Best Moments In Live TV
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Live television is all about high risk, high reward. Musical performances, awards ceremonies, sports events, or comedy shows. There's an electric charge to watching something as it's happening. We're all sharing the same moment. We're connected to the performers and to each other. And should something go wrong, we're connected to that too. I'm Stephen Thompson. And I'm Glenn Weldon. Today on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, we're debating the greatest moments of live television.

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Hi, it's Terry Gross, host of Fresh Air. I just talked to comic Bill Burr. He's known for his anger-fueled humor, which he connects to his upbringing. Let's talk a little bit about your childhood. Oh, Jesus. People are driving to work here. You know, let's try to give them something uplifting.

He was hilarious and introspective in the interview, and it was a wild ride. You can hear a special extended version of this interview on the Fresh Air podcast from NPR and WHYY. Making time for the news is important, but when you need a break, we've got you covered on All Songs Considered, NPR's music podcast. Think of it like a music discovery show, a well-deserved escape with friends, and a

And yeah, some serious music insight. I'm going to keep it real. I have no idea what this story is about. Hear new episodes of All Songs Considered every Tuesday, wherever you get podcasts. This month, Shortwave is featuring a science and dog collab for the ages. Because sometimes scientists need help and have to call in dogs to get the research done.

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Joining us today is our Pop Culture Happy Hour co-host Aisha Harris. Hey, Aisha. Hey, not live, but in living color. So great to be here. Great to have you. Also with us is NPR's TV critic, Eric Deggans. Hey, Eric. Hey, I'm feeling a little hypocritical. This isn't live. Should it be live? No, because that would be terrifying. Let's not do that.

So, look, folks, the monoculture is dead, but watching live TV is the closest we can get anymore to that feeling of interconnectedness, that feeling that we're all in this together. So we wanted to talk about the joys and the pitfalls of live TV and give our picks for the greatest live moments of all time. Now, we should note here that we are limiting ourselves to live events within the sphere of entertainment because all of us can think of harrowing moments when the news had us glued to our sets and

That is not what we're talking about today. So, you know, you're welcome. Who wants that? I was ready to talk about the slap, but go ahead. Oh, my boy. Go ahead. Oh, God. Stephen, kick us off with your pick. So we could talk all day about weird slips of the tongue, crazy high-profile mishaps during major events, but...

I don't want us to forget about the local angle. One of those moments where an intrepid local TV reporter goes out to report on the issues of the day only to have something hilarious and chaotic happen. Now, I followed a few ground rules here. Some of them you've kind of alluded to, Glenn. Mainly, I don't want anything where someone gets hurt. I don't want to see anyone traumatized.

truly embarrassed or humiliated. Okay, you just eliminated whole swaths of things that I thought you were going to go with. So basically, it's not going to be fun. Okay, David Downer. Au contraire. Au contraire, my friend, because what I specifically want to see is intrepidness in the face of slapstick.

So I give you a Canadian TV reporter named Rob Leth back in 2008 or so. He was a reporter for the TV network Global News in Canada, and he'd gotten sent out to report on an inner tube toboggan race. Again, capturing the major stories of the day. So Rob Leth is standing at the bottom of a hill. All right, so I've got my trusty stopwatch, and here they come down the hill. It looks like Ruben is in the lead, and here comes Alex. Okay.

That was a bad idea. At Riverside Park, Rob Black, Global News. That was a bad idea. That was a bad idea. I love that. So as you might be able to surmise from the audio, one of the inner tubes manages to careen directly into the reporter's feet, at which point he is literally fully pinwheeled. Like, oop!

I think I've seen this, yes. Is that like when Lucy holds the football and then Charlie Brown? It's very Charlie. And you see him fully rotate in the air. So he fully rotates and winds up kind of limply starfished on the ground. But he completes the report because he's intrepid. Yeah.

Now, I know this is basically just in terms of the annals of TV hilarity. It's basically just a guy falling down. But one, watching people fall down is funny. And really, the prospect of people falling down is one of the main reasons we still like to watch TV in 2025. This is why I love watching Wipeout. Watching people eat it and then be intrepid in the face of that, that's the best thing not only about live TV. It's the best thing about humanity. Wow.

