Awards Circuit Column: It's been 50 years since the Emmys split in two. Now the L.A.-based Television Academy and N.Y.'s National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences may finally combine again. Last month’s news that the two rival TV academies are looking to reunite was welcome and overdue — but it won’t be as easy as flipping a switch.
The Los Angeles-based Television Academy and the New York located National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences are run very differently, each having had 50 years to develop its own bureaucratic infrastructure. One insider tells me hundreds of items need to be ironed out before they can become one again. But that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t.
The original Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (which now calls itself the “Television Academy”) was founded by Syd Cassyd, an entertainment journalist who was excited by the potential of the new medium and realized it needed an industry organization. Cassyd wasn’t keen on the idea of his TV academy handing out awards, but the notion soon took hold and the first Emmys (with awards just for Los Angeles TV stations) took place in 1949. Meanwhile on the other coast, New Yorkers took notice, and Ed Sullivan launched his own TV academy in 1955.
With TV becoming more of a national medium, it didn’t make sense to have competing organizations — so the two merged in 1957, taking the name “National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.” But over the next two decades, the tension between the org’s Los Angeles and New York chapters only grew. The combined Academy was first based in New York, but then moved out west — angering the folks in Gotham. Los Angeles members thought the Academy allowed too many people to vote on the Primetime Emmys, arguing that only members working in national programming should have a say.
The New York faction disagreed. Ultimately, they agreed to a divorce: The L.A. group would relaunch the Academy of TV Arts & Sciences and take ownership of the Primetime Emmys and L.A.-area awards, while the National Academy of Arts & Sciences would get the regional, daytime, news, documentary and sports Emmys. Both groups would control the Emmy trademark and receive 15% revenue share from each other’s Emmy telecasts.
Things remained chilly for decades after that. ATAS and NATAS came close to remerging in 2005, but wound up in another legal spat in 2008 over the idea of a broadband-centric Emmys show that NATAS wanted to launch. It wasn’t until this decade, under new leadership, that the two sides started cooperating again.
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