When Gary Baum, ASC won his fourth career Emmy Award earlier this month, it was especially gratifying in that the honor came in a category–Outstanding Cinematography for a Multi-Camera Half-Hour Series–that had been restored thanks in part to a grass-roots initiative among cinematographers to drum up entries. Last year the category fell by the wayside when not enough multi-camera entries materialized.
In his acceptance speech, Baum appealed to the Television Academy to keep multi-camera categories alive. He later noted to SHOOT that editors also got their multi-camera recognition back in the Emmy competition this year. Baum hopes that after resurrecting multi-camera categories in 2024, such recognition will be preserved for 2025 and beyond.
A major factor in the decline of multi-camera submissions in 2023 was the move of certain children’s and family programming from the primetime Emmy competition to the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ (NATAS) Emmy ceremony. For DPs this meant that multi-camera programs last year were reduced to vying for just one primetime nomination slot in the more general Outstanding Cinematography for a Series (Half-Hour) category. It turned out that this single slot was filled in ‘23 by a Baum-lensed episode of How I Met Your Father (Hulu).
Fast forward to this year’s competition and Baum won for another installment of How I Met Your Father–”Okay Fine, It’s A Hurricane,” which turned out to be the series finale. Two of Baum’s Emmy wins over the years have been for How I Met Your Father, and there’s a certain symmetry to them. His initial win for How I Met Your Father was for the pilot in 2022. So he won Emmys for the very first and last episodes of the show.
Baum’s other two Emmy wins came earlier–for Mike & Molly in 2015 and the revival of Will & Grace in 2018.
Baum has a total of 15 career Emmy nominations thus far, adding two to that tally this year–the one for How I Met Your Father, and another in the same multi-camera series, half-hour category for the season one finale of Frasier (Paramount+) titled “Reindeer Games.”
While it was bittersweet to win for an episode that wound up being the series finale when How I Met Your Father wasn’t picked up for another season, Baum is grateful for his time on the show and the opportunity he now has to again work with director and executive producer Pamela Fryman. At press time he was collaborating with Fryman on the NBC series Happy’s Place starring Reba McEntire. Baum has enjoyed a fruitful working relationship with Fryman. In fact the three episodes of How I Met Your Father which garnered Emmy nominations for Baum in 2022, ‘23 and ‘24 were all directed by Fryman who also exec produced the show. The DP noted that he has a creative shorthand with Fryman whom he first worked with on the sitcom Call Your Mother starring Kyra Sedgwick.
Baum cited the inherent challenge of How I Met Your Father–an array of flashbacks and flash-forwards in what amounts to a co-mingling of parallel scripts. He credited Fryman with being a master of this hybrid, having helped to create it dating back to her tenure as director/EP on How I Met Your Mother. In less capable hands, he continued, a show like How I Met Your Father–so complicated in terms of how it’s produced and its story development–could turn to chaos. Instead, assessed Baum, Fryman handled the twists and turns adroitly, maintaining a calm set, proceeding on a logical and sensible path to give stability to what otherwise had the potential to be a volatile format.
Baum shared that How I Met Your Father was special to him in that it was “multi-camera but also a hybrid.” He noted, for example, that the show was written with some dramatic points that at times entailed different sets as well as location work (primarily on the Paramount backlot). This lensing ranged from music video to stunt sequences, work at night and at dusk. “It kind of allowed me to expand my craft,” related Baum, adding that the producers “let us do what we do,” meaning that he was afforded the creative latitude to shoot in ways he thought were best for the scene and the story. The producers, he said, wanted to make the show “as cinematic as possible.” Baum said he was simpatico with that goal and did everything he could to advance it.
Throughout his run on How I Met Your Father, Baum deployed the Sony F55 digital camera, which he described as being “Panavised” to accommodate customized 11:1 Primo Panavision zoom lenses.
In addition to How I Met Your Father, Frasier, Will & Grace and Mike & Molly, other shows in the Emmy nominations mix over the years for Baum have included Superior Donuts, Garry Unmarried, The Millers and Two Broke Girls.
