Showtime’s The Affair and Amazon’s Transparent took home the night’s honours for best television drama and comedy at the Golden Globe awards.
View our slideshow for more images from the glitzy awards ceremony.
Amazon.com Inc’s win for Transparent marked the first time an online streaming service took home a Golden Globe for best series. The show, about a transgender woman who comes out to her three adult children, won for best comedy series.
Its star, Jeffrey Tambor, also took home a statue for best actor in a comedy series, giving Amazon wins in both of the categories for which it was nominated.
Transparent received wide critical acclaim for its handling of groundbreaking subject matter and has been a breakthrough series for Amazon, whose original programming had struggled to find an audience early on. Few consumers knew the largest U.S. online retailer was in the TV business.
“It was a huge risk,” Jill Soloway, the creator of Transparent and the daughter of a transgender parent herself, told reporters backstage. “The way Amazon is distributing it is transformative and the show is transformative.”
Transparent bested HBO’s Girls and Silicon Valley, The CW’s Jane the Virgin and Netflix Inc’s Orange is the New Black to win the top comedy series award. The winner for best drama series, The Affair tells the story of an affair between two married people told from the different perspectives of the man and the woman.
It beat out four longer-running and well-loved series – Downton Abbey, Game of Thrones, The Good Wife and House of Cards. “It does feel like a real whirlwind and it does feel like we just got on the air,” the show’s co-creator, Sarah Treem, said backstage at the awards show.
Ruth Wilson, one of the stars of The Affair, picked up the award for best actress in a drama series. Netflix, which is better known than Amazon for its original online programming, went into the night with seven nominations but picked up just one award – best actor in a drama series for actor Kevin Spacey, who plays a conniving Washington politician in House of Cards.
“This is just the beginning of my revenge,” Spacey said onstage while accepting his award. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which hands out the Golden Globes, also honored new series Jane the Virgin and Fargo.
Gina Rodriguez won the best supporting actress in a comedy award for her role as a young Latina woman who is artificially inseminated by mistake in Jane the Virgin. “This award is so much more than myself. It represents a culture that wants to see themselves as heroes,” Rodriguez said onstage.
In the mini-series category, FX’s Fargo picked up two awards – best mini-series and best actor in a mini-series for Billy Bob Thornton. The series is a dark comedy crime series inspired by the 1996 Coen brothers film of the same name.
Golden Globe Award winners
FILM
BEST FILM DRAMA “Boyhood”
BEST COMEDY OR MUSICAL “The Grand Budapest Hotel”
BEST ACTOR, DRAMA Eddie Redmayne, “The Theory of Everything”
BEST ACTRESS, DRAMA Julianne Moore, “Still Alice”
BEST ACTOR, COMEDY OR MUSICAL Michael Keaton, “Birdman”
BEST ACTRESS, COMEDY OR MUSICAL Amy Adams, “Big Eyes”
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR J.K. Simmons, “Whiplash”
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS Patricia Arquette, “Boyhood”
BEST DIRECTOR Richard Linklater, “Boyhood”
BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM “Leviathan,” Russia
BEST ANIMATED FILM “How to Train Your Dragon 2”
BEST SCREENPLAY Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Nicolas Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Armando Bo, “Birdman”
BEST ORIGINAL SCORE Johann Johannsson, “The Theory of Everything”
BEST ORIGINAL SONG “Glory,” for “Selma” – John Legend, Common
TELEVISION
BEST DRAMA SERIES “The Affair”
BEST COMEDY SERIES “Transparent”
BEST MINI-SERIES OR TV MOVIE “Fargo”
BEST ACTOR, DRAMA SERIES Kevin Spacey, “House of Cards”
BEST ACTRESS, DRAMA SERIES Ruth Wilson, “The Affair”
BEST ACTOR, COMEDY OR MUSICAL Jeffrey Tambor, “Transparent”
BEST ACTRESS, COMEDY OR MUSICAL Gina Rodriguez, “Jane the Virgin”