Can the Biden Inauguration Win an Emmy?
If politics is entertainment these days, then Stephanie Cutter has certainly taken the note. A Democratic Party fixture for decades, the political consultant worked as Bill Clintons deputy communications director, adviser to Barack Obama in his first term, and deputy campaign manager on Obamas reelection bid. Shes been intimately involved in some of the countrys most intensely fought modern political battles. And now shes facing a new constituency: Emmy voters. Just as Hollywood needed to get creative in the COVID-19 era, the Democratic Party lacked the typical tools for mounting an effective campaign against a sitting president in 2020. The Democratic National Convention, for starters, had to be redefined; the stage where the presidential nominee is certified, and where a party (literally) comes together to gear up for the election, couldnt exist as we knew it. Without the ability to physically gather in a space, the DNC went virtualwith Cutter tapped as the televised, multiday events producer. There was no model, she tells Vanity Fair. Yet the productionfrom daily celebrity hosts including Julia Louis-Dreyfus to the brilliantly reimagined delegate roll callemerged as a rousing success. Then, Cutter put her producer hat back on after Joe Biden won the election, to helm the prime-time inauguration special, Celebrating Americaanother star-studded, well-received show. Both the DNC and Celebrating America are now eligible for Emmyscategorized as a hosted nonfiction special and a live variety special, respectivelywith Cutter now in a very different kind of campaign mode. Certainly when youre in the throes of dealing with a pandemicyoure not thinking, Lets submit this for an awardyoure just trying to get through the end of it without making any huge mistakes, Cutter says. But we were really encouraged to submit these for an Emmy because they were so different from what you normally see in politics. In the era of a pandemic, we accomplished something pretty big in terms of being able to produce interesting, creative content that engages people in a virtual setting.  Cutter and her teamincluding Adrienne Elrod, talent director for Bidens inaugural committee, and Ricky Kirshner, an Emmy-winning television veteranneeded to navigate both the new world of entertainment and longstanding political norms. They cut the DNC to two hours a day (typically, its daily run time would go as long as six hours), with speeches of party bigwigs shortened accordingly. We knew what story we wanted to tell, Cutter says. Usually people get up there and speak for 10 to 15 minutes. The average was two minutes for us, and everybody understood. We didnt get any pushback from anybody wanting to speak longer, for the most part. She pauses. There were one or two, but I wont mention who they are.  That is such a politically challenging decision Stephanie had to make thereto go to some very notable VIPs and say, You can only speak for four minutes, that is not an easy thing to do in the world that we work in, Elrod says. We wanted to convince the American people to support Joe Biden. If we had a bunch of boring speeches, it [was] not going to work.  The prerecorded DNC required careful planning, but Celebrating America was a different beast entirely. The election dragged on for days in November before Bidens victory was officially called, and then weeks before the January 20 inauguration, the insurrection in the U.S. Capitol transformed the entire tone of the event. On January 6, were in the middle of a Zoom meeting, planning out a [Celebrating America] segment, and I looked over to my TV and I see the caption, The Capitol has been breached, Cutter recalls. At that moment, we didnt know if wed be having an inauguration or what it would look like.