Mary J Blige shared the news of winning an Emmy to her social media page. During the post she captioned it saying, “Yes God Did“.
Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Mary J. Blige, Kendrick Lamar, and Dr. Dre took over SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California in February 2022 for the Super Bowl LVI halftime show.
The performance was designed to honor the hip-hop genre, set to celebrate its 50th birthday in 2023. The show took place not far from where Dr. Dre, Kendrick Lamar, and Snoop Dogg grew up in Southern California.
But the performance did more than that. The fantastic five won an Emmy for their performance.
The 2022 halftime show made history as the first halftime show to win the Emmy Award for Outstanding Variety Special (Live). The show also won awards for Outstanding Production Design For a Variety Special and Outstanding Music Direction. The show had been nominated three times.
The show’s director, Hamish Hamilton, told Billboard about what made the show so different.
“It was one of, if not the greatest Super Bowl halftime shows ever,” Hamilton said. “That [artist] lineup changed the world – they changed music, they changed politics, they changed the way that we dress, they had a seismic influence in music, culture and beyond and not one of them had been on a Super Bowl bill before, and all of a sudden they’re all on the same Super Bowl bill, and by the way it’s [near] Compton, where some of this started, where Dre started, literally this is his backyard. And, of course, you’ve got the home team in the final. It was a hip-hop L.A. Super Bowl once-in-a-lifetime moment. It just had everything extra going for it, from that first shot of Dre in his studio in Compton.”
While none of the artists had headlined the Super Bowl before, Mary J. Blige made a brief appearance in the 2001 halftime show during Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way.”
Jesse Collins, the show’s executive producer, stated he was nervous. Partly due to Jay Z, who was part of the honorees founder of Roc Nation.
“First on behalf of the fellow executive producers and our performers, we would like to thank the Television Academy for this incredible honor. It’s amazing. This is the first time this show has ever won this award and it’s so incredible to be a part of this moment. It took an incredible team to pull this together and I thank you all.”
