The 2018 Grammys struggled being back at Madison Square Garden after 15 years away, and the entire broadcast was so off that the person who got the most screentime other than host James Corden was Sting, “who kept turning up over and over again, any time the show needed to stuff the ‘this is getting a little too dangerous’ genie back into the bottle,” according to Vox’s Caroline Framke and Todd VanDerWerff. They add: “In particular, the show’s choice to essentially silo all political messaging into one 20-minute section in the middle of the production felt like a network note, as if CBS itself had descended to say, ‘Let’s not scare off Trump voters with a bunch of business about immigration and men’s sexual misconduct.’ Indeed, the awkward, whiplash-inducing transitions from relatively safe material to riskier material felt very CBS — since the network is, after all, America’s most staid broadcaster.”
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TOPICS: The Grammy Awards, CBS, Chuck Berry, Dave Chappelle, Donald Glover, Hillary Clinton, James Corden, Kesha, Lorde, Sting, Award Shows, U2