TV Critics Pick Their Favorites
By PJ Bednarski -- Broadcasting & Cable, 6/1/2006 5:19:00 PM
Though the Peacock may be struggling with 18-49s, the Television Critics Association gave NBC 10 nominations for its TCA Awards, which will be handed out July 23 during the critics tour in Pasadena, Calif.
NBC comedies occupy three of the five slots for outstanding achievement in comedy (My Name is Earl, The Office and Scrubs). UPN’s Everybody Hates Chris and Comedy Central’s The Daily Show round out the category.
Oustanding Drama nominees are ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy and Lost, Fox’s 24, and House, and HBO’s The Sopranos. That grouping also is nominated for Program of the Year, with one exception: Fox’s House isn’t on the P-O-Y list, replaced there by NBC’s The Office.TCA does things a little differently.
Rather than picking best actor and actress, its nomination process doesn’t separate men from women but by genre. In comedy, Steve Carrell (The Office), Stephen Colbert (Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report), Lauren Graham (The WB’s Gilmore Girls), Jason Lee (My Name is Earl), and Jon Stewart (Daily Show) are nominated. In drama Alan Alda (NBC’s The West Wing), James Gandolfini (The Sopranos), Hugh Laurie (House), Kiefer Sutherland (24), and Kyra Sedgwick (TNT’s The Closer), got acting nods. For the Heritage Award honoring shows for special stature, NBC’s The West Wing and Will & Grace and CBS’s Hallmark Hall of Fame were nominated."We don’t give ourselves enough credit for the TCA Awards," says Kansas City Star critic and TCA board member Aaron Barnhart, who points out, for example, that the TCA honored The Daily Show in a news category long before much of the rest of the nation began noticing the impact Stewart’s show had on political discourse.
