“Key & Peele” star Keegan-Michael Key will host the 2016 Peabody Awards ceremony gala, Variety has learned exclusively.
The 75th Peabody Awards will be held on the evening of Saturday, May 21, at Cipriani Wall Street in New York, and this year’s ceremony will usher in a number of changes for the event. For the first time, the jurors will select 60 finalists, which will be announced on April 12. From those 60, a group of 30 winners — The Peabody 30
— will be chosen and revealed in a succession of announcements by category, beginning on April 19.
“There are now more than 400 scripted primetime television shows, new locations for documentary television, a flood of podcasts, and a wealth of quality digital storytelling,” Peabody Awards Director Jeffrey P. Jones said. “Peabody has to reflect that change in order to continue to award the best of the best, while also recognizing and highlighting this expanded field of quality media production.”
The gala will again be televised in a 90-minute special that will air on Pivot on Monday, June 6, at 8 p.m., with Den of Thieves producing the telecast.
In addition, several New York events will be held to commemorate the 75th anniversary in the week leading up to the gala. On May 18, the cast and showrunner of one of this year’s winners will be present for a screening and discussion, sponsored by Pivot, which will take place at the New York Institute of Technology auditorium. On May 19, Peabody will host a retrospective on the career of Sheila Nevins and a selection of the 49 Peabody winners that the HBO documentary unit has won over the last 35 years, with an event held in the HBO screening room at HBO headquarters.
The Peabody Awards, based at the University of Georgia, celebrates projects in the fields of news, entertainment, documentaries, children’s programming, education, interactive programming, and public service, encouraging the media industries to reach for and achieve the highest standards.
Source: Variety
