Author: rb809rb

Tucci in Italy is swarming with handsome images: a mouthwatering dollop of spaghetti and clams inspired by a Neapolitan chef’s 94-year-old mother, majestic Renaissance-era palaces and quaint villages where the show’s host, Stanley Tucci, enlists locals to expound on Italian culture. But director of photography Matt Ball isn’t always looking for polish — he wants candor.

“It’s not necessarily a show about how beautiful everything looks,” Ball says. “The primary goal is to get authenticity. And then we shoot around it and try to make it look as nice as we can.”

Ball’s cinematography led to one of the three Emmy nominations that Tucci in Italy received this year, alongside a sound mixing citation and outstanding hosted nonfiction series or special. He met Tucci as a camera operator on Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, which ran for two seasons on CNN. When National Geographic picked up the retitled version, Ball was brought on as DP. They’re currently in production on another spinoff, this time set in Great Britain.

Before shooting, Tucci, producer Lottie Birmingham and their research team map out a roughly seven- to 10-day stint in each city being featured that season. They find cooks, farmers, food producers and culinary experts to show off the region’s cuisine and landscapes. Ball, who collaborated with two camera operators and two assistants on Tucci in Italy, then designed shots as unobtrusive as possible so the contributors could feel comfortable.

“The work of making it look beautiful has been done for me already,” Ball says, downplaying his aptitude for capturing the vistas of Sicily, Tuscany or Sardinia so elegantly.

If Searching for Italy prioritized major destinations such as Rome and Milan, Tucci in Italy sought out less touristy locales, like Ball’s personal favorite stop, Le Marche. There, at the seaside restaurant Da Emilia, Tucci tried a spaghetti and mussels dish the chef’s eponymous grandmother had taught her to make years earlier. The Devil Wears Prada actor dined with the chef at a long outdoor table overlooking the Adriatic Sea — an example of the charisma that Ball encountered everywhere he went.

“It looked fantastic,” he says. “The light was coming off the water, and it was a beautiful day. It was really lovely.”

Ball, for his part, gets to sample many of the dishes, too. Some of that intake depends on how much offal, for example, he’s willing to eat.

Ball’s food-oriented résumé is accidental, though. It started with a gig as a camera operator on the long-running Barefoot Contessa, where he met his wife. He’s since shot Be My Guest With Ina Garten as well as shows with celebrity chefs Jamie Oliver and Lorraine Pascale. He says he’ll stay on with Tucci as long as Tucci wants to continue his savory travels.

“Everywhere we go,” he says, “you’ll always hear somebody whisper, ‘That’s Stanley Tucci!’ ”

This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.

One of the great creative innovations America has given the world in the past 30 years is TV animation.

That sounds like hyperbole, but it’s true. The Simpsons changed how we look at the American family (and current events). Rick and Morty changed how we looked at comedy and the tragedy behind it. (“Wubba lubba dub dub.” Also, current events.) South Park changed how we looked at each other (and current events).

The problem is that those shows all started doing that a very long time ago. Rick and Morty is nine seasons in. South Park is 28. The Simpsons is 37 damn seasons deep. There are children who weren’t born when the series debuted who now have children who themselves are old enough to think Bart has got this whole life thing figured out.

All three of those shows are nominated for outstanding animated program this year. So is Bob’s Burgers, which just completed its 20th season. Now, a charitable view would hold that such shortlisting reflects the durability of these shows — how they manage to maintain their creative spark through so many changing winds.

There is something to that — it’s not easy to do anything well for three decades, let alone maintain character freshness.

But I fear the fact that animated characters don’t age — and that they’re basically money-minting machines for a few networks (especially Fox) — has led us to a pretty calcified place. No show should so regularly take a place on the Emmys stage. The Simpsons and Bob’s Burgers have been nominated every year since the Obama days. Nothing is that good for that long.

What isn’t on the animated shortlist this year? Dark sci-fi like Owen Dennis’ Among Us on Paramount+. The acquired taste but still bold stylings of Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s time-jumping family series Long Story Short on Netflix. Joe Cappa’s Adult Swim single-dad delight Haha, You Clowns. These are all newish shows from the past year or two with great energy and original takes. But to look at the Emmys noms is to not even know they exist (and indeed, many viewers won’t without the exposure).

A little breath of fresh air in the category comes via Smiling Friends, Adult Swim’s truly wacky take on a nonprofit and what it means to do good/be happy. And while I would hardly call anything in the George Lucas-verse fresh in 2026, Star Wars: Visions at least uses varied artists and styles in a way that feels original. But these shows seem token-y amid the Simpsons and South Park oak trees and probably won’t win anyway.

What can the Emmys do to fix this? Fortunately, there are a few things.

For starters, stop with just nominating a single episode. Unlike TV Academy convention elsewhere, the Emmys don’t award a show — they award an episode. That means that the kind of newer, zanier material that takes months to really settle into is completely disadvantaged — you’re not going to appreciate something weird and new if you just try to watch one episode. You’re just going to go back to something you know and like, such as The Simpsons or South Park.

Of course, the irony is that The Simpsons and South Park were themselves once oddball and required a multi-episode commitment to appreciate. But now that they are appreciated, voters just keep rubber-stamping them. I mean, Rick and Morty hasn’t really been good in several years. But voters just keep checking the box without thinking there might be a new Rick and Morty waiting out there.

The other irony is that many of the characters on these very shows would hate this kind of lazy legacy thinking and would balk at it. A category that is literally designed to celebrate subversiveness champions the sclerotic.

