Where, at any award show this year will there be some recognition of Katie Couric?
Jeff Simon: Best TV moments are sure to go unrewarded
I can’t get no satisfaction, as a famous Rolling Stone once said.
Not on Golden Globe night, anyway, and certainly not in the TV portion of it. (The whole shebang begins at 8 tonight on Channel 2.)
Nothing that I ever really want to see happen on the Golden Globes show ever does.
Please don’t misunderstand. Because of the alcohol intake and some carryover of general “what the hell” party atmosphere, the Golden Globes have their own unbuttoned pleasures as award shows go. You can usually count on someone to do something that the folks back home will be clucking over for many months on end.
It’s just that as any sort of award for a year’s TV life, they fall way down into near total irrelevance. I always watch people picking up statues that I wouldn’t watch on a bet during the week or that I just couldn’t care about on my most generous day.
Where, for instance, at any award show this year will there be some recognition of Katie Couric, emerging from her long Night of Long Knives at CBS News to become the only journalist in the entire country whose work actually mattered in the election of 2008? (“What newspapers do you read?” could only be a trick question to a vice presidential candidate whose general information was on the same level as the average Yukon moose.)
At the same time, how do you finally recognize that amazing Sarah Palin TV moment in 2008 when Tina Fey picked up where Couric left off to do the most pitch-perfect political impersonation we’ve ever seen on a TV comedy skit?
How does a mere award show deal with the amazing confluence of hilarious comedy about sex addiction on “Californication” with the troubles of star David Duchovny, whose own rehab for sex addiction couldn’t keep his own high-profile marriage (to Tea Leoni) together? The show, by conservative estimate, has a snowball’s chance in hell of winning anything tonight, but for those of us who laughed uproariously at its endemic writerly corruptions, how could we know that the show was cutting so close to the bone for its star? (At the same time, non-nominated Natasha McElhone, in real life, lost her doctor husband to a sudden heart attack while she was pregnant.)
How can an organization like the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (which was once such a renowned group of freeloaders that they gave an award to Pia Zadora after her husband threw some nice parties) recognize the subtlety and understated perfection that non-nominated William Petersen has brought to “CSI” all these years (and which leaves us for good on Thursday)?
What award show review of the year 2008 could possibly point out the crashing executive ineptitude of NBC’s Jeff Zucker, the man who managed the near-impossible trick of turning Jay Leno into a controversy and a problem and who has apparently made Howie Mandel his prime-time symbol? Carefully note, by the way, that the Globes are on Zucker’s own network so don’t expect to hear too many comedians roasting him on a slow spit, as he so clearly deserves.
I never expect any official recognition whatsoever for the TV show that I consider the best on TV by far — Showtime’s “Brotherhood” from Blake Masters, the show that had the genius to connect the kind of “Sopranos” thugdom with the more artful thugdom of a small state’s legislature. As the Rod Blagojevich scandal began to play out, the world of “Brotherhood” loomed even larger as the show for our time. Let “Mad Men” and its 1960 world get all the worshipful ink, “Brotherhood” actually seemed to have a purchase on 2008 truth.
Where are the award show prizes for Craig Ferguson’s nightly opening monologue?
Will Jimmy Smits ever be properly admired for turning his career inside out so deftly on this year’s “Dexter?”
Can anyone recognize whoever it was that somehow landed indie movie prince Harvey Keitel and the delectable Gretchen Mol on the weekly TV show “Life on Mars?” The show was unexpectedly terrific, even better than you expect from one with BBC origins.
Where is the award for the raunch of “Saving Grace,” whose overlooked heroine (Holly Hunter) is completely unlike any other starring woman ever seen in the history of television?
No one will give a prize tonight for “Boston Legal” going down in a blaze of absurdity and biting the hand that feeds it.
Let me put it this way: for these, and similar reasons every year, the Golden Globes were never golden to me.
They’re just globes, you know?
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