KMOS received its second Emmy award Sept. 22 for another episode of its show “Missouri Life” from the Mid-America Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in the Best Magazine Program category.

“Missouri Life” features various towns around the state with segments about restaurants, artists, businesses and the community. The Emmy-winning episode was about Callaway County. KMOS won the Emmy in 2017 for its episode about Silver Dollar City.

“The first one was a surprise. The second one was more of a surprise,” said Roy Millen, producer. “We knew we had a good product. We were very proud of it, but the competition was very tough and so going into this last one, I myself was trying to lower my expectations. I didn’t want to get too excited.”

Millen said “Missouri Life” has had good feedback from the communities they feature on the show.

“We’ve gone back and talked to several of the towns we’ve previously highlighted and they all are very excited. Businesses in particular have thought that it is drawing some attention to them,” Millen said. “They’ve had customers come in and say, ‘We saw you on TV!’ and, ‘We saw that story so I decided to come check you out.’”

Producer Eric Boedeker said they recently visited Brunswick, Missouri, a town they covered on “Missouri Life.”

“We went back and ate at the restaurant we covered the year before and (the owner) said that it’s almost every week that somebody’s coming in and saying that they stopped there because they had seen it on TV,” Boedeker said.

KMOS had two episodes nominated in the same category this year. The other episode was about Cape Girardeau. There were a total of eight nominations.

“We were proud of both of those. We were obviously happy with either,” Millen said. “We were rooting for a tie between ourselves.”

To produce an episode, Millen said they spend four days in a new town, shooting day and night.

“The fact that we’re a three-person production team is kind of remarkable that we can do this,” Millen said. “We spend a lot of time on the show. That’s the reason I think we are winning awards for it.”  

Boedeker said there was a lot of heavy competition for the Emmy.

“One of our competitors was the Kansas City Chiefs. I can’t imagine what their production team looks like,” he said.

Millen said they care more about the content of the show than anything else.

“(The Chiefs have) got a lot of money and…we don’t spend a lot of money on this.” Millen said. “We can’t afford to send it off to New York to have the audio sweetened and have graphics done. We do all that ourselves.”

Boedeker, Millen and Christi Millen, producer, are all former UCM students. Boedeker said working at KMOS is good experience to get into the TV industry.

“It’s cool to have KMOS on campus, future-focused, teaching students here stuff that within three years they can win Emmy awards,” Boedeker said. “If a student worked on something that we’ve nominated, we put their name on it.”

Millen and Boedeker said they hope they win more Emmys in the future for “Missouri Life.”

“We’ve got some good episodes this year,” Millen said. “We’ll have a hard time picking which episodes we want to enter.”

Millen said they hope to feature every county in Missouri on “Missouri Life.”

“We really enjoy going out into the communities and learning more about the state of Missouri,” he said. “We’d love to keep doing this forever.”

“Missouri’s got plenty of stories that we wanna keep telling,” Boedecker said.

To find the episodes for “Missouri Life,” go to https://video.kmos.org/. To get involved at KMOS-TV send an email to Boedeker boedeker@ucmo.edu.