Yeah. Isn't this just America's funniest home video? It's also bloopers and practical jokes. And it's Canadian. Yeah. It's all those things. They don't have to add a bunch of goofy sound effects to it. I don't need Bob Saget saying, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like, I just want to watch the guy fall down and then get back up. I'm sorry, but I think a blast of Yakety Sax would completely improve that. When would it not?

Yes. All right. That's a solid pick, Stephen. I can't argue with it. I mean, there's certainly news is a fire hose of moments like that. I mean, like, luckily there's now a thing called YouTube where they get collected and shared. Yeah.

by your father. They'd say, hey, did you see that thing I sent you? And then you go, yes, yes, dad, I saw it. But Glenn, this is what I'm saying. It is the unifier, right? Like a highfalutin grunta reader could watch that and still laugh and send it to their father-in-law and they could bond over it. Thank you for that, Stephen. That's a great pick. My pick is next. And I'm

Y'all know me. I love a ramp up. I love a preamble. I love priming the pump. I have none of that here because this moment speaks for itself. Please welcome the wickedly talented, one and only Adel Nazim. Adel Nazim!

That, of course, is the iconic moment that John Travolta presented the Best Song nominee Let It Go from Frozen to be sung by Idina Menzel at the 86th Academy Award on Sunday, March 2nd, 2014. If, like me, you hadn't really thought about that moment in a long time, much less listened to it or watched it, you might have forgotten, as I did, the utter conviction, the

The way he chews through that intro, wickedly talented. What is he doing? And then when he gets to the name, he doesn't stumble over it. People think, oh, yeah, he stumbled over it. No. Au contraire. The way Travolta...

Mm-hmm.

B, that he was distracted by the beauty of Goldie Hawn, who was waiting in the wings with him. And she is just so gorgeous. And at the last minute, he says they switched to a phonetic spelling of Menzel's name on the teleprompter. Now, here is a fun activity for y'all listeners. Write out a phonetic spelling of the words Idina Menzel that gets you anywhere near in the same time zone as Adele Dazeem.

I'll wait. Okay, so Menzel, Adele, that's all I got. That's all I got. Man, I was ready. I was ready for it. I was ready for the grand explanation. I'm going to roll with what Aisha is saying here. As somebody who has tripped over many a phonetic spelling in a script,

It is disconcerting. If you're not accustomed to seeing phonetic spellings, your brain is scrambling to translate a name you've never seen before into a series of syllables. And if your brain doesn't necessarily work that way, I'm not sitting here defending John Travolta. But Stephen, you would have the humility to stumble over the name. You would not just zero in. No.

and create some high fantasy version of some elf. That's because he's not a pro. Sure. Like John Travolta. Now, one thing to keep in mind here, I just wanted some context here. This moment became a thing pretty much immediately on social media that night. And by the next day, there were Adele Dazeem name generators. It was a much bigger story. But keep in mind at the time,

Menzel wasn't yet a household name. I mean, the gays knew her, certainly. The theater kids knew her from Broadway. And, you know, to our defense, we did our jobs back then. I went to the barricades on Twitter that night and I was like, what just happened here? But she has said that ultimately it was one of the best things that happened in her career. There is, of course, there is a Vanity Fair oral history. There was always a Vanity Fair oral history. Because she was considered the wronged party in that exchange. Yeah.

It made people kind of get in her corner. She gained in kind of instant notoriety. And yeah, she's going to have to deal with Adele Datsim jokes for the rest of her natural life, but...

She came out of it on top. There was no guarantee she would, but she did. Oh, come on. She has now had three iconic characters in Rent, Frozen, and then, of course, Wicked. So, like, she was going to be fine. She was going to be fine. Wickedly talented. I will say he's probably upset with you now, though, Glenn, because up until this point, I think most people now have made Warren Beatty the...

The person who for the Moonlight La La Land mix-up. No, no, come on. We don't want to blame Warren because they just handed him the wrong envelope. Fair. That's true. That is true. Okay. Anyway, I love that pick, Glenn. Thank you. And if local news is a fire hose of these kind of moments, the Oscars are a raging torrent. All right. Aisha, what's your pick? All right. Well, I know we said we weren't going to get serious here, but this is

kind of serious, you be the judge. So I'm going to take you all back to September 2nd, 2005. Does that time area ring a bell for any of you? Feels like...

