The Golden Globes Have Never Needed a Host

Back in June, when the Golden Globes were sold to Dick Clark Productions and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association was, for all awards-giving intents and purposes, put out to pasture, the future of the embattled awards show was far from certain. The Globes were without a network, after NBC cut ties. And without the weirdness of the HFPA and their kooky (and corrupt) voting practices, would the show even have an identity?

This week's Golden Globe nominations suggest things may well be back to normal. The nominees themselves didn't offer much in the way of controversy. The CBS morning show carried the nominations live, ahead of CBS broadcasting the awards, for the first time, on January 7th. Currently, the most out-of-the-ordinary thing about the Golden Globe Awards is that they don't have a host.

This doesn't have to be a problem! Though the Golden Globes are often seen as chasing the clout, reach, and prestige of the Academy Awards, they are very much not the Academy Awards. Nor should they be. While the Oscars are big, lavish, and long, the Globes have earned the reputation for being succinct, zippy, boozy, and fun.

That reputation was earned, at least in part, from the way Dick Clark produced the shows. The nominees from film and TV were seated at tables, free to mingle and drink and kick up their heels. The awards were presented with very little extraneous material — no comedy sketches, no montage tributes (save for the evening's recipient of the Cecil B. DeMille Award). And crucially, for most of the ceremony's most formative years, no host.

When NBC began broadcasting the Globes in 1996, there was an admirable virtue to how quickly the show moved without feeling rushed. Part of that was that the evening kicked off immediately with the night's first award. An offscreen voice would introduce the presenters, the names of the nominees — sometimes still making their way to their tables — would be read, and within five minutes, the first winner of the night was taking the stage to accept their award.

With categories for both film and television, almost all of which are for acting performances, there is a lot to cover in a single Globes ceremony. Clark always knew how to keep that train on rails. Invariably, the show was off the air right around 11:00 PM Eastern or soon thereafter. Not only were there no jokes to be made about the ceremony being too long — like we get every year at the Oscars — but there would be no host to say it if there were.

As with all things that portend doom and destruction, the Golden Globes' hosting crisis began with Billy Bush. It was Bush and his Extra co-host Nancy O'Dell who were called on to co-host the bizarre 2008 Golden Globe Awards, which were held in the middle of the 2007-08 Writers Guild strike. With Hollywood talent unwilling to cross a picket line, the Globes were presented not at the Beverly Hilton hotel but in a TV studio, with no recipients there to accept. (Do you remember that Atonement beat out No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, and Michael Clayton? Of course you don't, nobody does.)

Two years later, Ricky Gervais would be named host for the 67th Golden Globes, the first time in 15 years that a proper Globes ceremony had a host of any kind, and the first time ever that the Globes had a host in the traditional mold as we understand it today. (From 1982 until 1995, the Globes were "hosted" by pairs of actors who served as emcees for the evening — who could forget such epic pairings as Patrick Duffy and Dyan Cannon, or John Larroquette and Janine Turner?) The kind of host who does comedy, engages in bits across the course of the evening, and follows the template set by Oscar hosts like Billy Crystal, Johnny Carson, and Bob Hope, — Gervais ushered in that era for the Globes in 2010.

Gervais' tenure as Globes host was met with a lot of controversy, most of it fairly nonsense-based. Was he too mean in his jokes to the gathered celebrities? Did he step over the line by accusing the Hollywood Foreign Press of taking bribes? Why was he always drinking on stage? Gervais took every opportunity he could to cast himself as the bad-boy comedian whose hosting was too edgy for TV, a claim that was repeatedly belied by the fact that he kept getting asked back to host again (five times to date). Gervais was never too edgy, but god, was he ever annoying pretending like he was.

It's not like the Globes have failed to find good hosts. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler hosted four times (2013-15 and also 2021) to great acclaim. Seth Meyers navigated a tonally tricky landscape in the year that Harvey Weinstein’s predatory behavior was exposed, and the #MeToo saw a resurgence. Jerrod Carmichael did a decent job in 2022, though he also got into a few Gervais-esque situations where he was criticized for hitting below the belt (the dangers of making a Scientology/Shelly Miscavige joke on a night when Tom Cruise is there to be honored for Top Gun: Maverick).

Some of the Globes' most memorable moments are also proof that the show doesn't need a host. Beyond an opening monologue, awards show hosts are mostly there to keep things moving, keep the audience engaged, transition smoothly between segments, and step in to handle things if there's a hiccup. But the Globes seem to do just fine during those hiccup moments. In 1997, when Christine Lahti won Best Actress in a TV Drama for Chicago Hope and was accidentally in the bathroom when her name was called, it was Robin Williams — who was not the host, just there in the audience — who dashed up on stage to vamp for a while until Lahti returned from the loo. In 2001, when Best Picture presenter Elizabeth Taylor nearly read the winner before reading the nominees, it was Clark himself who darted out from backstage to guide the confused Taylor through the proper steps.

The Golden Globes don't need a host because they don't need to be the Oscars. They'll never have that kind of prestige anyway. Be the Golden Globes! Vote for weird winners! Get everyone tipsy in their seats! Ditch the host and get right to the awards. It's the one piece of Golden Globes history that deserves to be preserved.

Joe Reid is the senior writer at Primetimer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His work has appeared in Decider, NPR, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Slate, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The A.V. Club and more.