The 74th annual Peabody Awards ceremony on May 31, 2015, was a gala, Sunday night event, complete with red-carpet walk, at the elegant Cipriani Wall Street® in New York City. The hundreds in attendance included Peabody winners such as satirist Amy Schumer, Rectify star Aden Young and Alex Gibney, producer-director of Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown, media-industry executives and civilian connoisseurs of world-class production and stories that matter.
Fred Armisen, a Peabody winner for his work on Saturday Night Live and for his series Portlandia, brought a playful touch to his role as emcee, presiding over the presentation of 40 Peabodys to programs that included VICE News’s The Islamic State, the children’s series Doc McStuffins, the entertainment series The Americans, Jane the Virgin and Fargo, investigative documentaries like Virunga and Human Harvest: China’s Illegal Organ Trade, the radio report Betrayed by Silence, the podcast Serial, and local-TV news exposes like The Cost of Troubled Minds.
Sir David Attenborough, the British natural-film pioneer, received an Individual Peabody, and the long-running public-radio music series Afropop Worldwide was honored with an Institutional Peabody. Guest presenters included Tina Fey and Charlie Rose.
The event generated more media coverage than any Peabody ceremony in the University of Georgia program’s 74-year history. Nearly 650 newspapers, magazines and websites, including Vulture, Variety and Vanity Fair, took note of the distribution of the world’s most coveted award for electronic media.