Barack Obama: former United States president, Emmy Award winner. The Creative Arts Emmy Award winners were announced on Saturday night, and among those nominated was Obama for narrating the Netflix docuseries Our Great National Parks. Obama managed to pick up the win, marking his first Emmy win following his transition from politics into developing content for Netflix.
Obama had some strong competition in the Outstanding Narrator category. The other nominees were Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for History's Black Patriots: Heroes of the Civil War; David Attenborough for Discovery+'s The Mating Game: 'In Plain Sight'; W. Kamau Bell for Showtime's We Need to Talk About Cosby: Part 1; and Lupita Nyong'o for Discovery+'s Serengeti II: 'Intrigue'.
This may be the first Emmy nomination and win for Obama personally, though he has made an impression at the Emmys previously. The "Yes We Can" music video released for Obama's presidential campaign in 2008 was bestowed with the first-ever Daytime Emmy Award for Best New Approaches in Daytime Entertainment. Meanwhile, Obama was also the subject of the documentary David Attenborough Meets President Obama, which was nominated for a News and Documentary Emmy in 2016. Obama has also won a Grammy for Spoken Word Album in 2008 for narrating The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.
Also among the big winners of the Creative Arts Emmy Awards was late actor Chadwick Boseman, who posthumously won the Emmy for Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance. This was for voicing his Black Panther character T'Challa in the animated series What If...?, one of his final roles. Some of the other night's winners include Arcane for Outstanding Animated Program, George Carlin's American Dream for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special, and The Beatles Get Back for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series.
Related: Barack and Michelle Obama Screen New Documentary at Martha's Vineyard African American Film Festival
Barack and Michelle Obama signed on with Netflix to produce exclusive content for the streaming platform in 2018. Our Great National Parks comes as a result of that pact, showing that it was a good move for Netflix to invest in working with the Obamas. You can check out the official description and trailer for Our Great National Parks below.
"Our Great National Parks invites viewers to experience nature in the world's most iconic national parks. Spanning five continents, the series brims with wonder, humor, and optimism as each episode tells the story of a national park through the lives of its wildest residents - both big and exceptionally small - and explores our changing relationship with wilderness. Traveling from the waters of Monterey Bay, California, to the bright red soil of Kenya's Tsavo National Park, the lush rainforests of Indonesia's Gunung Leuser National Park, the majestic terrain of Chilean Patagonia, and more, Our Great National Parks beckons us to get out and explore, create new ways for these wild places to thrive, and vigorously preserve them for future generations to come."
You can find Our Great National Parks streaming on Netflix.com.