SAG Awards TV Review: It’s Netflix’s Hollywood & We All Live In It, Streamer’s First Live Award Show Proves
25.02.2024 - 03:57
/ deadline.com
After a rather tame show last month, the freewheeling Golden Globes kind of back! Only now they go by the name 30th annual SAG Awards with a whole lot of the Globes and the Emmys in their bloodstream.
Finally on Netflix proper after being relegated to the streamer’s YouTube channel last year, the 2024 SAG Awards is yet another shiv in the side of broadcast TV by Team Sarandos as the first awards show to stream live.
A fact that in part is likely why everyone from Guild boss Fran Drescher, de facto host Idris Elba, Beef star and now SAG Awards winner Ali Wong and more thanked the streamer and the co-CEO — cause that’s why they call it show business not show friends. A major player, if not the major player, in last year’s contract negotiations with the striking SAG-AFTRA, Netflix’s dominance of the industry economically and content-wise was crystal in tonight’s SAG Awards.
Still, unlike a lot of the MOR efforts on Netflix of late, there was some welcomed vinegar in the Shrine Auditorium and Expo Hall on Saturday evening.
BREAKING BAD REUNION #SAGAwards pic.twitter.com/0zT9blAE5q
As Jonathan Banks put it in all in perspective during the on-stage Breaking Bad reunion: “It’s an award show for God’s sake, they can’t fire us. F*ck ‘em.” At the same time, even with a new home for the SAG Awards, like a wedding, there was something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue.
The show opened with Michael Cera and Oscar nominee Colman Domingo doing a West Wing walk-and-talk version of the SAG Awards long standing “I’m an Actor” routine. That was followed by Ted Lasso’s Hannah Waddington regaling us with a tale from early in her career of a mouse in her dress and Idris Elba strolling us up to the stage with De Niro