Exclusive: Ramy Youssef's Peabody Award speech—plus the (thankfully) diverse list of 2020 winners

Every year, the Peabody Awards committee selects 30 programs as “the most compelling and empowering stories released in broadcasting and digital media” during the previous year. When reflecting on 2019 (which seems about 57 years ago at this point), the board of 19 jurors ultimately choose to honor a variety of television, audio, and web programming that would put most American awards shows to shame in terms of the diversity of creators behind the celebrated projects.

One such winner is Ramy Youssef, whose Hulu series, Ramy, was announced as an award recipient Wednesday morning. “Thank you, Peabody Awards for recognizing our show, Ramy, this year. It is a huge honer and a privilege,” Youssef says in an acceptance speech released exclusively to The A.V. Club and viewable below. “The idea that a show about an Arab family in New Jersey could be recognized on this level means so much to us, but also to all future productions and networks that want to take a chance and a shot at small stories from first-time creators and from people who want to put something out from a voice that hasn’t been heard before. And so—on behalf of the entire cast, crew, and creative team of Ramy—thank you very much for the Peabody. Just to join the winners that have been awarded in the past—I see Oprah has won a Peabody. And so, we are now like Oprah, and so that’s big.”

In addition to the 29 other programs recognized like Ramy, the Peabody Awards also chose PBS’s investigative documentary series Frontline and Fox’s The Simpsons as this year’s as recipients of Institutional Awards and Cicely Tyson as the Peabody Career Achievement Award winner. In lieu of an awards ceremony—which was to take place in Los Angeles June 18 but was canceled due to the coronavirus—all 2020 recipients were offered the chance to make video acceptance speeches like Youssef that will be made widely available later today. Here is a full list of the 2020 Peabody Award winners alongside the jury’s description of the projects.

Chernobyl (HBO)
An unforgettable account of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster shows what happens when science is censored to the detriment of people’s lives and offers a bold testament to the humanity, courage, and suffering of ordinary citizens in extraordinary circumstances.

David Makes Man (OWN)
Tarell Alvin McCraney’s visually stunning coming-of-age drama contemplates identity as fluid, plural, restrictive, and powerful, immersing viewers in the heart-wrenching world of a gifted 14-year-old African American boy growing up in the South Florida projects.

Dickinson (Apple TV+)
Creator Alena Smith lovingly and playfully embraces anachronism, bringing a contemporary sense, sensibility, and soundtrack to 19^th-century New England and the world of poet Emily Dickinson. Hailee Steinfeld offers a standout performance in a show that excels at being fun while crackling with energy and wild originality.

Fleabag (Amazon Prime)
The enchanting show from Phoebe Waller-Bridge about a woman struggling with the death of a friend and her attraction to a hot priest pushed the creative bar to new heights in its second season, maintaining a nearly unmatched ability to be playful and devastating, hilarious and poignant, at the same time.

Ramy (Hulu)
Ramy Youssef writes and stars in this touching, thoughtful, and very funny sitcom focusing on a first-generation American Muslim and his family in New Jersey. Tracing its origins back to his stand-up routine, and also starring Hiam Abbass, Amr Waked, Laith Nakli, Mo Amer, and May Calamawy, the groundbreaking series is masterful in its weaponization of the tension between faith and secularism, East and West, and men and women.

Stranger Things (Netflix)
Writer-producers Matt and Ross Duffer perform yet another masterful act of chemistry, mixing homages to a cavalcade of 1980s media to create a show that bubbles over with original fun and inclusiveness in its third season. Part science fiction, part horror, part government conspiracy drama, it fleet-footedly veers between modes and expectations, keeping viewers on their toes and the edge of their seats.

Succession (HBO)
Jesse Armstrong’s gleeful, brainy send-up of New York City media conglomerates and one percenters revels in the dysfunction of the Roy family and its members’ outlandish antics to control the clan’s empire. Brian Cox has established himself as one of TV’s most delicious villains of all time and standouts Kieran Culkin, Sarah Snook, and Jeremy Strong give equally rich and complex performances.

