North Fork TV fest honors 'Succession' star J. Smith-Cameron 

A scaled-down North Fork TV Festival will hold but one event Saturday — crowning "Succession" star J. Smith-Cameron as its next "Canopy Award" winner — but the organization's new leader says that's a prelude to a splashier festival in 2023. 

"We really believe we can do more than discover and curate'' shows, said Monica Halpert, the festival's new executive director. "We want to create programming with the possibility of taking that further down the pipeline [by] creating a thriving production hub right here on Long Island, which we also think is possible."

Modest and well-meaning, the North Fork TV Festival has spent the last eight years championing locally produced "independent" television content from its home base in Greenport. But while celebrated for the wine and views, the North Fork has never exactly been a cradle of TV production. Its relative isolation hasn't helped, although Halpert — who's lived the past 25 years in New Suffolk — insists "our proximity to New York City can't be ignored. I say Hollywood owns the silver screen but New York owns the small one, with all these epics and New York stories being produced just 90 miles away. How do we get playwrights, for example, to think about TV [and] to take some of their stories over 8 to 10 episodes? There is so much opportunity." 

Meanwhile, the Festival's newest Canopy winner, Smith-Cameron, joins such past honorees as Kelsey Grammer, Aida Turturro and Bridget Moynahan.

Smith-Cameron has spent the bulk of a distinguished career on the New York stage although more recently has starred as Gerri Kellman in HBO's Emmy Award-winning "Succession." But in a recent interview, she said that it was another TV role — on Sundance's "Rectify" — that "blasted my prejudices out of the water about what TV could be." 

"I feel like TV is getting artier, and movies more accessible to TV, so it's all kind of merging together, which is great, because that means more opportunity for diverse genres." 

Smith-Cameron — who lives part of the year in East Hampton with her husband, Oscar winner Kenneth Lonergan — says that "I really do believe there's a need for this festival because of other creative sources that aren't being supported. They need this festival too." 

Smith-Cameron will be celebrated at a fundraiser (which includes dinner) at Claudio's On Main, 111 Main St. in Greenport, beginning at 6 p.m. Tickets are $350 and up.