Pee-wee as Himself Wins 2025 Creative Arts Emmy for Documentary or Nonfiction Special

A winner has been announced!

Pee-wee as Himself won the Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special category on Sunday, Sept. 7, at the 2025 Creative Arts Emmys. Also up for the award were Deaf President Now!, Martha, Sly Lives! and Will & Harper.

In his final days, Paul Reubens — best known as Pee-wee Herman — sat for more than 40 hours of one-on-one interviews for the HBO docuseries Pee-wee as Himself.

The series, which premiered May 23, covers everything from his sexuality to the legal troubles he called “giant footnotes” in his life.

“It was incredibly shocking,” director Matt Wolf said in a May interview with PEOPLE, recalling Reubens’s death just one week before their scheduled final interview. “I found out that Paul died on Instagram along with everybody else.”

Shortly after Reubens’s passing, his assistant shared a private audio recording Reubens made the day before he died — his final message to the world, which is featured in the series. “More than anything, the reason I wanted to make a documentary was to let people see who I really am and how painful and difficult it was to be labeled something that I wasn’t… a pedophile,” Reubens says in the message. “I wanted somehow for people to understand that my whole career, everything I did and wrote, was based in love.”

Pee-wee as Himself previously won Outstanding Original Film, Broadcast or Streaming at the Gotham TV Awards and is a key contender at the Primetime Emmy Awards with five nominations.

Deaf President Now! tells the story of the historic eight-day protest in 1988 at Gallaudet University — the world’s only liberal arts university designed specifically for deaf and hard-of-hearing students.

The protest led to the appointment of the school’s first deaf president and helped spark the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The Apple TV+ documentary, which premiered on Jan. 28 and earned a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, is co-directed and co-produced by Gallaudet alumnus Nyle DiMarco and Academy Award winner Davis Guggenheim.

Netflix’s Martha chronicles the rise, fall, and comeback of lifestyle icon Martha Stewart, all in her own words.

Directed and produced by R.J. Cutler, the documentary debuted on Oct. 30 to generally positive reviews. Stewart herself, however, was less impressed.

One of her chief complaints: the filmmaker “used very little” of her personal archive, despite having what she called “total access.”

“It was just shocking,” Stewart told the New York Times on the day the film was released. “Those last scenes with me looking like a lonely old lady walking hunched over in the garden? Boy, I told him to get rid of those and he refused. I hate those last scenes,” she said.

Released on Jan. 23 by Hulu, Sly Lives! charts the rise, reign and fade of Sly and the Family Stone, one of the more influential bands of the ’60s and ’70s.

Although alive during filming, frontman Sly Stone does not appear in the documentary. He died on Jun. 9 at 82 due to prolonged lung disease. “He can’t speak in full sentences,” producer Josh Patel said during a February Q&A. “His eyes reveal a precociousness and a lucidity that’s there, but his motor function doesn’t exist.”

Patel added that the film’s director, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, approached the story with sensitivity. “Ahmir’s first thing he said was, ‘Let’s tell this story with a lot of empathy. That’s not empathetic.’”

In the Netflix film Will & Harper, longtime friends Will Ferrell and Harper Steele document a deeply personal cross-country road trip following Steele’s coming out as transgender.

A former Saturday Night Live head writer, Steele’s transition prompts a series of emotional and candid conversations between the pair about identity, friendship and what it means to be seen.

“What if I could go with her to these places?,” Ferrell said in a September 2024 PEOPLE interview. “And at the same time we can have a discussion as to what it means to be trans, and I can ask all the questions I have as a cis male. But mostly it just felt like a fun thing for us to do.”

Despite the film’s acclaim — including wins at the GLAAD Media, Critics’ Choice Documentary, Dorian Film and Peabody Awards — it failed to make the shortlist for the Academy Awards. Ferrell responded to the snub with trademark humor during a February interview with Stephen Colbert: “F— the Academy. Especially the doc branch,” he quipped. “You don’t want to hang out with the doc branch. What a bunch of losers.”

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The 2025 Creative Arts Emmys are being presented in Los Angeles on Saturday, Sept. 6 and Sunday, Sept. 7. The full show will be broadcast on Saturday, Sept. 13 at 8 p.m. ET on FXX.