The 2024 Peabody Awards won’t be officially unveiled until May 9, but PBS is already a winner… of the nominations phase. The storied public broadcaster received 11 out of the 68 total nods for this year’s ceremony, which will take place in Los Angeles on June 9—one month after the winners are announced. And those nominees represent a cross-section of PBS’s varied non-fiction and news brands, including Frontline, Independent Lens and PBS NewsHour. (You can see the full list of nomine
For the record, one of PBS’s Peabody nominees is already a statue-carrying Oscar winner. Fresh off its win for Best Documentary at the 96th Academy Awards in March, Mstyslav Chernov‘s 20 Years at Mariupol—a harrowing on-the-ground depiction of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which played in theaters and also aired as a Frontline episode—seems likely to repeat that triumph as the Peabody pick for 2023’s best non-fiction film. Pro tip: You can watch the movie for free on Frontline’s YouTube page.
But Mariupol does have some competition from other public television docs, including POV’s While We Watched and three installments of Independent Lens: Hidden Letters, The Picture Taker and Sam Now. Other non-PBS documentary nominees include Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie from Apple TV+ and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, one of four Max non-fiction features recognized.
PBS’s hot streak continued in the News and Public Service categories, receiving six additional nominations. News nods went to a pair of Frontline reports—one covering Clarence and Ginni Thomas and the other looking at the 2022 Iranian uprising—and the one-hour PBS NewsHour special, War in the Holy Land. Three more Frontline installments were nominated in the Public Service category, including After Uvalde, America and the Taliban and America’s Dangerous Trucks.
Other news organizations receiving Peabody recognition include ABC News, which picked up a News nod for an episode of its Impact x Nightline Hulu series, On the Brink. The Wall Street Journal was recognized for its 40-minute News doc, Shadow Men, and USA Today picked up a Public Service nomination for the streaming report, The Post Roe Baby Boom.
Meanwhile, those who enjoy their headlines served with a side of British snark will be happy to hear that HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver bridged the gap between news and entertainment by scoring a nomination in the Entertainment category alongside fully fictional series like The Bear, The Last of Us and Poker Face. Oliver and his Last Week team were specifically nominated for a November 2023 episode that wrestled with the Israel-Hamas War.
A full list of all 68 nominees for the 84th Peabody Awards can be found on the organization’s official site.