After announcing its full list of winners last month, the Peabody Awards celebrated those honorees in person on Sunday night, with a L.A. ceremony hosted by Roy Wood Jr.
The comedian kicked things off inside the Beverly Wilshire by joking, “Last year’s host was Kumail Nanjiani, so that is back-to-back years with a minority host. The Peabodys standing up for diversity, how about that? Which means in a few months, the White House will cut their funding and so they’ll have John Mulaney, that’s on y’all.”
The event honored 34 winners across entertainment, documentary, news, podcast/radio, arts, children’s
and youth, public service, and interactive and immersive programming, with a focus on storytelling that reflects the social issues and emerging voices of today. Baby Reindeer, Ripley, Shogun and Will & Harper were among the recognized Hollywood projects.
“We’re celebrating the fact that everyone in this room has done one of the boldest things you can do in these times, and that is just straight up tell the truth,” Wood told the crowd, acknowledging the stress of having to know all of the horrible things going on in the world to tell the truth. “It’s hard to create stuff about terrible things without knowing all of the terrible things. It’s hard — that’s why I quit The Daily Show, it was too much stress.” He then deadpanned, “I work at CNN now [with comedy show Have I Got News For You], I ain’t got to do nothing but plug Jake Tapper’s book.”
Elsewhere in his monologue, Wood told the winners — who knew they’d be winning ahead of time — to be short and sweet, joking, “We want your acceptance speeches tonight to be brief and full of sincerities that you don’t really mean, like an apology from Patti LuPone.” (The Broadway star apologized on Saturday for previous comments she had made about Kecia Lewis and Audra McDonald.)
“We’re celebrating the storytellers who risk, who did, who investigate, who create and illuminate,” the comedian declared before launching into the categories, which featured a star-studded roster of presenters including Aloe Blacc, Anna Kendrick, Andrew Lack, Benito Skinner, Indya Moore, Joel Kim
Booster, Jurnee Smollett, Linda Perry, Mandy Moore, Marissa Bode, Michael Schur, Nava Mau, Niecy Nash, Randall Park, Stephen Merchant, Uzo Aduba, Van Jones and Yvonne Orji.
The night also featured two special honors, the first being the Peabody Institutional Award, given to Saturday Night Live. Jon Hamm presented, musing the “secret sauce of the show has always been “holding up a mirror and reflecting America’s culture to us — politics, contradictions, all of it, right back at you. Yes, SNL is wigs and cue cards and gigs and gags and all of this stuff, but it’s always something that dares to confront who we really are.”
Lorne Michaels was on hand to accept, accompanied on stage by alums Amy Poehler, Molly Shannon and Fred Armisen.
“I don’t really deserve this, but in a way I do,” Michaels teased, noting, “During SNL 50 this year, which is stunning to even say, all of those people coming back from the first season on, all being in one room, performing and applauding, I think was one of the most moving experiences of my life. I’m not planning a 60th, but I think that getting to do what I get to do is sort of everything that makes me happy; it also makes me angry.”
To close out the night, Andrea Mitchell was given the Career Achievement Award, as she reflected on her early days in news and how far women have come in the business. She added, “All of us journalists have to be fearless. It is no exaggeration to say that strong journalism, providing accurate information to the American people, is critical to the survival of our democracy. As Thomas Jefferson wrote to the continental Congress in 1787, ‘Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.’”
