Think Emmy Categories Are Confusing Now? Here’s How Two TV Academy Experiments in the ’60s and ’70s Went ‘Super’ Awry

At 98, Dick Van Dyke is nearly a quarter century older than the Emmys (which clock in at 76 this year). That’s why it’s all the more astounding that he’s still a force when it comes to TV’s biggest prize. Not only did he score a Daytime Emmy this year, breaking records as that honor’s oldest winner ever, but he was the subject of the current Emmy-nominated CBS special “Dick Van Dyke 98 Years of Magic.”

Van Dyke, who last won a Primetime Emmy in 1977 (for “Van Dyke and Company”), isn’t up for one of the four nominations that “98 Years of Magic” received — including outstanding pre-recorded variety special
— though his star power sure didn’t hurt. Van Dyke has won four Emmys overall, but one of them comes with an interesting asterisk.

As an armchair quarterback, I know I’m always pontificating on ways the Television Academy could improve the Emmy categories or telecast. But sometimes, radical change isn’t such a good idea.

I’m referring to what happened in 1965, when then-leader Rod Serling pushed the idea to replace the traditional categories with just four major ones: “program achievements in entertainment,” which honored four shows among 15 nominees; as well as three “individual achievement” categories with multiple awards for actors and performers, directors and writers.

It was a way of replacing the competition with a list of honorees, almost like today’s AFI Top 10 lists. In that year, rather than a best comedy Emmy, “The Dick Van Dyke Show” won that program achievement in entertainment Emmy alongside “Hallmark Hall of Fame: The Magnificent Yankee,” “My Name Is Barbra” and “New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts.” Van Dyke landed an actor/performer award, as did Leonard Bernstein, Lynn Fontanne, Alfred Lunt and Barbra Streisand.

It was a disaster, as the spirit of the competition was completely removed. As a result, the TV Academy reverted to traditional categories like comedy and drama the following year. But it didn’t quite learn its lesson: It’s now been 50 years since the org took another radical stab at shaking up the status quo, with something in 1974 it dubbed the “Super Emmy.”

This was in many ways even more misguided than the 1965 experiment. In 1974, the TV Academy announced the winners for several acting, writing, directing and crafts Emmys in the comedy and drama
categories days before the telecast — robbing them of their on-camera moments. It was almost an afterthought to the actual telecast. Instead, the ceremony focused on pitting those drama and comedy winners against each other for what was nicknamed the “Super Emmy.”

For that mega award, comedy winner Alan Alda (“MAS*H”) beat out drama winner Telly Savalas (“Kojak”) for actor of the year, and Mary Tyler Moore (“The Mary Tyler Moore Show”) bested “The Waltons” star Michael Learned for actress of the year. That meant Alda and Moore won two Emmys for the same role in the same year, while folks like Savalas and Learned were somehow simultaneous Emmy winners and losers for the same exact roles.

Alda and Moore even criticized the concept onstage while accepting the Super Emmy, and just like in 1965, the TV Academy dropped the idea as quickly as it implemented it. Former TV Academy awards chief John Leverence, who joined the org a few years after the 1974 mess, reminded me that the Super
Emmy concept violated a cardinal rule of the awards.

“It was an unhappy experiment that was not repeated,” he tells me. “I like to say that No. 1, it is a basic principle of the Emmy structure that there is one Emmy given for one achievement. So if you’re lead actor in a drama series, there’s not going to be an additional ‘super’ award tacked on to that. Secondly, it is a principle that eligibility is based on genre. You have a lead actor for a drama series, you have lead actor for a comedy series, lead actor for a limited series. Thirdly, ‘lead actor in drama’ says that’s the highest you can give. To add another tier above that would diminish the significance of achievement.”

So why do it? At the time, the feeling was that a smaller tier of “Super Emmys” would simplify who were the most important winners of the year. “That that theoretical notion, however, was absolutely undercut by the three principles of Emmy eligibility,” Leverence says. “So three fundamental principles of the Emmy structure — one Emmy for one achievement, genre eligibility and tiering — all three of those were violated in the 1974 Super Emmy.”

Turns out there is a science to all of this. Even when it comes to honoring icons like Alan Alda, Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke.