The Next Great Awards Show Is Here
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calc(100vw - 30px)" width="1560">In 2020, I spent months walking the same loops around my local park while listening to the pop culture podcast Las Culturistas . The hosts, comedians Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang , became my beloved emotional support pair of gay guys who just so happened to have a massive wealth of inane pop culture knowledge. Specifically, I kept returning to a series of episodes in which Yang and Rogers presented what they had decided were the “top 400 moments of culture.” I liked the gentle anarchy of it. That their definitive list of the most impactful moments in culture included “the baby boom after World War II” alongside Allison Williams eating cereal in Get Out . “When Ash's Charmeleon evolved into Charizard” narrowly edged out the discovery of penicillin to take the 68 th spot. Number 1, incidentally, went to John Travolta calling Idina Menzel “the wickedly talented Adele Dazeem” at the 2014 Oscars, which is indeed a landmark event in world history, and you can't tell me otherwise. I loved these episodes so much at the time that a friend and I made our own personal top moments of UK–skewed culture, including things like Victoria Beckham's edition of Vogue's 73 Questions and a football manager called Sam Allardyce eating 11 fried eggs in one sitting. It's just a lot of fun to adopt Rogers and Yang's attitude toward pop culture as a tapestry of the absurd and the iconic. Every memorable moment, no matter how inconsistent or fleeting, is fit to be appreciated and immortalized.
A few years ago, the idea that recent guests Michelle Obama or Sarah Jessica Parker would show up on Las Culturistas would have felt like the type of bit you might hear on Las Culturistas . But the hosts' stars, particularly Yang's, have risen considerably since the podcast premiered in 2016. Yang has put in a six-year stint as a regular cast member of Saturday Night Live and had a role in last year's Wicked . And the pair's cultural rankings that I enjoyed so much in my desolate pandemic hours morphed too. In 2021, they held the first Las Culturistas Culture Awards on the podcast, with categories such as the Six Flags Award for Worst Ride in Orlando, the Kylie Minogue Award for Why Haven't They Happened in America Yet?, and Best Fish. From 2022 onward, they've held the awards live and free to the public at the Lincoln Center. This year, for the first time, the awards were broadcast on television. The show found its home on Bravo with next-day streaming on Peacock, a synergistic melding of the hosts' genuine passion for the Real Housewives franchises and, perhaps, Yang's ongoing relationship with NBCUniversal.
When I heard the news, I wondered: Would the format translate to television? Would the zaniness and high-octane mania of the podcast awards be too much to take on the screen? Awards shows are ridiculous, and much of the special's comedy plays on this knowledge. Yang and Rogers are poised to make hay of the seriousness with which Oscars are campaigned for, the gushy sincerity of the speeches, the fact that a literal orchestra must start playing in order to stop people from talking too long about how supportive their mom and partner are. There are funny Oscars hosts, yes, and sometimes the celebrities land a good joke here and there, but I wouldn't describe most awards shows as fun . However many people get up on that podium and insist they can't believe that little old them has received the honor, people want these awards. There's too much at stake. There are the Razzies, of course, the annual competition for the worst of everything in cinema, but they're not broadcast on TV. There is certainly room for something less po-faced in the televised awards show space.
The 2025 Las Culturistas Culture Awards certainly had the celebrity clout to feel like a real awards show. At the taping at Los Angeles' Orpheum Theater were Yang and Rogers' usual milieu of alt comedians and Bravo's own roster of affiliated stars, among them Andy Cohen and the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City cast, but there were also true A-listers, like Jeff Goldblum, Allison Janney, Jamie Lee Curtis, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Dave Franco. And everyone seemed to have come prepared to have some fun with it. The categories were classic Las Culturistas nonsense, such as Best Batman Woman, the Creatine Award for Straight Male Excellence, and Most Amazing Impact in Film, the latter of which included as nominees Kate Winslet's hat intro in Titanic and “AI unfortunately” but ultimately went to Jeff Goldblum's chest in Jurassic Park .
And it made me laugh, throughout. Particularly, I enjoyed their take on the awards show staple of the “In Memoriam” segment, for which Yang and Rogers sang Aerosmith's “Don't Wanna Miss a Thing” while a screen behind them showed pictures of people who had passed (on the opportunity to attend the awards show).
If the broadcast had just been wall-to-wall jokes about the year's best pop culture moments and send-ups of awards show fare, it would have been a good comedy show. But it wouldn't have been a contender to become a successful awards show in its own right, an achievement Yang and Rogers have accomplished here. Along with the satire, the hosts genuinely celebrate excellence. As well as hammy renditions of songs like Lady Gaga's “Abracadabra,” sung by the pair themselves, there are sincere musical performances by artists like Remi Wolf and Jensen McRae. They gave out two proxy lifetime achievement awards, one to Kenan Thompson and the other to Janney. Because, they claimed, they couldn't afford the licensing for a clips package of Janney's work, instead a group of dancers performed an interpretive routine of her roles from The West Wing and Drop Dead Gorgeous while a delighted Janney gazed on from the audience. What translates from the podcast is the pair's love and enthusiasm for culture, in the broadest possible sense of the word.
At the opening of the show, Yang and Rogers declared that they were there “to prove that every podcast should also be TV” and that “everything on TV should be a gay fever dream.” Please, God, not every podcast should be TV. But this one should.
