From the Teen Show to an NY Emmy Winner

By Katie McFadden

Artie Brennan, an actor, comedian, director and filmmaker, can now add New York Emmy Award winner to his resume. The Breezy Point summer resident recently won a regional Emmy Award for his short film, “The Chat,” filmed right in his family home in Breezy Point.

“I still can’t believe it,” Brennan said three days after his big win. In a black tux he bought just for the occasion after being nominated for the Entertainment – Short Form Content Category, Brennan recalls the numbing shock of hearing his short film being announced as the winner at the 68th annual New York Emmy Awards at the New York Marriott Marquis in Times Square on Saturday, October 11.

Unlike the national Emmy awards, the New York Emmy Awards are regional awards presented by the New York Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences to recognize excellence in television and media in the tri-state area, but the golden trophy looks just the same. Brennan has won awards for Best Actor for the Shorts Film Festival and a feature film that won an audience choice award at the LA Comedy Film Festival, among others, but he says this one, so far, is his proudest achievement. “This is by far the biggest,” Brennan said.  “The Chat” is also one of Brennan’s more serious, and most personal pieces.

Brennan discovered his passion for comedy early on. “I started doing improv with the UCB out of college. I had a degree in advertising, but I had taken every acting class I could, and when I was thinking of what I wanted to do, I started doing all comedy,” he said. Sketch comedy then led him into filming things, and he started to develop his writing, directing and filmmaking skills, often writing himself into parts that he could play.

Brennan has made things like a skit parodying the NYC Parks Department, called the “New York Beach Department,” a short reel that could’ve been a scene in “Parks and Recreation,” which The Rockaway Times shared on social media in 2023. He even co-created and ran an off-Broadway show “The Super Crazy Fun Time Show,” an interactive gameshow-esque comedic performance, which he ran for seven years.  He’s also appeared in well-known television shows from “House of Cards” to “The Affair” and “Blue Bloods.”

But as any summer Breezy kid would, Brennan truly started to develop his talents in the annual Teen Show. Throughout his childhood, Brennan’s family owned a summer bungalow and his mother, Kathy, and much of his family now live there full time. “Mrs. Barnes, who ran the Teen Show, was a very good family friend. They didn’t have any boys. Before they did the pre-teen show, I was 11 and they needed boys, so she told my mom, ‘He’s going in the show.’ I absolutely loved it. I did it for a few years. I got up and sang. My friends’ kids, I tell them to do it. That show is how I became friends with other kids there being a summer guy,” Brennan said. He even spent some time as a lifeguard, spending his last year as captain. “I loved that job,” Brennan said.

Though now living in Stuy Town in Manhattan most of the year, the beach is always calling Brennan. “The ocean, the beach is my favorite place,” he said. And it often serves as the backdrop for many of his projects. For instance, the reel, “New York Beach Department,” was filmed in Rockaway. Over the summer, he filmed various beach towns for a mockumentary focusing on the paranoia over shark attacks called “Dog Days of Summer,” which he’s in the process of submitting to film festivals. “The majority of it was filmed in Rockaway,” Brennan said. And “The Chat,” his now Emmy Award-winning short, was filmed right in mom’s house in Breezy Point, although there are no identifying features of the community.

Instead, this film focused more on a very important conversation. One that became all too real in 2022 when Brennan’s wife, Kristen, broke the news that she was diagnosed with breast cancer. “After a while, she had surgery and I started writing about it. It was almost a cathartic thing. I was getting it out of my head. And I kept thinking about when we were younger, no one talked about cancer, and now people talk about it whenever people are doing well, not when they’re in treatment,” Brennan said. “I was thinking back to that beginning and that moment where you have to talk to that person you love and say this is the reality, and it reminded me of when I was a kid and my father passed away from cancer and my house was very quiet, but we didn’t know why. I took some real conversations my wife and I had, and I put it into this thing. The conversation we had, we both find everything funny, so there was humor in it, but then you get to the reality of it. I wrote like seven drafts, and I show my wife everything and she usually says, ‘that’s too smart, no one will get it,’ or most of the time, ‘that’s too stupid.’ So, I didn’t show it to her at first but eventually I did, and she said, ‘I think you should make it.’”

Brennan enlisted the help of cinematographer Jeff Enkler and actress Emma Harrington, who played “Kayla,” and Artie played “Andy,” reenacting parts of that very real conversation he and his wife had a year before. “I thought, maybe if anyone sees this and they’re in the same position, maybe it can give them some comfort,” he said. “No one talks about this, but most people have to go through something like this.”

“The Chat” was screened at the Dances with Films Film Fest at the Regal Theater in Union Square. “That was a dream for me. I got so much feedback from people,” Brennan said. So, ahead of Breast Cancer Awareness Month last year, Brennan pitched it to the Manhattan Neighborhood Network, a cable channel in Manhattan, seeing if they would be interested in screening in during the month. “They played it a bunch of times,” Brennan said. And with that, Brennan was able to submit it for consideration for a New York Emmy.  Last month, he got the call. “The Chat” was a nominee. “Just being nominated was nuts,” he said.

And on Saturday, Brennan officially became an Emmy winner. “It was amazing. I am still floating. I’m kind of smiling and half of it is…is this real? What I feel great about is that this is the project that this happened for. This was my most personal work,” Brennan said. In his acceptance speech, Brennan thanked the inspiration behind “The Chat,” Kristen, who he is happy to report is “doing good. She has had two clear scans and she’ll be on medicine for a few more years, but she’s doing good, and she has a very good outlook on life.”

After winning an award for something that starts off comedic but takes a dramatic turn, Brennan says he may change his outlook on how he approaches projects. “Jeff, the cinematographer, said, ‘I think you should be writing more Judd Apatow and less Mel Brooks, a little more of the real things.’ And I think I’m going on that further. It’s a lot more fun to write crazy comedy, but in the end, the fulfilling part is we got this made and wow, look at what came out of it.”

For more info on Artie Brennan, and to watch “The Chat,” check out www.artiebrennan.com.