The Emmys

by Thomas O'Neil

A year-by-year history of the Emmy awards provides television lovers, star watchers, and trivia buffs with the ultimate reference source to the most prestigious awards in the television industry

Genres: Nonfiction

448 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1992

Reviews

[Martin Denton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fun look at the Emmy Awards written by an expert on performing arts awards par excellence, Tom O'Neil. (Note: Tom and I are longtime acquaintances and I even wrote a few pieces about the Tonys for his GoldDerby website back in the day.)

Though there had been a few books about the Oscars before Tom came along, he was the guy who turned award-show-watching and award-show-predicting into a kind of art. This book exemplifies what he did, going not just on the surface of who won what but really deeply behind the scenes to explain how the nominations and awards are actually made. It's fascinating stuff, though it makes the book a little dense to read straightforwardly like a novel--this one is made to dip into, checking out the competition for a particular TV season as your whim takes you.

The maddening changes of the rules in the early years of the Emmys are very well covered here; these crazy quirkinesses resulted in Art Carney winning five Emmys while Jackie Gleason won none.

All in all, a lot of fun to be had here!

[Charles Bright · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must have for any TV and/or awards nerd. I know Tom and this is his livelihood so you know you're going to get more information on the subject than you ever thought was possible. You can also check out his writings (along with several other awards geeks) at Gold Derby.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this cover-to-cover, because I'm an awards show whore.

[Lynnette]

Reprint

[Giuseppe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun book. Only problem is that it only goes through the 91-92 season. I suspect they wont be updating this book, or for that matter, even producing similar books since so much information is available in real time on the internet. Thats too bad, because sometimes it's fun to not play website jumping, and instead just curl up with a fun book, even if its just a few years behind.