Humanitas Prize - History

History

Beginning as primarily a television award, the first Humanitas Prize winners were announced on the Today Show. Kieser, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Abernathy announced the first winners in 1975. At that time, the awards were divided into three categories, based on program length (30, 60, or 90 minutes and longer); these lengths tend to correspond to comedies, dramas, and telefilms or miniseries, to the extent that some articles refer to the categories by those names.

The present-day award system is broken up into Prime Time TV 90 minute, Prime Time TV 60 minute, Prime Time TV 30 minute, Children's Live Action, Children's Animation, Feature Film, and Sundance Feature Film categories, with additional awards that include the Angell Comedy Fellowship for film-school students. The fellowship was started after David Angell and his wife, Lynn Angell, were killed in the crash of Flight 11 in the September 11, 2001 attacks. The Kieser Award, a kind of lifetime achievement award, was established after Keiser's death in late 2000. The Special Award category is irregularly given, usually to writers of a news or documentary program, which otherwise are excluded from the prize; to date the longest period without the special award was the 11-year period between 1995 and 2006.

When the award was established, the committee determined that the writer was the source of the most humanizing values in any program and should therefore be the focus of the awards. Although lists of Humanitas Prize winners for television categories often tell only the name of the program, the award actually is made to the writers of specific episodes, and more than one episode of a given show may be among the finalists in any given year; similarly, reports on the film categories often give more prominence to the film's title, but the award goes to the writing staff. In 2005 Humanitas winners included Hotel Rwanda (feature film) and The West Wing (television).

In 2006, the documentary film An Inconvenient Truth about global warming starring Al Gore was given a "Special Award" for "mak a significant contribution to the human family by communicating values, forming consciences and motivating human behavior."

The most wins — four — by any single program was for writers of the TV series M*A*S*H: Larry Gelbart, 1976; Alan Alda (with James Jay Rubinfier), 1980; and the team of David Pollock and Elias Davis in 1982 and 1983. Several shows won three times including The West Wing, The Wonder Years, Family, Scrubs, thirtysomething, Hill Street Blues, and I'll Fly Away, which once won in the 60- and 90-minute categories in the same year. Life with Louie was the only show to win three times in the children's animation category.

Writers who have won three times include Aaron Sorkin (for The West Wing and Sports Night), David E. Kelley (Picket Fences, The Practice), and Marshall Herskovitz (thirtysomething, Once and Again, and the telefilm Special Bulletin). While at least four writers have had back-to-back wins, it is not unusual for several years to pass between one writer's winning the prize again. To date the longest gap was the case of China Beach writer-producer John Sacret Young, who won in 1978 for the telefilm Special Olympics, then won his second Humanitas Prize 21 years later for the TV movie Thanks of a Grateful Nation. (Young eventually went on to become a member of the Humanitas Board of Directors, where he serves with at least four other repeat prizewinners.)

In 2010, Humanitas introduced a new program called "New Voices," designed to help emerging television writers. The program pairs inexperienced writers with Humanitas board members to sell their work to the television networks.