Independent Spirit Awards announces its first TV nominations, answering the question: "What is Indie TV?"

Variety

Michaela Coel's I May Destroy You appeared to be the frontrunner in Film Independent's first five TV categories, with a nomination for Best New Scripted Series and the winner and only nominee in the category of Best Ensemble Cast in a New Scripted Series. What makes I May Destroy You and other nominees, such as Little America and A Teacher, "Indie TV"? "If there’s a through line with the 2021 noms," says Michael Schneider, it’s that all five projects tell uniquely personal stories: I May Destroy You, about sexual assault and trauma; A Teacher, about exploitation, grooming and abuse; Small Axe, stories about West Indian immigrants in 1960s to 1980s London; Little America, stories about the immigrant experience in the United States; and Unorthodox, about a young woman fleeing her strict Hasidic Jewish community. But here’s another similarity: The fact that all five nominees come from streaming services (give FX an asterisk, but A Teacher launched on its Hulu streaming portal) is telling. These are multi-billion dollar corporations, not scrappy little indie distributors. But premium cable and streamers — free of the need to satisfy advertiser demands for the broadest audience possible — have long been able to run smaller, more narrow and targeted projects that are also some of TV’s most original, and yes, 'indie'-minded fare."