"When the Daytime Emmy nominees were unveiled Wednesday, some of the more interesting noms went unreported," the Washington Post's Lisa de Moraes noted in a blog post yesterday afternoon. Interesting is quite the euphemism in the case of nominee Kevin Clash.
Clash, you may recall, is the Sesame Street puppeteer who resigned last November after allegations of a sexual relationship with a teenager, has been nominated for a Daytime Emmy award. So what exactly was the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) thinking? It's not like the nomination occurred before the lawsuit against Clash was made public.
According to a May 1, 2013 press release, Clash was nominated for a total of three daytime Emmys, although two of those three were by virtue of his being a co-producer or director of a project:
- "Outstanding New Approaches: Enhancement to a Daytime Program or Series" for the PBS program Little Children, Big Challenges: Divorce for which Clash was a co-producer
- "Outstanding Pre-School Children's Series" for PBS's Sesame Street, for which Clash served as co-executive producer
- "Outstanding Directing in a Children's Series" for which Clash was nominated as a Sesame Street director along with three other individuals, Ken Diego, Joey Mazzarino, and Matt Vogel.
- "Outstanding Performer in a Children's Series" for which Clash was nominated by virtue of his puppetry and voice work for Elmo on PBS's Sesame Street.
In fairness to the Academy, only the last of those four nominations is for Clash in a purely individual capacity. That being said, it is absolutely shameful that NATAS would allow such a nomination to go forward for Clash's puppeteering given the nature of the credible allegations against him.
