New Television Academy Leader Has a Full Slate

Meryl Marshall, the new president of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, inherits a number of challenges from her predecessor.

In the next year, Marshall, 47, will need to find a larger venue for the Emmy ceremony to accommodate an expanding roster of participants, negotiate a new deal to broadcast the awards and seek to smooth strained relations with the major networks--showing them, she said, that free television is as important to the academy as cable and emerging outlets.

Toward that end, the academy may amend the process through which TV movies get nominated for Emmys to give “network gems,” as Marshall put it, a better chance of achieving recognition versus high-profile, big-budgeted fare from channels such as Home Box Office.

Currently an independent producer whose credits include the HBO series “Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child” and various TV movies, Marshall is only the third woman to head the academy. She began her entertainment career at NBC, having previously worked as a criminal defense attorney.

As chair of the academy’s educational outreach program and a lecturer through UCLA Extension, Marshall wants the organization to provide a forum for topics ranging from digital television to TV’s educational potential--exploring the impact of such matters on both the industry and the public.

“There has to be a place in which some of these items and issues really get discussed,” she said. “I’d like to see the academy take on a role very similar to [think tank] the Aspen Institute, where it collects both academia with working professionals and [carries on] a dialogue about what these changes are going to mean and do. . . . I think the academy ought to be a place where those conversations take place.”