TV Jots

And the Big Winner Is…

Does the picture above give it away?

Nice work, Lost! Both the long-running ABC island thriller and another favorite of mine, AMC’s sophomore drug dramedy Breaking Bad, were among the 36 recipients that scored prestigious George Foster Peabody Awards today, according to the winners list released earlier.

Says Horace Newcomb, Peabody Director at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication: “The works recognized by the Peabody Board this year not only reflect great diversity of content and genre, but also true technical innovation and the varied roles of new distribution systems. The list of winners this year clearly indicates a changing media environment that will continue to require judgment and evaluation through the Peabody Awards process.”

The Peabody Awards, which date back to 1941, are given out annually to select international entities for excellence in both radio and television broadcasting. Other notable honorees this year include the venerable New York Times for its website — which just happens to be my homepage of choice — and the HBO comedy Entourage, currently between its fifth and sixth seasons.

The last pick is causing a bit of controversy among some knowledgeable TV critics, who contend that its lewd brand of humor and repetitious plotting, or something like that, make the show a dubious choice for a Peabody, star Jeremy Piven’s three Supporting Actor Emmys in a row for the series be damned.

I can’t add anything to that discussion since I don’t watch Entourage regularly enough to speak authoritatively about the comedy’s quality, so I refer readers to James Hibberd and Alan Sepinwall‘s comments on the matter. If you only want to know what all of the 68th Annual Peabody Awards winners are, however, just keep on scrolling downward. TV Jots has got the goods, and in handy alphabetical order, to boot.

36 Years in Solitary: Murder, Death and Justice on Angola

NPR, All Things Considered
Laura Sullivan’s gripping three-part report raised questioned about the guilt of two Louisiana prison farm inmates who been kept in solitary confinement for more than three decades.

Ape Genius

PBS, NOVA, National Geographic Television, John Rubin Productions, Inc.
A synthesis of the latest research on the intelligence and creative capacity of gorillas and other great apes, this stimulating documentary also explored what it means to be human.

Avatar: The Last Air Bender

Nickelodeon
Unusually complex characters and healthy respect for the consequences of warfare enhanced this American-made, anime-influenced martial-arts adventure.

Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony

NBC and Zhang Yimou, NBC Olympics
An exponential magnification of what was once known in television as a “spectacular,” the Beijing opening ceremony was crafted and choreographed by creative director Zhang Yimou and directed for television by Bucky Gunts.

Black Magic

ESPN, ESPN Films in association with Shoot the Moon Productions
This unusually penetrating sports documentary illuminated the lives of African American basketball players and their coaches at historically black colleges and universities during the civil rights era.

Breaking Bad

AMC, Sony Pictures Television, High Bridge Productions, Gran Via Productions
Bleak, harrowing, sometimes improbably funny, the series chronicled the consequences of a mild-mannered, dying science teacher’s decision to secure his family’s future by cooking methamphetamine.

CBS News 60 Minutes: Lifeline

CBS, CBS News, 60 Minutes
The world of the uninsured and underinsured in America was unforgettably illuminated by this report about a free-clinic mission, designed for Third World communities, that set up shop in Tennessee for a weekend and treated hundreds of patients.

China: The Earthquake of Chengdu

National Public Radio, NPR
On assignment in China when earthquakes devastated Sichuan province, members of an NPR team were on the air in Chengdu when the tremors began, and they provided riveting, first-hand accounts from around the region for days.

Coverage of 2008 Presidential Primary Campaigns and Debates

CNN
With state-of-the-art technology and a small army of reporters, producers and analysts, CNN gave viewers unparalleled coverage of a historic presidential election process.

Crossfire: Water, Power and Politics

KLAS-TV, Las Vegas
This network-quality documentary by Las Vegas’ CBS affiliate was a brave, meticulous examination of a plan to pipe massive amounts of water from rural Nevada to booming Sin City and the potential consequences for ranchers, farmers, Native Americans and the environment.

Depression: Out of the Shadows

PBS, Twin Cities Public Television, and WGBH Boston
The documentary explored the many forms of depression and an expanding range of treatment strategies as it dispelled the stigma that often inhibits action and fostered hope.

Entourage

HBO, Leverage and Closest to the Hole Productions in association with HBO Entertainment
Hollywood gets an affectionately merciless tweaking in this picaresque serial about an ambitious male starlet, his posse of pals, and his multi-faced agent.

Failing the Children: Deadly Mistakes

KMGH-TV, Denver
Motivated by the starvation death of a 7-year-old boy, the station’s persistent investigation turned up systemic incompetence in Denver’s Department of Human Services, and then broadened into a state-wide story.

Hear and Now

HBO, HBO Documentary Films in association with Vermillion Films, Inc.
This moving documentary explored the consequences positive, negative, unforeseen of the decision by a sixty-something couple, deaf since birth, to undergo cochlear implant surgeries.

Hearst-Argyle Television: Commitment 2008

Hearst-Argyle Stations, Hearst-Argyle Television
Exemplars of public-service broadcasting, 25 Hearst-Argyle stations fulfilled a company mandate with extensive reporting on candidates and issues in their respective communities and supplemented on-air reports with online forums, profiles and debate coverage.

