NATAS Hopes to Make 40th Daytime Emmys a Winner

The New
York-based National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) expects
to announce by the end of January a network that will air this year's Daytime
Emmy Awards-the 40^th anniversary edition-as well as a producer.

That's an improvement
over last year, when word that cable news network HLN would produce and air the
show did not come until less than two months prior to the ceremony, which took
place at the Beverly Hilton on June 23.

What may make
things easier this year is that in August, NATAS announced that David Michaels
had been named senior executive director for the Daytime Emmy Awards. Michaels
came to NATAS after serving on the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences
(ATAS)' Board of Governors as co-chairman of the Daytime Emmys for 14 years.

"The
relationship between us is really good right now," he says. "This could mean
more of a melding between the two groups."

Already this
year, NATAS put out a call for entries and judge registration, and entries have
started rolling in, Michaels says.

To get all of
that moving, NATAS has gotten more aggressive with its social-media campaign,
tweeting constantly, posting on its Daytime Emmys Facebook page and creating a
LinkedIn group so industry players can follow and contribute to the discussion.

While neither
Michaels nor Brent Stanton, NATAS' executive director of the Daytime Emmys,
will actually produce the show, they expect it to be a celebration of 40 years
of daytime programming, including packages on the heyday of soap operas, which
now have been whittled down to five: ABC's General Hospital, NBC's Days
of Our Lives, and CBS' The Young and the Restless and The Bold
and the Beautiful. ABC's One
Life to Live also has final episodes that aired in this calendar
year, so it will be up for consideration as well.

Although One
Life to Live and ABC's other cancelled soap, All My Children, now
are off the air, both shows may come back as online-only programs, according to
news last week that both SAG-AFTRA and the Director's Guild of America had
completed negotiations with production company Prospect Park, which acquired
rights to both series after ABC
decided to stop producing them.

To accommodate
daytime shows that may only live online, NATAS this year divided its category "New
Approaches" in two, allowing it to honor Web-only series separately from online
video content that enhances existing programs, such as the "Ellen's Dance Dares"
Web videos that grow out of Ellen.

"Part of our
agreement with ATAS is that we are going to look at all of these programs
together and decide where they best fit," Michaels says, noting that "time
doesn't exist on the Internet."

NATAS also added
a category that will single out one host of a culinary program, because the
previous "lifestyle" show hosts category had too many potential nominees.
Another new category is specifically devoted to travel and
adventure programming, Michaels says.

"I think that's
going to be an exciting category. There are so many good culinary hosts that
they tended to dominate their previous catch-all lifestyle category."