Last week. That's how old I am. Okay. All right. Well, what if I said a concert for hurricane relief? Okay. I know where you're going. All of a sudden. The destruction of the spirit of the people of Southern Louisiana and Mississippi may end up being the most tragic loss of all. George Bush doesn't care about black people. There it is. At which point the eyes of Mike Meyer.

I was going to say, I was so focused on Mike Myers doing that whole thing when I watched it on TV. There's not a more uncomfortable white man in the world in that moment. So for those of you who may be listening to this and maybe weren't even alive when this happened, which is crazy to think about, this was, of course, the concert for Hurricane Relief to benefit the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Yeah.

And Kanye West and Mike Myers, what a 2005 pairing that is, were put together to talk about hurricane relief and, you know, be one of the celebrities there. And of course you have George Bush doesn't care about black people. That's what everyone remembers. That is the mic drop moment. Yeah.

But we often forget, because that's such a great soundbite, that before this, Kanye is rambling. There's this massive preamble. For a full minute, a full long minute about how the media has portrayed Black people as looters and how the system is set up to provide their communities with the least amount of help at the slowest rate possible. I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a Black family, it says they're looting.

And the other thing we forget is that, like, he looks and sounds legitimately frightened because he knows what he's saying. It's controversial. It's completely off script, which is why this is such a great live moment. And meanwhile, yes, of course, Mike Myers is looking on nervously and then, like, doesn't acknowledge what just happened and just continues to stick to the script. Yeah.

He's like, I'm Canadian. I don't even want to be involved here. I know.

A deer in headlights. And then, of course, Kanye punctuates it with the infamous mic drop of George Bush doesn't care about Black people. I think it's important to put this moment in context because Ye, now known as Ye, but Kanye West back then, old Kanye, as some of us like to call him. This occurs literally just three days after late registration, his second album drops. Just a few or a couple of weeks later, Gold Digger lands at number one and then stays there for 10 straight weeks.

And so when I think about this, I think about two things. I think about how this moment sort of like laid the track for Kanye's persona as this like force of chaos. Except in those early days, he was absolutely famous. He had already had college dropout. He wasn't like no one, but he also wasn't what he is today. Or what he was 10 years ago.

Yes, exactly. And so that force of chaos in those early days was perceived by many people, including myself, to be like good for progressives. Like this is a moment that is such a refreshing break from the polite niceties and he's speaking truth to power. And it's like him using that power that he has, the old Kanye, in a good way before it curdled into the Taylor Swift drama, the slavery was a choice comments. Yeah.

the current wave of anti-Semitism that he's been spewing. And for a long time, I think this moment and the memory of this moment allowed him to get away with so much.

so much amongst people. And I think also the fact that like just a few weeks later, Goldinger went to number one. He did not suffer the consequences that you might expect him to suffer professionally. Now, my last thing I'll say is beyond Kanye, I think that this sort of like predates the era when celebrities being outspoken and unfiltered about politics would really become expected amongst most of them. Like it's 2005.

Yes, there were people who were formerly known as the Dixie Chicks, now the Chicks. Obviously, that's the same era. But it was rare. And you've had moments at awards shows with Marlon Brando sending Sachin Littlefeather to accept an award for him. There have been instances in which people have seized that kind of platform to make a political statement. But I think here it was a really unexpected spot for it. Right.

Right. Obviously, I'm not saying that politics and entertainment did not enter. Like, of course, we have people like Jane Fonda. Like, they existed. But I think especially within a star of his magnitude, there's that expectation that I think hasn't been matched since. I think subconsciously, a lot of people expected the Super Bowl this year with Kendrick to do something similar because Trump was may or may not have been in the

crowd when he was performing. We know he was at the game, but like it's been disputed whether or not he was actually he actually saw Kendrick perform live. But I saw some critiques that his performance was more about Drake than it was about the current moment. And I feel like subconsciously people are thinking like we need another George Bush doesn't care about black people. But like

Nothing can compare to that moment. Like Kanye has never been the same since that moment. He has never been of the same fame meter. He's definitely in a different complete stage of his career. So I think this is to me what makes this such a perfect live performance.

