CableACE Award
award
The CableACE Award (earlier known as the ACE Awards) was an award that was given by the National Cable Television Association from 1978 to 1997 to honor excellence in American cable television programming. ACE is an acronym for "Award for Cable Excellence". The trophy itself is shaped as a glass spade, alluding to the Ace of spades.
History
The CableACE was created to serve as the cable industry's counterpart to broadcast television's Primetime Emmy Awards. Until the 40th ceremony in 1988, the Emmys refused to honor cable programming. For much of its existence, the ceremony aired on a simulcast on as many as twelve cable networks in some years. The last few years found the ceremony awarded solely to one network, usually Lifetime or TBS.
In 1992, the award's official name was changed from ACE to CableACE, agreeing to do so to reduce confusion with the American Cinema Editors (ACE) society.
By 1997, the Emmys began to reach a tipping point, where cable programming had grown to hold much more critical acclaim over broadcast programming, and met an even parity, a position that would only hold for a short time before cable programming began to dominate the categories of the Primetime Emmys.
Few attended the national CableACE Awards ceremony in November 1997, and the CableACE show had a low 0.6 rating on TNT, compared with a 1.2 rating the year before, while the Emmys had a 13.5 rating that year. Smaller cable networks called for the CableACEs to be saved as their only real forum for recognition.
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This entry incorporates text from “CableACE Award” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.