Darran Tiernan, one of Ireland’s busiest directors of photography, has secured the award for best cinematography on a TV series (one hour) at the 78th Emmy Awards.
The honour, the most prestigious in US television, came for his work on the Step Into My Office episode of the Prime Video series Spider-Noir. Streaming in both colour and black and white, the show, starring Nicolas Cage as an ageing variation on Spider-Man, has picked up much acclaim for its visuals since its release in May.
It has been a down-and-up week for Spider-Noir, which landed five Emmys days after it emerged that the show had been cancelled following just one season. Spider-Noir also won for stunt co-ordination, title design, special visual effects and sound editing.
Tiernan, in the business for more than 30 years, got his start shooting commercials before racking up credits on such high-end shows as The Penguin, Westworld and Perry Mason. “I’m from Dublin, where it was hard to work on films, especially when I was growing up in the 1990s,” he told ShotDeck recently. “It was only just starting to happen when My Left Foot, Jim Sheridan’s film, came out and put us on the map, shot by the great Irish cinematographer Jack Conroy.”
Taking place over two nights at the Peacock Theatre in Los Angeles, the ceremony for “craft” categories crowned the comedy-horror Widow’s Peak as the biggest winner with eight Emmys.
In second place was the Super Bowl halftime show with seven. Also scoring well were DTF St Louis, the US version of The Traitors and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
The most garlanded “platform” of the night was Apple TV, securing 19 wins. HBO Max and Netflix followed with 16 and 13 Emmys, respectively, confirming the dominance of streamers over old-school broadcast television at such awards ceremonies.
The remaining awards will be given out at the televised Primetime Emmys ceremony on September 14th.