The 27th Annual Producer’s Guild of America Awards were held last night at the Century Plaza in Los Angeles. One of the traditional “run up to the Oscars” ceremonies that are considered bellweathers in their movie categories, the PGAs also honor the best of production in television, and are sort of a clean up in the post-Golden Globes landscape.
Game of Thrones has been nominated every year for the Outstanding Television Drama category since it first started airing in 2011. Known as the Norman Felton award, it is named for the legendary 1960s producer of such hits like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. But though the show has been nominated like clockwork, it has also lost every season, to more traditional television dramas, like Boardwalk Empire and Homeland, and then twice to Breaking Bad. But, like with the Emmys, 2015 and Season 5 seems to have been Game of Thrones year, as they took home the top honors.
CENTURY CITY, CA – JANUARY 23: Producers/writers David Benioff (L) and D. B. Weiss accept The Norman Felton Award for Outstanding Producer of Episodic Television, Drama for ‘Game of Thrones’ (Season 5) onstage at the 27th Annual Producers Guild Of America Awards at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza on January 23, 2016 in Century City, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)
The award honors the entire producing team, so honors went not only to David Benioff, Dan Weiss and Bryan Cogman, but also Bernadette Caulfield, Frank Doelger, Carolyn Strauss, Lisa McAtackney, Chris Newman and Greg Spence. Those they beat out in the category included the heavily favored final season of Mad Men, previous winner Homeland, Breaking Bad replacement stand in Better Call Saul, and the other perennial nominee that never seems to win, Netflix’s House of Cards.
It’s interesting that after four years of snubs, Season 5, which some insist on ranking as the worst season to date, seems to be the season that is garnering award attention in places that were routinely passing them up. The PGA win suggests that perhaps those who wrote their Emmy sweep this past fall as an unfortunate fluke based on the influx of new voters were overhasty. We’ll have to see how the voting shakes out at the PGA’s counterpart, the Screen Actors Guild Awards, which will be held next Saturday.