The EMMY Awards: Part 2

Here is a photo from the 1955 Emmy Awards. NBC originated this first ever coast to coast simulcast. Starting in 1955 to 1971, the Emmys were simulcast from both New York and Los Angeles to quell jealousies between rival cities, frequently resulting in screens going blank for up to a minute. It was a costly arrangement and NBC paid $110,000 for the first transcontinental hookup.

When the Emmys were first broadcast in 1949, there were 1 million TV sets in the United States. By the national broadcast of 1955, there were 25 million.

ATT was nominated for an engineering Emmy but lost in 1951 for the transcontinental microwave relay system that made possible live coast-to-coast television broadcasts.

The Emmys have been televised every year except 1954 when there were disputes between the east and west coast chapters, and were shown for the first time on a national broadcast in 1955 on NBC. The January 16, 1957, Emmy awards ceremony was the first to be telecast in color.

Ed Sullivan and New York’s TV elite forced the establishment of a separate bicoastal group, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in 1957.

In 1977, after suits and countersuits, the bicoastal academies finally agreed to work together. The NATAS, based in New York, manages daytime, sports, news and documentary, international and local awards. The newer Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, located in California, bestows primetime prizes.

The number of categories for Emmys has fluctuated wildly over the years, from six the first year to more than 40 in many seasons. Even the wording changes, fluctuating from best to outstanding. Once there was a separate category for Westerns, but those Gunsmoke and Maverick days are gone at least for now. Cable TV programming was not allowed to participate in the primetime competition until 1987.

Jackie Gleason never won an Emmy, but his pal Art Carney won five for The Honeymooners. Deadpanner Ed Sullivan, who caused the bicoastal split in the academy in June 1955, smiled when his show received the Best Variety Series award that year. He never won a personal Emmy in voter competition, but was given a Trustees Award in 1971.

Rod Serling won his third successive writing award in 1957 for The Comedian, about the struggles of a burlesque king adjusting to TV. The award for the story, obviously based on Milton Berles life, was presented by Berle.

The Emmys ceremony for the 1958-59 season is remembered for the notorious Astaire Affair, when the dancers first television special, An Evening with Fred Astaire, won all nine of the awards for which it was nominated, thus establishing an Emmy record. Ed Sullivan asked that the ballots be impounded.

Huckleberry Hound was the first syndicated program and the first cartoon series to take home an Emmy, which it did in the 1959-60 season.

Hallmark Hall of Fame’s Macbeth, a $750,000 production filmed on location in Scotland and broadcast as a two hour color presentation, is considered by many television historians to be the first made for TV movie. It received five Emmys at the 1961 ceremony, including one in the rare category, Program of the Year.

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