Washington native wins fourth Emmy
From “The Dick Van Dyke Show” to “Mad About You,” it took Carl Reiner 38 years to score nine Emmys and become the preeminent Emmy winner among performers.
In just four years, Washington native Abraham Higginbotham managed to put half the number of Reiner’s Emmys on his shelf.
When the Primetime Emmy Awards were handed out Aug. 25, Higginbotham, a 44-year-old Trinity High School graduate, ended up with his fourth Emmy for his role in the creative team for the ABC-TV series “Modern Family.” It marked the fifth time the series triumphed in the Outstanding Comedy Series category, and the fourth since Higginbotham has been the series’ executive producer.
“Many ‘experts’ predicted this would be the year that we lost, and more than one person wrote an article basically begging voters to vote against us, so we felt the tide was turning,” Higginbotham said by email earlier this week. “I got to bring my sister this year and I warned her, ‘It won’t be as fun as years past, we will definitely lose.’ So it was a very pleasant surprise.”
Initially looking to pursue acting after getting a degree from Boston University, Higginbotham ended up turning to writing for television after penning a couple of spec scripts for the series “Will and Grace” and “Frazier” and finding he had a knack for it and it paid the bills more readily than his occasional acting gigs. He went on to be a writer and co-executive producer for “Will and Grace,” along with Fox-TV’s “Arrested Development” and ABC-TV’s “Ugly Betty.”
Higginbotham is on the last year of his contract with “Modern Family,” and “I’m not sure what’s next,” he said, though he is looking at getting a feature-length film off the ground. He also has some “ideas brewing in my head” for additional television projects that he would like to explore.
“I’m still doing the same amount of writing and producing on (“Modern Family”) that I always have,” Higginbotham said. “Maybe a little more writing because three of our original writers left at the end of last season and the process of ushering new people in kind of demands more writing of the experienced staff members.”
And, no, he doesn’t have many moments where he looks back longingly and thinks about reigniting his acting career.
“There are certainly moments when I think, ‘I’d love to play this scene or land this joke,’ but overall I do not want to act more frequently … Acting has never been as kind to me as writing has. When a path opens up to you, stay on it. Don’t jump back over to the one with deep holes and dead-ends, sharp bushes and hungry, mean animals.”
“Modern Family” has averaged about 14 million to 16 million viewers each season, and in 2011, a Los Angeles Times scribe credited the series with reviving situation comedies in a primetime landscape that had become crowded with reality series and talent competitions. Higginbotham used to worry about the health of the genre, but he now feels it is on a stronger footing.
“I think Hollywood and the general public will always crave well-crafted, relatable stories with fleshed-out characters who make you laugh and feel something … Is this TV model something of the past? I think the answer is no.”