Back in the early 1980s two talented young performers from Ontario first worked together on SCTV \u2014 stars-in-the-making John Candy and Martin Short. All those years later, they\u2019re paired together again, this time in the race for Primetime Emmy recognition.<\/p>\n
Candy and Short are the focus of separate documentary features with a major shot at nominations for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special. John Candy: I Like Me<\/a>, directed by Colin Hanks, examines the comedic actor beloved for Planes, Trains & Automobiles, Uncle Buck and many other films.<\/p>\n More from Deadline<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cWhen he was up on the screen, people looked at the screen and it was like, \u2018That\u2019s us,\u2019\u201d Hanks says of the Candy appeal. \u201cThere was this human connection in which John was a normal human being that suffered all of the same things that we do as individuals.\u201d<\/p>\n As a kid, Hanks met Candy on the set of Splash, the 1984 Ron Howard film that became a breakthrough for Colin\u2019s father Tom Hanks and Candy. \u201cIt\u2019s almost a great magic trick. John made everyone feel special,\u201d Hanks recalls. \u201cI remember the way that John made me feel. He made me feel welcome and accepted.\u201d<\/p>\n Marty, Life Is Short, directed by Martin Short buddy and Oscar nominee Lawrence Kasdan<\/a>, follows the life and career of an actor who, on the strength of Only Murders in the Building, is more popular than ever.<\/p>\n \u201c[Marty] hasn\u2019t changed. That\u2019s the amazing part. It\u2019s like it took 50 years for people to get him,\u201d Kasdan observes. \u201cHis audience has gotten bigger. And sometimes I think his reach has been underestimated because he stands next to the brightest media stars in the world\u2026 Over time he\u2019s just aged so well. And I love seeing his\u00a0audience expand.\u201d<\/p>\n Marty, Life Is Short<\/a> and Prime Video\u2019s John Candy: I Like Me are just two of the myriad celebrity-oriented documentaries with strong Emmy potential. Along with the Short film, Netflix has Being Eddie, about Eddie Murphy; aka Charlie Sheen; Selena y Los Dinos<\/a>, about the late Tejano singer and her family band, and the documentary series Rafa<\/a>, about tennis sensation Rafael Nadal. HBO Max fields the two-parter Billy Joel: And So It Goes, directed by Susan Lacy and Jessica Levin; two-parter Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!, directed by Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio; My Mom Jayne: A Film by Mariska Hargitay, and it streams the celebrity.land Films feature I\u2019m Chevy Chase and You\u2019re Not. The latter film, directed by Marina Zenovich, offers an \u201cauthorized yet unfiltered\u201d take on the comedy star known, at least at times, for problematic behavior, probing \u201cwhat is beneath the surface of his superstar bravado.\u201d<\/p>\n Emmy voters, unlike their counterparts in the Motion Picture Academy\u2019s documentary branch, don\u2019t look skeptically at celebrity-themed documentaries. Last year, Matt Wolf\u2019s Pee-wee as Himself<\/a>, about the late actor Paul Reubens, won the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special. Two years ago, Ron Howard\u2019s Jim Henson Idea Man<\/a>, about the Muppets mastermind, won five Primetime Emmys, including Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special.<\/p>\n Continuing in the celebrity vein this year, Apple TV advances Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, Ben Stiller\u2019s affectionate look at his famous parents, comedians Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara. The streamer also boasts Mr. Scorsese, directed by Rebecca Miller, a five-episode series about the Oscar-winning filmmaker. Martin Scorsese is unquestionably one of the greatest ever to go behind a camera, yet the series reveals dramatic stumbles on his route to the top.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the main themes in this series is reinvention, personal reinvention. And I think anybody can actually identify with that, that sense of like you\u2019re up and then you\u2019re down,\u201d Miller notes. \u201cAnd in his case, he was really down. He was fired from his first feature film. He kind of got wiped out from drugs. He saved himself from that. Then there were other times in the \u201980s where he was written off entirely, went to sort of what they call \u2018director\u2019s jail\u2019 for a while. And each time he had to kind of rise from the ashes.\u201d<\/p>\n Not all the celebrity-focused docuseries in Emmy contention are flattering. Sean Combs: The Reckoning<\/a> explores the pattern of behavior that ultimately led to a federal prison sentence for the titular music mogul and entrepreneur. The series streaming on Netflix is directed by Alex Stapleton and executive produced by Stapleton and Curtis \u201c50 Cent\u201d Jackson.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had a conversation about joining forces and working on this documentary together. And it was like hours and hours of conversation that were really deep,\u201d Stapleton remembers. \u201cAnd what I appreciate about 50 is his willingness to investigate the middle and the messiness \u2014 that things are not always so black or white, so right or wrong. Where does the line of victim end and the perpetrator begin? These were things that I knew getting involved with this story were going to be themes and necessary to kind of push into. And I really felt like at the time, the media, especially social media, but even legacy media, the coverage [of Combs] was so two-dimensional, and it was really wrapped up in baby oil. But that\u2019s not a story, that\u2019s not a documentary. So, I was always interested in digging further.\u201d<\/p>\n The two-part aka Charlie Sheen, directed by Andrew Renzi, is also a portrait of a star with more baggage than an airline cargo hold.<\/p>\n \u201cI wanted to enter the celebrity doc conversation, [centering on] maybe somebody who\u2019s not so perfect. Charlie came to mind and I was able to get connected to him,\u201d Renzi explains. \u201cWe spent about eight months to a year getting to know each other before we shot a frame of the film.