PBS won seven of the newly announced 30 Peabody Awards for outstanding storytelling in media, while HBO and Netflix won four each and CNN and NBC had two each.
PBS long-running investigative program Frontline won an Institutional Award, as did much-admired animated comedy The Simpsons. Earlier this week the Peabody judges gave a career achievement award to actress Cicely Tyson. Full release announcing the Peabody Awards is linked here.
First-time winners AppleTV Plus and OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network join Amazon Prime, Lifetime and Hulu with one award each. Winning platforms also include APM, BBC Sounds, Montana Public Radio, Newsday, WBBM-TV in Chicago and WNYC Studios.
Four POV documentaries were among the seven PBS programs, as was a Frontline documentary (For Sama), the documentary Independent Lens: Hale County This Morning, This Evening and the children's program Molly of Denali won as a children's program on PBS Kids.
HBO won Peabodys for the entertainment programs Chernobyl, Succession and Watchmen and for the documentary True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality.
Netflix entertainment programs Stranger Things, Unbelievable and When They See Us won Peabodys, as did the documentary The Edge of Democracy, about Brazil.
NBC won Peabodys for the news programs A Different Kind of Force: Policing Mental Illness and American Betrayal, about when U.S. forces withdrew support for their allies the Kurds.
The CNN Peabody winning programs were the documentary Apollo 11 and The Hidden Workforce: Undocumented in America.
Lifetime's harrowing six-part series Surviving R. Kelly won a Peabody, as did Hulu's Ramy, a comedy by Ramy Youssef about growing up as a first-generation American Muslim and his family in New Jersey.
OWN won its first Peabody for David Makes Man, the Tarell Alvin McCraney coming-of-age drama. Newcoming streamer service Apple TV Plus's Peabody is for Dickinson, the drama about the poet Emily Dickinson.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge's comedy Fleabag on Amazon Prime Video won a Peabody. So did Unwarranted, the WBBM-TV news program for which investigative reporter Dave Savini spent a year reporting on botched police raids in the Chicago area that left behind traumatized families and trashed homes.
The Peabody 30 are chosen from nearly 1,300 entries submitted from television, radio/podcasts and the web across the genres of entertainment, news, documentary, children’s and public service programming, the organization said. All winners are chosen unanimously by a board of 19 jurors. The Peabody Awards are based at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia.
“This year’s winners are a vibrant collective of inspiring, innovative, and powerful stories. True to the spirit and legacy of Peabody, our winners are also distinguished by the presence and resilience of many emerging and diverse voices,” Jeffrey P. Jones, executive director of Peabody, said in a statement. “We are especially proud to celebrate FRONTLINE as an unwavering source for truth through quality journalism when both are actively under attack, and The Simpsons, one of the most consistently funny and culturally important satirical sitcoms over the last three decades.”
