Try to contain your excitement: The Golden Globes are coming back to NBC in 2023. Hooray.
The historically boring and historically problematic awards show is coming back to TV next year
Finally answering the prayers of… the members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and presumably no one else, The Hollywood Reporter says that the Golden Globe Awards will be coming back to NBC next year. This is so exciting. We cannot contain our excitement. Whoop-de-doo. Maybe Ricky Gervais will come back. Yippee.
Now, this hasn’t been confirmed yet, so there’s still a chance we’ll all get saved from having to acknowledge the existence of the one awards show that is somehow even more meaningless than every other awards show, but apparently “multiple high-level sources” that spokes to THR have confirmed that it’s in the works. Whatever ends up happening, last year’s broadcast of the Golden Globes was canceled in the wake of a report that accused the HFPA of allegedly running the awards as a big scam to get money and favors from Hollywood (What? No way!), which was followed by an additional report that pointed out that there wasn’t a single Black person among the 87 people who voted for that year’s awards.
The HFPA announced various ways it intended to change its culture (members are no longer to accept gifts, for one thing, which must take a lot of the fun away), but the damage was done and the regular TV broadcast was canceled. The awards were still given out, but there was no real ceremony, no glitz, no glamor, and—essentially—no real reason for the Golden Globes to exist at all. And yet here we are, with the HFPA and NBC apparently getting back together for another Golden Globes ceremony in January of 2023.
But there’s still some fun to be had here, like with the THR story noting that the Globes can’t even get its regular date anymore. The ceremony is usually held on a Sunday in January, but all of the Sundays next January are already claimed by bigger events: New Year’s Day, the final day of the NFL’s regular season, and—most hilariously—the Critics Choice Awards. Yes, a different awards show snuck in and took over the Golden Globes’ preferred date, leaving the HFPA to settle on January 10, a Tuesday. Who’s going to want to see famous people get trophies on a Tuesday? We’re all just trying to keep our heads down and get through the work week at that point.
But to be clear, the only reason this is happening is because of money. The THR story points out that the HFPA has since been reorganized into a for-profit organization that pays its members $75,000 a year to… vote on the Golden Globes, with the newly increased diversity of its voting pool coming from non-members who are unpaid. Also, the Globes ceremony is typically the highest-rated awards show of the movie awards season before the Oscars, and THR says it usually “financially boosts” the “Oscar-hopeful projects and people.” And here we thought it was all about celebrating art and giving trophies to hard-working famous people! Now we don’t know what to believe!