Tina Fey, Benj Pasek among Emmy nominees with Philly ties

Also in the running: Narberth filmmaker Jennifer Fox's HBO movie "The Tale" and "Paterno," Barry Levinson's HBO film about the late Penn State football coach.

Benj Pasek and Tina Fey have been nominated for Emmys.Read moreFILE PHOTOS

by Ellen Gray

Published Jul. 12, 2018, 12:56 p.m. ET

Ardmore's Benj Pasek has an EGOT in his sights, and so does University of Pennsylvania graduate John Legend.

On Thursday, the composing duo of Pasek and Justin Paul — already winners at the Oscars, Tonys, and Grammys — were nominated for an Emmy Award for outstanding original music and lyrics for their work on Fox's A Christmas Story Live! Legend, who's also won those other awards, was nominated for his leading role in another live musical performance, NBC's Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert.

If Pasek and Paul win, they'll be the youngest people to have won all four major awards, becoming the 13th and 14th members of a group that includes John Gielgud and Rita Moreno.

Pasek, a graduate of Friends' Central School, turned 33 last month. He and Paul, also 33, met at the University of Michigan. Legend is 39.

(A Christmas Story Live! was based on the Broadway show A Christmas Story: The Musical, for which Pasek and Paul wrote the lyrics. The librettist for that show, nominated for a Tony in 2013, was Joseph Robinette, a retired Rowan University theater professor from Richwood, who also received a Tony nomination, for best book of a musical.)

Upper Darby's Tina Fey, meanwhile, has more than one reason to show up at the 70th annual Emmys on Sept. 17, which will be televised on NBC. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, the Netflix comedy she co-created with Robert Carlock, is nominated for outstanding comedy series for the fourth year in a row. Fey herself received a nomination for outstanding guest actress in a comedy series for guest-hosting NBC's Saturday Night Live.

Other nominees of local interest include:

HBO's Paterno, a film about the late Pennsylvania State University football coach that stars Al Pacino as Joe Paterno, for outstanding TV movie and for Barry Levinson's direction. (Pacino, who previously won for portrayals of Dr. Jack Kevorkian and Roy Cohn, was not nominated.)
HBO's The Tale, for outstanding TV movie and for Laura Dern's performance as an adult filmmaker coming to terms with the sexual abuse she experienced as a child. The fictionalized film is the work of Narberth native and Germantown Friends School graduate Jennifer Fox, on whose experiences it's based.