Emmy Magazine

There’s nothing quite like the excitement leading up to the announcement of the Emmy nominations. Like a great television show, the ceremony has an undercurrent of suspense and the occasional plot twist, but it’s also a lot of fun. Last year’s festivities were a family affair, hosted by Ron Cephas Jones and Jasmine Cephas Jones—who in 2020 became the only father and daughter performers to receive Emmy noms in the same year. (And they both won!) This year’s hosts, Melissa Fumero and JB Smoove, may not be related, but having recently worked together—on the upcoming Netflix comedy Blockbuster—they had an easy rapport that made for an entertaining presentation. Together they cooed over JB’s “baby,” the Emmy he won last year for his performance in the short-form comedy Mapleworth Murders, which he just…

“Never did I fathom I was going to be one of the stars of the show,” declares Aida Osman, who plays Shawna on Rap Sh!t, a new HBO Max series from Insecure’s Issa Rae. Set in Miami, the scripted comedy follows estranged high school friends Shawna, who works at a South Beach hotel, and Mia, a single mom and makeup artist (played by rapper-singer-songwriter KaMillion of VH1’s Love & Hip Hop: Miami), as they reconnect and form a rap duo. Initially, Osman, who has been a writer on the Netflix animated series Big Mouth and a story editor on the HBO teen comedy Betty, was hired as a writer on Rap Sh!t. Then came the audition for the role of Shawna. “I didn’t actually think that they were going to cast me,” Osman admits. Born…

Mo Amer has toured the globe doing stand-up, costarred with Ramy Youssef in Ramy and will make his film debut with Dwayne Johnson in the forthcoming Black Adam. Now he can add show creator, executive producer and leading man to his résumé, thanks to Mo, a series that premieres on Netflix August 24. The show is based on Amer’s own life, growing up as a Palestinian refugee in Houston. His character, Mo Najjar, juggles complex family relationships with off-the-books odd jobs while waiting to earn his United States citizenship. However emotional the stories become, Amer always infuses them with humor. “It’s really important to always see the comedy in things, but also be really in tune with the dramatic,” he says. “I’ve always made comedy out of everything. The most depressing situations…

Cinematographer Oona Menges recommends show business for teenagers who lack direction: “It’s amazing for a young person who doesn’t really know what they want to do because you’re traveling around the world, and it’s almost like a university of life. My dad said that, and he’s right.” Dad is Chris Menges, the renowned director of photography on The Mission and The Killing Fields (he won Oscars for both). Luke, her brother, is also a DP, mainly in U.K. documentaries. “In my mind, I was never going to be a DP,” says Menges, who lives in London. “It was enough to try and learn and be a good focus puller or top loader.” But in some ways, her path to cinematography looks inevitable. “I was really lucky in that my mother [the late actress…

Few people work more gleefully than Bertie Gregory. How many folks pop up from the sea beaming after running into a pilot whale? “The most fun part was that one of the whales did a huge poo, and I swam right into it,” Gregory says in “Dolphin Quest,” the last of five episodes of Epic Adventures with Bertie Gregory. The Nat Geo show debuts on Disney+ September 8. As a wildlife filmmaker, he has stellar credentials: a degree in zoology and an apprenticeship with one of National Geographic’s star photographers. The youngest BAFTA winner for wildlife film (David Attenborough’s Seven Worlds, One Planet), he’s also had two Nat Geo web series. Growing up in Reading, outside London, Gregory was fascinated by animals and photography. The two passions drove him to trespass on neighbors’…

When Mickey Down and Konrad Kay were preparing to graduate from Oxford, where they met, they both felt pressure to get a high-paying salary job. “Mickey’s mother is Ghanaian and my mother is Polish,” Kay says from his home near the London suburb of Wimbledon. “So the moment you leave university, you need to figure out how to make the most money as quickly as you can.” Armed with degrees in theology (Down) and literature (Kay), they landed lucrative investment-banking jobs, which neither of them embraced. “I worked out pretty quickly that I was really ill-suited to it,” says Down, who lasted just over a year. “None of us were really qualified to talk about any of the stuff that we ended up bullshitting about,” says Kay, who endured just under…