Hopkins

ABC, ABC News
All-access filmmaking in the corridors and operating rooms of a fabled teaching hospital produced human drama of open-heart intensity.

Independent Lens: King Corn

PBS, Mosaic Films, Independent Television Service (ITVS), Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)
Starting off like a post-grad goof two college buddies plant one acre of corn and follow it to market the documentary ended up raising questions about everything from crop subsidies to animal cruelty to our obesity epidemic: What’s in your gullet?

Independent Lens: Mapping Stem Cell Research Terra Incognita

PBS, Kartemquin Educational Films, Independent Television Service (ITVS)
Neither scientific facts nor ethical complexity nor emotional drama was sacrificed in this documentary about a neurologist who took up stem-cell research after his beloved daughter suffered a spinal injury.

John Adams

HBO, Playtone in association with HBO Films
The American Revolution was made flesh and blood in this richly detailed miniseries focused on the political evolution of colonial lawyer John Adams and his wife, Abigail.

Jungle Fish

KBS 2TV, Korean Broadcasting System
Interactive blogging was integral to the plot of this handsome film, a stylized slice of life among students at a ruthlessly competitive South Korean high school.

Lost

ABC, ABC Studios
Breezily mixing metaphysics, quantum physics, romance and cliffhanger action, the genre-bending series about a group of air-crash survivors on a mysterious island has rewritten the rules of television fiction.

Nanking

HBO, A Ted Leonsis Production in association with HBO Documentary Films
Human decency rises to confront human atrocity in this powerful, newly documented remembrance of a small group of Westerners who saved thousands of Chinese during the 1937 “rape of Nanking” by Japanese invaders.

NOAH Housing Program Investigation

WWL-TV, New Orleans
Dogged inquiry by anchor/reporter Lee Zurik embarrassed the New Orleans Authority Housing Program, a non-profit agency intended to help poor and elderly victims of Hurricane Katrina, and prompted a federal investigation of its misuse of funds.

Onion News Network

www.theonion.com, The Onion
The satirical tabloid’s online send-up of 24-hour cable-TV news was hilarious, trenchant and not infrequently hard to distinguish from the real thing.

P.O.V.: Campaign

PBS, Laboratory X Inc., American Documentary Inc., P.O.V., Center for Asian American Media
Soda Kazuhiro’s revealing, sometimes painfully funny documentary observed the ragged political campaign of a naf handpicked and backed by Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

Richard Engel Reports: Tip of the Spear

NBC, NBC Nightly News
Under fire at times, the war correspondent and his team produced an extraordinary series of reports from remote outposts in Afghanistan, making vivid and visceral the hardships and danger faced by American soldiers.

Saturday Night Live

Political Satire 2008, NBC, SNL Studios in association with NBC Universal Studios
The late-night legend stole the election-year thunder from its satirical competition on cable and may have swayed the race itself.

Sichuan Earthquake Coverage

Sichuan Television (SCTV)
When a massive earthquake devastated its province, Chengdu-based Sichuan Television dispatched its camera crews and for several days was the only source of images for TV news organizations around the world.

The Gates

HBO, Maysles Films in association with HBO Documentary Films and CVJ
Filmmakers explored how the now-celebrated Central Park installation by artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude came to be in this memoir of a creative process that survived a 24-year odyssey of bureaucratic hoop-jumping.

The Metropolitan Opera: Live in HD Series

The Metropolitan Opera Association
With vividly designed, smartly annotated productions of “Hansel and Gretel,” “Dr. Atomic,” “Peter Grimes” and other operas, the Met used state-of-the-art digital technology to reinvent presentation of a classic art form.

The New York Times Website

www.nytimes.com, The New York Times
Aggressively and imaginatively adding sound and moving images to the news that’s fit to print, the “Gray Lady” became a leader in the emergence of new journalistic forms.

The Red Race

Shanghai TV Station, NDR Fernsehen, Shanghai Media Group
Without narration or judgment, this documentary, riveting from its first frame, depicted the rigorous training of China’s potential gymnastic stars, age 6.

This American Life: The Giant Pool of Money

Public Radio International; Chicago Public Radio’s This American Life, National Public Radio, News Division
The first-ever collaboration of “This American Life” and NPR’s news division, this report was impressive for the arresting clarity of its explanation of the financial crisis we’re in, and even more so for its having aired so early May 2008.

Turner Classic Movies

TCM, Turner Broadcasting System Inc.
It’s a wonderful network, this dedicated presenter and preserver of vintage films, and after 20 years, no other in the cable spectrum has stayed truer to its original mission.

Washington Week with Gwen Ifill

PBS & pbs.org/washingtonweek, WETA-TV, Washington, DC
Thoughtful, informed and timely, the political talk show that sets the standard for the genre supplemented its contribution to the national discourse in 2008 with a series of live events far outside the Beltway.

YouTube

www.youtube.com, YouTube, LLC
The video-sharing website, a “Speakers’ Corner,” where Internet users can upload, view and share clips, is an ever-expanding archive-cum-bulletin board that both embodies and promotes democracy.