1. Jamie Kennedy (2012)
For decades, Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve on ABC was the default broadcast playing in the background while America drank itself into a stupor. Clark, who died last year, knew how to hit the sweet spot of a New Year’s Eve broadcast: His show had to be tame enough that it wouldn’t distract from viewers’ own festivities, but it also had to capture enough New Year’s Eve excitement to make couch potatoes feel like they were in on the fun. When other performers emcee their own December 31 TV extravaganzas, they often end up showing that Clark’s job was harder than it looked. Few hosts, though, have matched Jamie Kennedy’s spectacular failure on the Orange County station KDOC last year. The entire cast and crew appeared to have gotten their drink on before the show started (and it’s probably charitable to assume that alcohol was the only drug involved). Kennedy had only intermittent awareness that he was appearing on live television, probably because his stage manager, by his own accounting, was missing in action. Macy Gray performed in a groggy haze and struggled to figure out what time it was. Stretches of dead air abounded. And as the show came to a close, a fight broke out on stage. As “Auld Lang Syne” played over on ABC, Kennedy reminded the world that some auld acquaintances really should be forgot.
2. Andy Williams (1984)
Before there was Dick Clark, there was Guy Lombardo. The original king of December 31 ushered in each TV new year from 1956 to 1976 for CBS (and on the radio before that), but the network found itself in need of a new broadcast perennial following Lombardo’s 1977 death. In 1979, it introduced Happy New Year, America, a more timely challenger to New Year’s Rockin’ Eve anchored by hosts such as Donny Osmond, Natalie Cole, and Nelson Muntz’s favorite crooner, Andy Williams. Though Williams was born only two years before Clark, their public perception and stage presence appear to come from different eras. More than a decade removed from his turn as the boyish host of The Andy Williams Show, the “Moon River” singer looked sorely out of place in the 1984 show, playing wooden straight man to Lily Tomlin’s Ernestine character and “auditioning” to back Gladys Knight as one of the Pips (themselves future Happy New Year, America hosts). Most egregiously, he committed the one hosting sin that never affected Clark, even in his later years: The party was completely out of Williams’ control.