Another fix: Stop with the international ghettoizing. My colleague David Canfield just covered this on the live-action side, but it applies on the animated side, too. Bluey is one of the best shows on television these past 10 years. And many people in America watch it. Find a way to make it eligible for the primetime Emmy.

While we’re on the topic of Bluey, get rid of the “Eligibility in animation is for programming that targets an audience age 13 and above” rule. This is just not how people watch television anymore.

And finally, open up the Phase II voting beyond just the animation branch to the whole TV Academy. Animation is one of two realms that has this limitation. And it’s having a bad effect. People in the animation branch work in the field, which means they tend to vote for the shows of folks they know or have worked with. So we get the 30-year veterans.

I get why this exclusionary voting rule was first drafted: Animation is a specialized craft, and specialists should vote on their specialty. Also, there is a fear that the, ahem, unwashed masses who don’t work in animation won’t really know the shows because they’re too busy watching the live-action stuff. But if that was ever true, it’s not anymore. Everyone watches everything.

All of these might seem like big changes, hard to implement, but they’re really not. They’re possible and would make a world of difference. And if you doubt it, there’s a group you can ask that will help. A group that looked at the world as it is and said, “Maybe there’s another, more daring way to view it.” They are, of course, called animators.

This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.

Anna Paquin, Christy Carlson Romano and Melissa Gilbert are calling on Hollywood to protect child actors following the deaths of Hayden Panettiere, Michelle Trachtenberg and Daveigh Chase.

Panettiere’s death at age 36 last Sunday prompted the three actresses, who were child stars themselves, to take their concerns public. Trachtenberg died at 39 in February 2025, while Chase died in July at age 35.

“It’s not a coincidence that so many former, specifically pre-sexualized female, child ‘stars’ have profoundly sad lives and untimely ends. We were not as protected by the ‘systems’ that look great on paper, as we are supposed to be,” Paquin wrote on Instagram Friday. She rose to fame at 11 years old with her film debut in 1993’s The Piano, which earned her an Oscar for best supporting actress.

“RIP HP, MT, DC and too many others. It’s a strange small club we belong to and you are worthy of support no matter how our industry makes us feel,” Paquin continued. “Literally DM me. I believe you and I will stand by your side. You aren’t alone. Let’s have each other’s backs. It might make public disclosure less terrifying.”

The True Blood alum added in a separate post, “One more thing– As an adult I’ve had the pleasure of working on productions where the welfare and mental health of young performers was handled incredibly carefully. Especially around material that was intense. It is possible to holistically look after the kids on set and tell complex and sometimes upsetting stories. It just has to be the top priority of the production.”

Earlier in the week, Elle published an essay by Romano — who appeared in 1996’s Everyone Says I Love You as a child before becoming a teen Disney star with her role in Even Stevens and voicing Kim Possible — where she compared child stardom to the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

“The former child actor exists in a category the world does not know how to hold. We are children when the public wants to feel protective of us, professionals when the industry wants to profit from us, and spoiled celebrities when we eventually show symptoms of having been both,” Romano wrote in part. “Early fame is like CTE. Not as a diagnosis. As a way of thinking about repeated impact. We now have language for youth sports: protocols, helmets, parents worried about concussions. But we have almost no language for what happens when stress, scrutiny, rejection, adult pressure, and the collapse of privacy become the architecture of a childhood.

She added, “Young performers are still treated as exceptions. Lucky exceptions. Cute exceptions. Talented exceptions. Exceptions whose labor powers one of the most profitable storytelling machines in the world, while their mental needs are treated as inconvenient or irrelevant. Social work be damned.”

Gilbert also shared a lengthy post on Substack Saturday, where she asked, “Why are these three sweet, wildly talented, vibrant, vital young women gone?” Gilbert landed her breakout role at just nine years old, playing Laura Ingalls Wilder on Little House on the Prairie from 1974 to 1983.

“I did not know Hayden personally and only worked briefly with Mishy and Daveigh. It feels personal because I was them,” Gilbert wrote. “We are all members of the same tribe; Female Former Child Performers, and when one of us dies, it runs through all of us like an electrical current. When three of us die so close together, something is very, very wrong. We all know the stories of how the entertainment industry uses, abuses, exploits and then throws away it’s youngest, but for some reason, this trend is getting worse.”

She later added, “Where is our Union in all of this? Where is the collective outrage? Where are the regulations? Where is the protection of privacy?”

“It really seems like no one cares enough to enact real change. At least, not until the next death and everyone talks about how sad they are and how we must do something and then they forget and get on with their lives until it happens again and again and again,” Gilbert continued. “Yes, addiction is a real disease. Family dysfunction is real. PTSD is real. In actors, all those things are assets. They enable us to access emotion and share it with an audience. But when it comes through children, it should be treated tenderly, protectively, respectfully and in a way that is as limited as possible.”

Gilbert’s post comes as her husband, Timothy Busfield, awaits trial in Albuquerque, New Mexico, after being accused of child sex abuse on the set of the former Fox/Warner Bros. Television series The Cleaning Lady. Gilbert has defended Busfield, who has denied the allegations.

Panettiere started working in Hollywood at a young age, appearing in the soap opera One Life to Live at just four years old before starring in 2000’s Remember the Titans at 10, among other projects. As for Trachtenberg, she appeared in the Nickelodeon series The Adventures of Pete & Pete as a child, as well as 1996’s Harriet the Spy and 1999’s Inspector Gadget. Chase was known for voicing Lilo in 2002’s Lilo & Stitch when she was younger as well as starring in the 2002 horror film The Ring.