Unbelievable (Netflix)
Drawing from a true story, Susannah Grant, Ayelet Waldman, and Michael Chabon expertly pen a rape investigation for the #MeToo era, showing not just what police work should look like, but what a mediated account of rape should entail. With standout performances from Toni Collette, Merritt Wever, and Kaitlyn Dever, the series serves as a model for how storytellers can implore society to believe women but also how to shift the ways we talk about rape.

Watchmen (HBO)
Damon Lindelof’s revolutionary series provides new answers to classic comic book genre questions about what it means to mask one’s identity and who gets to be a superhero. More than that, it offers a frank, provocative reflection on contemporary racialized violence, the role of police, and how Americans understand their place in the world after a large-scale disaster.

When They See Us (Netflix)
Devastating and commanding, Ava DuVernay’s powerful miniseries about the Central Park Five case and the lives it ruined is a touchstone for its historical moment, and a powerful registry of the inhuman practices and degrading effects of 20th-century racial injustice and state violence.

DOCUMENTARIES

Apollo 11 (CNN)
Comprised entirely, and masterfully, of archival materials, “Apollo 11” is a reminder of a time when America celebrated scientific accomplishment and engineers, test pilots, human “computers,” and government agencies collaborated to pull something off that had never been done before. With previously unreleased 70mm film footage and audio files, reproduced here without talking heads or authoritative narration, this compelling documentary makes NASA’s first moon landing present and visceral for a new generation.

For Sama (PBS)
In the painful and poetic testament that is “For Sama,” Waad al-Kateab wrestles with why she and her husband remain in besieged Aleppo to help run a hospital, as the choice to flee is much more wrenching than one might imagine and the choice to stay is equally confounding, yet understandable. We have all seen the war in Syria in countless news reports, but we have not seen it like this.

Independent Lens: Hale County This Morning, This Evening (PBS)
In this intimate exploration of the everyday lives of African Americans in rural Alabama through artistically rendered vignettes, director RaMell Ross captures the feel, atmosphere, fiber and culture of a community rarely seen on film.

POV: Inventing Tomorrow (PBS)
Laura Nix’s inspiring profile of six amazing teenage scientists from around the world serves not only as a celebration of science, of knowledge, and of sheer ingenuity, but as a celebration of young people working to solve the problems gifted to them by prior generations.

POV: Midnight Traveler (PBS)
Filmed on phones by Hassan Fazili, this autobiographical account of his refugee family’s journey from Afghanistan to Hungary is an arresting and deeply moving testament to the power of parenting through trauma. It offers a remarkably rare and valuable humanizing picture of the everyday life of a refugee family, while also stopping at points to consider the ethics of filming such a story.

POV: The Distant Barking of Dogs (PBS)
Simon Lereng Wilmont’s beautiful, moving, and nuanced documentary chronicles life in a war zone through the eyes of a child. The story of an Eastern Ukrainian boy and his fiercely devoted grandmother pits the harsh realities of war against the innocence of childhood in a gracefully edited collection of cinéma vérité moments.

POV: The Silence of Others (PBS)
Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar offer a stunning reflection on fascism, memory and forgetting by documenting the struggle of victims seeking legal redress for torture and other human rights abuses committed during Spain’s General Franco’s dictatorial reign. The film serves as a cautionary tale of fascism, its enduring wounds, and enduring presence.

Surviving R. Kelly (Lifetime)
This explosive six-part series, based on interviews with women who survived alleged sexual abuse from R&B superstar R. Kelly, chronicles the complicity of a music industry and fans who turned a blind eye to multiple allegations as the singer rose to staggering heights of fame. The result is a powerful exploration of celebrity, the double standard of justice around gender and race, and how speaking truth can effect change.

The Edge of Democracy (Netflix)
Telling the epic tragedy of what happened in Brazil, from Lula to Bolsonaro, this film from director Petra Costa commandingly and chillingly shows how precarious a democracy can be.