moment is that it could only have happened then, and it could only have been Kanye, and it was just completely, completely unexpected. I remember that moment. But the thing to remember leading to that moment was all of the video of people suffering in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. And it was the flooding that then cut off New Orleans. And

And there were tons of people who were stuck in the city, particularly people who were poor and couldn't afford to leave, who were desperate. And there was all kinds of press coverage documenting that. People were watching it in real time. Anderson Cooper was freaking out. We had all of these news commentators who were documenting all this misery and sort of going, what has happened? How does this happen in America for days and days? And so leading up to that,

To have Kanye be the celebrity to say, what is going on with this president who says he cares about everybody? But there was a lot of suspicion about George W. Bush's ability to run the country anyway. And then when that happened, it seemed to be confirmation, particularly for people who were poor and people who were not white, that this country was not working for them.

So there was a whole bunch of stuff leading up to that moment that made it so powerful. And I think that's another reason why we haven't seen it repeated again. Yeah. Because that was a singular moment at the end of a horrific emergency. Yeah. I highly recommend anyone to check out Spike Lee's excellent documentary, When the Levees Broke, which dives into this and also everything that Eric just explained and puts that moment really, really deep.

really well into context. I will say, I don't think I watched this live, but I do remember it being like next day as soon, like it was, it was inescapable, inescapable. It was pre-meme before the memes. Yeah. Yeah. It was crazy. It was crazy. Cause it was like, for me, it was like almost like the Janet Jackson, you know, moment. And I, I was watching the Superbowl when it happened, but I didn't clock that it happened. Right.

And I feel like that was what happened with this. I think I was watching that event, but I didn't quite clock what he had done until later. Yeah. And, you know, the meme that survived is the deer in the headlights look of Mike Myers. But as you went into, there's a lot more to that clip. The most uncomfortable white man on the planet. Capturing the look in the eyes of everyone in the control room. Yeah.

That's a great pick, Aisha. Thank you so much. Eric, what's your pick? Okay, so I'm not going to give this too much preamble either, except I'm going to say that this happened a year and a half before I was born, and it is the moment that birthed a million musicians. And please, say to me, you'll let me hold your hand. You'll let me hold your hand. I want to hold your hand. Yeah.

61 years ago, the Beatles went on Ed Sullivan, and they played several songs. It is amazing to me, as somebody who's covered music and pop culture for 30 years now, how many musicians have told me that they watched that and it made them want to be musicians or form a band. It was a beacon that sort of said, you can do this. This music that your generation loves can power the world.

So get out there, pick up a guitar, get together with your friends, form a band and make something happen. And there's so many amazing bands and wonderful musicians that we have now because of it. You know, a live moment on TV that isn't horrific, wasn't a tragedy, was joyous. That band and those guys have given us so much. And in many ways, it started with that performance.

Yeah, you're absolutely right, Eric, because it's not just a musical sea change. It was a cultural sea change. Totally. And you have to think about the other people who were guests on the Ed Sullivan show that night. Oh, man. I mean, the original footnotes of history, right? It really has just become, in its own way, its own meme because it is so often cited. If, like, any retrospectives, any montages, it's like, even if you don't hear it, you might see them, like, bopping their heads. And it's like, oh, yes, of course, it's the Ed Sullivan. Like, it might, it's,

might be one of the most reused live TV events ever. That's not sad and disastrous. And the moon landing. There are a few others. Yes, of course. You know that and Elvis Presley also performing on Ed Sullivan. True. The signal that, hey, you know, this youth culture isn't just some minor thing that the adults can ignore and, you know, let those crazy kids do what they do. They are invading these traditional spaces.

And they're going to shake their hips even if the censors don't like it. And they're going to play their jangly guitars and drive a nation of teenagers wild. It's just amazing. Well, I mean, Eric and Aisha picked cultural moments that have repercussions throughout history. Steve and I picked things we thought were funny. So...

We want to know what you think is the best moment in live TV. Find us at facebook.com slash pchh. And that brings us to the end of our show. Eric Deggans, Aisha Harris, Stephen Thompson, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Always a pleasure. Thank you. This episode was produced by Liz Metzger and edited by Mike Katzeff. Our supervising producer is Jessica Reedy. And Hello, Come In provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Glenn Weldon, and we'll see you all next time.

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