The Five Spot: News Bloopers Will Cure What Ails You

ALSO: Recommendations for Apple TV’s free weekend and Jon Hamm being a silly goose

The Five Spot is a weekly Friday roundup where I rank and riff on my five favorite things from the week. Most of the entries will be about film and TV, but there might also be ones about weird local news or sandwiches I ate or anything else, really. The whole thing is an exclusive for paid subscribers, so if you want to read the top four entries, you can do that by upgrading…

Off we go.

FIVE: This is the good stuff

It remains the official position of this newsletter that nothing in the entire world of scripted comedy is funnier than a real-life news presenter fighting a losing battle with a case of the giggles. I mean no disrespect to the comedy writers of the world when I say this. Some of the stuff they do stands the test of time better than a live news blooper. A show like 30 Rock is an artistic achievement on par with the works of the Renaissance masters, just in a different form with a different delivery system. I truly believe that. There’s something noble about that kind of creativity, about the human brain’s ability to turn a blank page into a world with characters we know doing things that make us laugh. It’s powerful. It’s also not as funny as a news anchor accidentally saying a naughty word and falling to pieces as the camera continues to roll relentlessly. Apologies to Tina Fey. I suspect she understands.

Above, please find a compilation of news bloopers from 2024. Not all of them are heavy hitters. Some of them are a little too focused on technical difficulties, which are unfortunate and embarrassing but not the kind of thing that produces an involuntary belly laugh. Ignore those. Focus on the flubs, on the serious gray-haired men blubbering through silly tears, on the rascal co-hosts twisting the knives as their colleagues struggle to keep from falling apart. It’s beautiful, honestly. I could watch these clips for hours. I would pay movie theater prices to watch a three-hour compilation on a big screen with a room filled with other cackling loons. This is not hyperbole. Give me a $15 ticket and a $14 popcorn and a $9 fountain soda and let me choose my seat on the little touchscreen. I started typing this idea as a joke but I’m becoming more serious as it goes on. Let’s put a pin in this one.

For now, please enjoy the compilation. Lord knows I did. Part of this is because I am a child, to be sure. I feel okay about it. Hopefully, sometime this year, we can get… oh, let’s say Wolf Blitzer to do a report on the dangers of artificial intelligence but he bungles his words a little so it sounds like “fartificial intelligence” and then he and two sitting senators from opposite sides of the political spectrum start giggling with such intensity that they all have to lean off-screen to vomit in unison, which causes them to laugh even harder when they see little flecks of spew in Wolf’s beard, which the cameraman then zooms in on, which sends the whole studio into a contagious fit of laughter than lasts through the entire program.

This is how we unite our broken nation.

FOUR: Some recommendations for the upcoming free Apple TV weekend