The Golden Globes may have been mired in questions about diversity and the odd technical glitch, but one thing’s for sure: It was another good night for the Brits.
Continuing the trend for UK talent and projects invading Hollywood award ceremonies, Brits took home 10, or 40%, of the 25 Globes on Sunday night after bagging a quarter of the nominations. This included six of the 11 television awards and four of the 14 movie prizes.
If the British charge was led by anything, it was The Crown, the Netflix series that has Blighty stamped into its DNA. Peter Morgan’s royal drama put in an imperious performance with four prizes, not least best TV drama.
There were also statues for Gillian Anderson, for her performance as Margaret Thatcher; Josh O’Connor, for his second turn as Prince Charles; and newcomer Emma Corrin for playing Princes Diana.
Meanwhile, Anya Taylor-Joy won best actress in a limited TV series for Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit. Taylor-Joy has both American and British citizenship, and has earned her stripes on shows like Peaky Blinders and Endeavour.
Other notable winners including Sacha Baron Cohen, who picked up two gongs after dusting off his grey suit for Amazon’s Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, and John Boyega, who won his first Globe for Best his work in Steve McQueen’s BBC/Amazon anthology series Small Axe.
Daniel Kaluuya (Judas and the Black Messiah) and Rosamund Pike (I Care A Lot) were also recognized in performance categories.
Saturday Night Live‘s Feb. 27 telecast, featuring Nick Jonas as host and musical guest, drew a 4.1 rating household Live+Same Day rating in the 44 metered local markets and a 1.0 adults 18-49 rating in the 25 markets with local people meters.
That was down a tenth in households and 18-49 from last week’s show, hosted by Bridgerton star Regé-Jean Page with musical guest Bad Bunny, and matching the fast-national results for the Feb. 13 episode hosted by Regina King with musical guest Nathaniel Rateliff. After a hiatus, Saturday Night Live will return to live shows on March 27 with alumna Maya Rudolph as host and rapper Jack Harlow as musical guest.
For the first time in its history, SNL is #1 among all comedies on broadcast and cable in 18-49 and total viewers (L+7) this season. In social interactions, this season’s SNL is up 23% through 13 episodes vs. the same period last season.
Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update reflects on some of the biggest headlines of the week. This time, that included Paramount+’s announcement that aFrasier revival series is officially happening.
Because it’s been 16 years ago since the end of the original series, Colin Jost used Friends to explain Frasier to younger viewers, eliciting laughs and some groans.
He also commented on the offensive content disclaimer put on old The Muppet Show episodes on Disney+, suggesting that they serve as a invitation for viewers to check out the shows.
Weekend Update, which also riffed on the $1.9 billion stimulus package (“Just like when I’m drunk, Congress decided to spend a bunch of money at 2:30 in the morning,” Jost said.) and on Ted Cruz’s CPAC speech, featured Cecily Strong reprising her impersonation of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Kenan Thompson bringing back LaVar Ball.
Strong’s Congresswoman Greene was asked to explain her latest controversial action, putting out a sign that there are two genders, male and female, next to the office of a fellow Congresswoman with a transgender daughter.
“They are calling me the Congress’ new ‘It’ girl,” Strong’s Greene said about her penchant for stirring controversies just weeks into her tenure. And she does not mean being the Congress’ new thing. “No, It, like the evil clown the preys on children,” she said. Watch the skit above and the two parts of Weekend Update headlines and the LaVar Ball appearance below:
Bill Maher sat down with former Fox News and NBC News personality Megyn Kelly for the leadoff interview Friday on HBO’s Real Time, but their discussion didn’t focus on her former employers or her controversial past at all. Instead, they had a frank talk about race, social justice and 21st century “victimhood” in America, especially how it pertains to kids and their schools.
After a brief back-and-forth about the hard-right/hard-left state of cable news, Maher said he really wanted to have The Megyn Kelly Podcast host back to talk about why she and her husband took her kids out of their New York private schools. Their conversation touched on anti-racism and “social justice” efforts schools are making, and — saying he’s heard the same thing “anecdotally” from other parents — he asked Kelly about it.
She said she “loved their schools,” even though “they were definitely leftist,” but “then they went hard left” and “took a really hard turn toward social justice stuff.” Kelly talked about her 8-year-old boy’s school that “unleashed three-week experimental trans-education program. It wasn’t about support — we felt that it was more like they were trying to convince them.” And it “confused the kids.”
She also said her kindergartner “was told to write a letter to the Cleveland Indians objecting to their mascot.”
Maher and chimed in that these are the kinds of thing that he’s heard from parents, who say, “My kids are not ready to be told they’re white supremacists. I’m not ready to be told that.”
He then read from a letter from a school that said things like “there’s a killer cop sitting at every school where white children learn,” “I’m tired of white people reveling in their state-sanctioned depravity and snuffing out black life with no consequences” and “as black bodies drop like flies around us by white hands … .” Maher said, “It bothers me so much that I have to be on this side of this issue because I’ve always been a civil rights advocate. Don’t make me Tucker Carlson. You’re the f*cking nuts — this is insane.”
He added: “There [are] racist problems problems in this country, but this is hyperbole. And this is making people crazy. This is not the way we get to the Promised Land.”
Kelly agreed, saying, “It’s divisive, it’s racist, and it’s had exactly the opposite effect of the one they intend.” She added later, “Everybody gets divided into ‘oppressed’ or ‘oppressor’ on racial identity, on sexual identity. .. I mean, this is really damaging, and as you get older, what the studies show is these sort of implicit biased education efforts bring out racism. So if somebody’s having racist thoughts in the back of their head, it brings it to the frontal lobe, and more people act on their latent racism than they otherwise would have.”
After a few more examples of what they both perceived as overreach by schools — and some by students of color — Maher said to Kelly: “Again, I’m with you. Of course we should acknowledge that there is racism in this country, and we have a horrible, sorry history. We don’t have an exactly horrible, sorry present, certainly as much as it was in the past. That doesn’t mean there’s not work to do, and we should do it, but don’t gaslight me. … I feel like this is beyond race. I feel like it’s a generational thing where so many people want their identity wrapped up being a victim.”
Kelly replied: “That’s the push now, to lean into victimhood. And it’s not just a race thing, I see it in some of my fellow women … but we don’t have to lean into victimhood, even when we might be victims. Even if you are a real victim, which I’ve been in the past too, it isn’t psychologically helpful not helpful to lean into it. I always use the word ‘target.’ I was the target of certain men — that didn’t make me anybody’s victim. And the more you wallow in that mentality, the more you veer toward negativity and attract more of it in your life.”
Wrapping up their sit-down, Maher thanked his guest for coming on “and talking about this — not an easy subject, and I hope someday we don’t have to talk about it.”
You can watch most of their conversation above and Maher’s monologue below: