the gold rush

SAG Awards to Spare Us Another Live Awards Show Nightmare

Photo: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images for Turner

Is this … the Good Place? Variety reports today that the SAG Awards will be airing an hour-long, pretaped show this year, as opposed to the awkward remote program other award shows have been doing during the pandemic. Perhaps in response to this weekend’s Golden Globes, which were rife with mishaps, technical challenges, and overall eeriness, the SAG Awards will instead be keeping the celebrations to a minimum in order to maximize COVID-19 safety. The special, airing April 4 on TNT and TBS and will feature the signature SAG “I Am an Actor” speeches and comedic elements in between 13 award announcements and the “In Memoriam” section, all pretaped. “We’re looking at trying to do a unique award ceremony in an hour and leave people saying, which they very rarely do [with an awards show], ‘Man, I wish we had more,’” executive producer Todd Milliner told Variety. The nominees will still be placed in awkward breakout rooms to announce the winners, but since it’s all pretaped, they’ll know the results days before the rest of the world will (but maybe we’ll still get those weird Zoom interactions before the show cuts to commercials). Overall: net positive?

SAG Awards to Spare Us Another Live-Awards-Show Nightmare