The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) has announced a new branch of the Emmy Awards called the Children’s and Family Emmy Awards. The new ceremony will feature family programming categories previously a part of the Daytime Emmy Awards.
The Children’s and Family Emmy Awards mark the first new Emmy expansion since 1979, when the Sports Emmy Awards, along with the News and Documentary Emmy Awards were given their own ceremonies. The announcement follows an agreement made between the New York-based NATAS and the Los Angeles-based group, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences earlier this year. The two groups agreed to consolidate all children’s programming, both daytime and primetime, under NATAS’ domain.
“Recent years have seen explosive growth in the quantity and quality of children’s and family programming,” Adam Sharp, current president, and CEO of NATAS, said, “Now is the perfect time to acknowledge and honor this impactful content with a dedicated competition and celebration.” Last year, the Daytime Emmys held a separate, virtual event when announcing the winners in children’s and family categories.
According to the NATAS, submissions for the animation category reached 300 as of last year, marking the most submissions of any NATAS Emmy category. This is a result of children and family content increasing by 23% over the past two years. As a result of the rapid increase, the NATAS added seven new categories within their preschool sector, which will now be featured in the new Children’s and Family Emmy Awards. Sharp told Variety this about the categorization,
“We had been adding categories over the years to accommodate the changing industry, but we weren’t necessarily trimming in other areas at the same time. So some steam had to be led out of the kettle… For children’s that does mean we will wind up adding some categories and also reshaping some categories because now they’re able to stand on their own and not exist in a daytime environment. We can tailor them a bit more to the children’s community.”
Sharp credited the new sense of comradery between the television academies and expressed his hope to sufficiently recognize the growing medium and how it affects the industry today. Announcements regarding the new ceremony’s categories, eligibility rules, and call for entries will take place in 2022. For now, the NATAS hopes to garner feedback and delve into various types of children’s programming before locking in categories before the ceremony’s debut.
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