\u201d<\/p>\n Renzi didn\u2019t approach the project as hagiography. \u201cI take it very seriously that I\u2019m making something that ultimately creates a legacy piece for somebody,\u201d the director insists. \u201cThis is the Charlie Sheen documentary, and there probably can\u2019t be another one\u2026 He had no editorial control over this thing, but he\u2019s able to look at it and say, \u2018All right, good, bad, all the things, this is an honest portrait of me that I feel like was representative of my POV\u2026\u2019 It\u2019s a nice feeling to be able to walk away and say, \u2018OK, he\u2019s good with it, I\u2019m good with it. My hands are clean.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Contenders for Emmy recognition extend beyond the celebrity-themed into another very popular genre: true crime. Among the blood-soaked docs are the HBO Max series The Yogurt Shop Murders, directed by Margaret Brown. It\u2019s an investigation of the long-unsolved killing of four young women at a frozen yogurt outlet in Austin, Texas in 1991. About a month after the series premiered last August, police announced they had finally identified the culprit, a deceased serial killer \u2014 a dramatic development that spurred HBO Max and Brown to create a special fifth episode, titled \u201cThe End of Wondering\u201d.<\/p>\n Brown moved to Austin in the late 1990s, less than a decade after the horrifying murders. \u201cPeople would talk about the case like this ghost story that happened here except that the ghost story was real,\u201d she says. \u201cPeople would talk about it at parties late at night. Everyone had a theory. I\u2019m basically the same age as the girls and their siblings, and I have so many friends who were connected to those girls and even some of the boys who were wrongly accused of the crime \u2014 one of whom was on death row and one was [sentenced to] life in prison for a time.\u201d<\/p>\n Netflix puts forth the feature documentaries A Deadly American Marriage and Oklahoma City Bombing: American Terror, and the three-part American Murder: Gabby Petito, a series about the young woman killed by her fianc\u00e9 in 2021 in a case that attracted nationwide attention.<\/p>\n From Investigation Discovery comes Lost Women of Alaska, a series narrated and executive-produced by Oscar winner Octavia Spencer. It chronicles the disappearance of several Indigenous women in Alaska, where evidence increasingly pointed toward a serial killer.<\/p>\n \u201cI can\u2019t imagine having a family member disappear and not knowing what happened to them. So, we want to provide closure in some cases, justice in others,\u201d Spencer says. \u201cThere\u2019s a number that really stuck out for me, that there were over 1,300 missing Indigenous women [in Alaska]\u2026 That\u2019s an alarming number. The very opening line [of the series] is, \u2018Alaska is a serial killer\u2019s playground.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Even some non-true crime, non-celebrity documentaries are climbing into the Emmy mix (if you can imagine). From executive producer Jordan Peele comes High Horse: The Black Cowboy, a three-part series on Peacock that \u201creveals the story of the Black cowboy whose history has been stolen, erased and left untold.\u201d<\/p>\n From the PBS series American Masters comes W.E.B. Du Bois: Rebel With A Cause, directed by Rita Coburn, about the towering civil rights activist, historian and sociologist. That doc feature is narrated by Viola Davis, with performances of Du Bois\u2019s words rendered by Jeffrey Wright, Courtney B. Vance, and Common.<\/p>\n In six parts, The American Revolution, directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt, plunges us into the momentous war that led to the nation\u2019s founding. The PBS series doesn\u2019t censor uncomfortable truths, such as the reality that George Washington and other Founding Fathers owned slaves.<\/p>\n PBS \u201chas urged us, but also permitted us to dive deep, unafraid of conflict,\u201d Burns said last September as he unveiled the first episode of the series in New York. That was a subtle reference to the climate in which the series premiered \u2014 coming after President Trump\u2019s attempts to sanitize accounts of American history at the Smithsonian Institution and at National Parks.<\/p>\n The Emmy nominations will be announced July 8, just a few days after the nation celebrates its 250th birthday.<\/p>\n Best of Deadline<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for Deadline’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Back in the early 1980s two talented young performers from Ontario first worked together on SCTV \u2014 stars-in-the-making John Candy and Martin Short. All those years later, they\u2019re paired together again, this time in the race for Primetime Emmy recognition. Candy and Short are the focus of separate documentary features with a major shot at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2462669,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[484393,315557,345385,373055,305348,343479,472212,428271,22350,343762,343144,313591,305417,306358],"class_list":["post-2462668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-alex-stapleton","tag-charlie-sheen","tag-colin-hanks","tag-documentary-features","tag-eddie-murphy","tag-john-candy","tag-lawrence-kasdan","tag-marina-zenovich","tag-martin-short","tag-primetime-emmy","tag-rebecca-miller","tag-ron-howard","tag-scorsese","tag-tom-hanks"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/A-Matter-Of-Life-Death-This-Years-Documentary-Emmy.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2462668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2462668"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2462668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2462670,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2462668\/revisions\/2462670"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2462669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2462668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2462668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2462668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/span><\/div>\n
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