LeVar Burton To Receive Lifetime Achievement Emmy Award

LeVar Burton is a national treasure, and the world is recognizing that by bestowing more awards on the former Star Trek: The Next Generation star.

Burton’s Emmy for a lifetime

The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences has announced they will be honoring LeVar Burton for his work on the children’s program Reading Rainbow with a lifetime achievement award at their first-ever Children’s & Family Emmy Award ceremony, which is part of the Daytime Emmy Awards series. The ceremony will be held on December 11 in Los Angeles.

Burton has already picked up a dozen Daytime Emmy Awards for his work on Reading Rainbow alone. The PBS series promoting reading for kids ran for 21 seasons from 1983 to 2006, all hosted by Burton who was also an executive producer.

PBS “remixed” some of Burton’s Reading Rainbow highlights in the following video…

Burton picks up NAB  Award

This is a big week for LeVar and awards. On Monday he was in Las Vegas at the National Association of Broadcasters annual NAB show, where he was honored with the first-ever Insight Award from the Library of American Broadcasting Foundation. The reward was in recognition of his “extraordinary contributions to broadcasting, history, and American culture.”

Geordi returns in Picard season 3

Burton will be returning to the Star Trek franchise as part of the third season of Star Trek: Picard, where he will be reunited with co-stars Michael Dorn, Jonathan Frakes, Gates McFadden, Marina Sirtis, and Brent Spiner who are all reuniting with their former captain, Sir Patrick Stewart.

You can hear him as Geordi LaForge in the announcement video released earlier this month.

Burton is also keeping busy developing a new game show based on Trivial Pursuit and he has just signed on for a recurring role in the second season of the Starz drama Blindspotting.


Find more Star Trek celebrity news at TrekMovie.

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great news and well deserved…on an unrelated note, rewatching the S3 trailer i’m now convinced the crew gets back together to go save Wesley and The Traveler……the reason why they all get back together has to be about saving one of their own and outside the main cast that was announced he would seem the only logical character that would galvanize the crew to go on an ‘old fashioned road trip’ together…and then the show and picard’s story ends with him, wesley and dr crusher forming a family together if even for a brief time. and they might do something silly like reveal picard is wesley’s real dad

Not so silly, Sean…

Its looking like Picard might end up with Laris, rather than Dr. Crusher.

That’s just a touch on the creepy side….

Happy for him. He’s always seemed to me to be a real Class Act. Congratulations.

A well deserved honor. Congratulations!!

as well he should. It’s a shame he wasn’t given more of a chance on Jeopardy. Yeah, it was a little clunky but I think he would have grown into it and been a lot of fun

Reading Rainbow, TNG, Roots…LeVar Burton has contributed greatly to creating high-quality television and helping develop it as both a cinematic art and an educational tool. This honor is greatly deserved.

As an educator, this is great news. I’ve always admired his contributions to children’s literacy. And yes, he should be the jeopardy host but I know that ship has sailed.

So well deserved! As an African-American man myself, Levar Burton was already a big icon where I grew up thanks to Roots (which to this day I never saw but read the original novel twice) and Reading Rainbow. He was already an inspiration. Once he did TNG that’s when he became very mainstream and inspired many more people like myself growing up.

And yes SO happy he will be back next year as Geordi. Picard has been disappointing as a show to say the least but I’m still hopeful next season will be a high water mark for the show with the entire TNG cast back.

Roots is an excellent novel, one of the first ones I ever read, and have revisited a couple of times over the years. The original miniseries on TV, enjoyed it very much, due in no small part to Burton’s portrayal.

I agree with you on Picard, Tiger. This season has turned out to be quite the letdown. Not a shock by any means, but disappointing nonetheless. Sincerely hoping SNW is going to break the losing streak (imo) for the Kurtzman-era live action shows and make for some intelligent, compelling Trek.

This could hardly go to a more deserving recipient. Congratulations, Mr. Burton!

This makes me smile. Congratulations!

At the same time… I’ve come to accept that Patrick Stewart isn’t a spring chicken, but in my mind the TNG cast can’t possibly be old enough for “lifetime achievement,” lol!