Jimmy Fallon will host the 2017 Golden Globes, NBC announced at the Television Critics Association press tour on Tuesday, Variety reports. The ceremony will take place in Beverly Hills on Jan. 8, 2017. Fallon tweeted that he was excited to host and then took a dig at Trump:
But while it’s Fallon’s first time hosting the Golden Globes, he’s no stranger to awards shows—he’s been hosting them for 15 years. In fact, looking back at footage of his past gigs is a miniature tour of the 21st century. But be forewarned: It’s been a pretty grim century.
The 2001 MTV Movie Awards
This was Fallon’s first hosting gig, so a few rough edges were inevitable, but this is all edges. His introduction with co-host Kirsten Dunst is, if you didn’t recognize it, a parody of Madonna’s “Don’t Tell Me” video and a pretty good object lesson in what a terrible job people do predicting what music videos will be cultural touchstones in 15 years. Jim Carrey won best villain for Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas, while Tom Cruise somehow won best male performance for Mission: Impossible 2. In other words, it was a simpler, dumber time for the whole country. On the other hand, Sofia Coppola won Best New Filmmaker, and we weren’t at war in the Middle East, so you win some, you lose some.
The 2002 MTV Video Music Awards
The next year, MTV got Sarah Michelle Gellar and Jack Black to host the movie awards and shuffled Fallon off to the Video Music Awards. His introduction is a Proustian reverie of music videos from that year, which is to say it’s painful to watch or listen to. When’s the last time anyone thought about Eminem’s “Without Me” video? (For that matter, does anyone remember the Dave Matthews Band made a video starring Judah Friedlander? Does Judah Friedlander remember this?) Fallon has a pretty great Neil Young impression in his back pocket—here’s hoping he sticks to that at the Golden Globes instead of breaking out his Avril Lavigne.
The 2005 MTV Movie Awards
By the time he returned to the MTV Movie Awards, Fallon had left Saturday Night Live and endured the disastrous release of Taxi. He got the show all to himself, but his intro would have benefited greatly from Kirsten Dunst. Instead, audiences got Fallon and Andy Dick edited into Batman Begins, plus fart jokes. Jon Heder’s cameo (and the cheers of recognition from the crowd) seems like a laugh at Heder’s expense, until you realize Napoleon Dynamite actually won Best Movie that year. Check out Fallon’s opening monologue if you’ve been missing Paris Hilton jokes for some reason.
The 2010 Emmy Awards
NBC tapped Fallon—at the time hosting Late Night for them—to emcee the first live Emmys since the 1970s. The step-up in production values from MTV really shows, but this is still the most 2010 thing imaginable. It was the golden age of television, the golden age of Obama, and the golden age of Bea Arthur jokes, and it’s all there, preserved forever in one performance of “Born to Run.” Will Jimmy Fallon manage to encapsulate our current cultural milieu at the 2017 Golden Globes, so that future generations can look back on the YouTube of tomorrow and know what it was like to live in this historical moment? For their sake, let’s hope not.