True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality (HBO)
A profile of attorney Bryan Stevenson and his work at the Equal Justice Initiative seeking justice for the incarcerated poor and death row inmates in Alabama and the South, the film offers a searing indictment of the court system, and helps viewers see how the U.S. Supreme Court is historically and directly accountable for sustaining racial violence, white supremacy, and the exploitation of black people through the trajectory of decisions that leads from enslavement to lynching to the death penalty.

PODCAST/RADIO
Dolly Parton’s America (WNYC)
During one of the most divisive periods in American history, Dolly Parton is the “great unifier” whose music speaks to people of diverse backgrounds and ideological perspectives. In this long-form multilayered podcast, host Jad Abumrad and producer Shima Oliaee explore Parton’s relationship to feminism, her faith, and her country roots, as well as the perpetuation of certain myths about Southern identity.

Have You Heard George’s Podcast? (BBC Sounds)
Through poetry, spoken word, music, and speculative fiction, George Mpagna, known as “George the Poet,” pushes the boundaries of language and wordplay to explore issues of trauma, intimacy, work, art and creativity, belonging, attachment, and meaning in Black Atlantic worlds. From the sonic and creative cultures and histories of black people in West Africa, England, the Caribbean, and the U.S., George the Poet constructs a rich and provocative 21st-century cosmos in this podcast.

In the Dark: The Path Home (APM Reports)
In the second season of this story, Madeleine Baran and Samara Freemark once again set the benchmark for what truly superb true crime podcasts can and should be, expertly revealing a pattern of discriminatory jury selection in the troubling case of Curtis Flowers. Their reporting tells the bigger story of race and the criminal justice system while just as adeptly engaging in the more local story of the lives affected.

Threshold: The Refuge (Auricle Productions)
Host Amy Martin reveals the tangle of traditional culture, economic aspirations, spiritual practices, protest movements, and political deal-making that shape current environmental policies in this five-part series on the battle over the future of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. A superb account of environmental activism, Alaska Native rights, and the politics of oil and gas exploration features indigenous voices discussing their own futures.

NEWS
“A Different Kind of Force: Policing Mental Illness” (NBC News)
This poignant documentation of how local law enforcement in Texas are adapting to handle people with mental illness with empathy rather than weapons provides background on how the deinstitutionalization of the mental health system and lack of resources created a societal problem. The report carefully gives voice to people with mental illness and their families, and offers strategies to address the issue.

“American Betrayal” (NBC/MSNBC)
Richard Engel’s reports on the U.S. decision to abandon their allies the Kurds through war footage and interviews with Kurdish soldiers, a school teacher, and foreign policy experts masterfully attend to both the big picture and to the humans trapped in that picture. Offering a nuanced historical primer, Engel’s work interrogates policy as much as it features the human costs of rash policy.

“Long Island Divided” (Newsday)
This three-year-long investigation of housing discrimination and its impact on Long Island’s suburban towns and communities is local investigative journalism at its best. Through compelling documentary, data journalism, and hidden cameras, “Long Island Divided” shows the personal toll and collective impact on individuals and families subjected to the everyday practices of racial discrimination institutionalized by the real estate industry.

“The Hidden Workforce: Undocumented in America” (CNN)
This revealing look at undocumented workers in the United States takes the focus away from the border and places us instead in the American Midwest to show how vital immigrants have become to the heartland—humanizing them and their contributions to the social, economic, and cultural fabric of the nation.

“Unwarranted” (WBBM-TV)
Investigative reporter Dave Savini spent a year reporting on botched police raids in the Chicago area that left behind traumatized families and trashed homes. Through exhaustive interviews, surveillance video, and hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests, Savini uncovered police behavior that ranges from careless to callous. The reports resulted in Illinois legislation that instructs police departments to train officers on how to de-escalate force if children are present during a raid.

CHILDREN’S & YOUTH

Molly of Denali (PBS Kids)
While American media depicts indigenous characters almost entirely in historical settings, the charming story of Molly Mabray, an Alaska Native girl who helps her parents run the Denali Trading Post, represents these traditions as a living culture with much to offer at the current moment—from environmental consciousness to community belonging to creative expression.