End-of-year programs have become standardized. After all, they are very aware that they barely have a real audience: they either serve lonely people who will go to bed after the twelve chimes, or they act as a backdrop for a home celebration where they serve as background music and little more. However, sometimes something happens that makes everything go haywire. A true television outrage, an impossible program made real, a rare bird that stands out for how horrendous it is. This is what happened in 2013, when Jamie Kennedy almost unintentionally created the worst special in television history.
Do you like terrifying specials?
You may be wondering who Jamie Kennedy is, and why he was given a New Year’s Eve special dedicated to him. Well, you might recognize him as Randy Meeks, the know-it-all from the Scream franchise, or as the creator of the reality show The Jamie Kennedy Experiment. Always trying to take everything to the extreme, on the last night of 2012 and the first of 2013, two independent television stations in Orange County and Sacramento trusted him to welcome the new year. In his own way, of course.
Live, from the Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles, Kennedy massacred the concept of a New Year’s Eve special, causing horror among the few who watched it. In his defense, and as he stated later, he always wanted to do an “anti-New Year’s Eve show” without rehearsing and impossible to predict, but really, besides that, it was also filled with technical errors (“Come on, man, don’t mess with me” and “Where’s the guy with the camera?”, could be heard right at the start), with sketches that made no sense, problems between the direction and the host, microphones that constantly appeared in the shot… And I wish this were the worst.
At one point, the press agents of Carl’s Jr, which was one of the event’s sponsors, saw how someone was forced to eat a Turkey Jalapeño Burger in the most sexual way possible. You can imagine the anger. The people from the Commerce casino in Los Angeles didn’t fare well either, as Kennedy portrayed a Mayan trying to win back his fortune playing poker in a tremendously racist and indescribable sketch. You would think that, at least, he would welcome the new year as tradition dictates, right? Well,…
To begin with, Macy Gray came out to sing at 11:50 PM thinking it was 11:15 PM, and as soon as she finished, Kennedy started the countdown, but since he couldn’t find a clock anywhere, he ended up ten seconds late. And after New Year’s Eve? Terribly risqué jokes (including a puppet show about rapes) and a fight on stage. Even on New Year’s Eve, no one was drunk enough to tolerate such a thing. Interesting from an artistic point of view? Maybe. But from pure entertainment? Not at all.
There are those who, in hindsight, compared it to the disaster that was the Star Wars Holiday Special, and those who pointed out that, regardless of what Kennedy wanted to create, it was certainly not the final result. You might be surprised, but the following year no one called Jamie Kennedy to do his show on television. After the disaster, he wasn’t even very surprised that he couldn’t wish for a chaotic year 2014. However, years later he added a reality: “We wanted it to be a mess. Did we know it was going to be that bad? No. But if we had done it well, would I be talking to you now? I didn’t stab anyone, I didn’t shoot anyone, I just made a New Year’s special. Is that so bad?”. Well, it depends on who you ask, for sure.