The Wild Things That Happened on Live TV
One of the joys of live television is that any sort of script can go out the window with the snap of a finger. As soon as people realize they don’t get a do-over, just about anything is guaranteed to happen. While we’ve got some funny and great moments, even the cringey ones are notable enough to revisit. Who doesn’t love a little bit of awkward live TV to remind us all that we just happen to be humans who make mistakes? The second-hand embarrassment is real, but so is the satisfaction of knowing that sometimes you just have to roll with the punches.
Rewind the DVR, because we’re revisiting some of the wildest moments caught on live TV (and boy, are they a doozy)!
Cara Delevingne on Good Morning Sacramento
Being a movie star can be exhausting. Just because actors are paid a bunch of money doesn’t mean they don’t work hard for it. Sure, we only see a couple hours of all that hard work on the screen, but there’s so much more that goes into making a movie. Even when filming is done stars are still working hard to plug the new film. Working the press circuit means constantly doing interviews and answering the same questions over and over again.
After a while, that’s got to be tiring. When Cara Delevingne was interviewing for a local news spot, she had to defend her face and not be “excited” enough to talk to the anchors. Instead of just taking her explanation at face value they decided to demean her and sign off so she could take a nap and pound an energy drink! That’s not how you’re supposed to treat a guest on your show y’know.
Bill Lost His Cool
Let’s face it, we all get tired with our jobs every now and again. However, you might want to make sure you’ve left your workplace before going off on a rant about that coworker you hate, especially if your job is broadcast on live TV! News anchor Bill O’Reilly clearly didn’t get the memo, and his tirade will live on in infamy.
We’re pretty used to news anchors talking calmly and professionally, this made O’Reilly’s screams and shouts even more jarring to watch. Apparently, his frustration had to do with a malfunctioning teleprompter. Though this peek into his workplace decorum made us glad we don’t work with the guy.
Jim Carrey at NYFW 2017
Jim Carrey is a pretty iconic personality. His contribution to the performing arts is something nobody can deny! Even after pulling back from acting, he continued to make some fascinating art. Once he picked up painting, Carrey embarked on a pretty eye-opening journey of self-reflection and interesting interviews. At New York Fashion Week in 2017, he did an interview that had little to do with fashion and a whole lot to do with what truly makes an icon.
His statement may have seemed pretty out there. That doesn’t mean that he didn’t hit some big points that people are still discussing to this day! No matter how meaningless, Carrey knows how to make a statement and stay in the public eye.
Sasha Baron Cohen at the 2012 Oscars
Sasha Baron Cohen is no stranger to outrageous stunts and shenanigans. Borat, Brüno, and The Dictator are just some of his most widely known films. They’re not just over-the-line and hilarious. They’re pseudo-documentaries that show just how weird the actual world is when confronted with someone clearly satirizing it. They’re performance art. To keep up the charade, and promote his brand further, Cohen dressed up as his character from The Dictator for the 2012 Oscars.
When it was time to do an interview with Ryan Seacrest, Cohen had to stay in character and make a scene (without Seacrest being aware of what would happen). Faster than a blink of an eye, Cohen produced an urn and dumped a bunch of ashes all over Seacrest on live television!
Kristen Stewart said a naughty word on SNL
Saturday Night Live is one of those institutions where nearly anything goes as long as you can get a laugh. The late-night LIVE sketch show has featured a ton of outlandish and unscripted moments in the past. It’s practically a magnet for them thanks to the format. One of the most memorable happened when Kristen Stewart hosted the show for the first time in 2017.
While you can get away with a lot on-set, saying the “F word” is not one of them. Right before her monologue ended, Stewart said LIVE ON CAMERA that SNL was the, “…coolest f****ing thing ever!” Naturally, this was a slip-up. How do we know? She turned redder than a stop sign while the entire audience (and some cast members) erupted in cheers and clapping!
Rashida Jones at the 2015 SAG Awards
Part of the fun of watching red carpets is hearing how the stars got dressed and primped for the evening. It’s a huge fashion event that contains some serious, and a lot more non-serious, interviews being done on the fly. While some of the interviews can seem superficial, reporters have to be careful not to sound insensitive. It also helps to know a bit about the person you’re interviewing. Rashida Jones, director, actor, producer, and legend, comes from a famous family.
She’s the daughter of acclaimed trumpeter Quincey Jones and model Peggy Lipton! Together they make an undeniably gorgeous and talented family. When Jones was answering questions on the SAG red carpet, a reporter asked her how she got so tan. When Jones commented that she has a diverse and ethnic heritage, things got awkward. Instead of handling the response, the reporter just abruptly starts laughing as if it’s the funniest thing in the world.
Whoopi Goldberg farted on The View
The human body is a beautiful and weird thing. For all of the ways we try and mask the things, we don’t like how they sometimes manage to squeak out. The funny thing is: everyone has a body that makes sounds. Does it mean we can be mature about it when it happens out of nowhere? Nope, not one bit. The View has always been a show where women give their take on the world and encourage dialogue.
They also know how to cut loose and have gas from time to time. Whoopi Goldberg though took that last statement a bit too seriously. During an episode, she couldn’t help but let out a little squeak from her rear end!
Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl Wardrobe Malfunction
Where were you in 2004 and what were you doing? If anyone in your life is a sports fan then they could tell you exactly where they were. The Super Bowl is one of the biggest sporting events in the United States. Every year, two titanic teams go head-to-head for a trophy. Midway through the match, there’s a brief musical interlude to entertain the rest of us.
This particular year, fans were treated to a double-show featuring Justin Timberlake and the legendary Janet Jackson! Everything went off without a hitch up until the final few seconds. At the end of the performance, Timberlake ripped away part of Jackson’s costume! Instead of revealing some other outfit, her breast was displayed on live television for MILLIONS to see.
OJ Simpson’s Wild Car Chase
Reality television wasn’t a thing in the early 90s. Instead, we watched car chases and the fall of famous celebrities. One of the most well-known of those things involves OJ Simpson and a white Ford Bronco. When Simpson’s wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, was found dead in their home, people had a lot of questions for OJ. In what can only be called a horrible decision, he chose to flee!
One would think a celebrity of his stature couldn’t make it far. You’d also be wrong. The car chase that ensued between Simpson and the LAPD was so legendary in both length and media coverage that people are still talking about it to this day. There also seems to be an endless stream of parodies as well.
He simply doesn’t care
Hurricane Katrina was a pretty devastating storm. Not only did it cause over $80 billion in damages, but the coverage was also pretty horrific. Unfortunately, despite occurring in a country with abundant resources, the US’s response to the devastation wasn’t well-handled. In fact, many consider the emergency services to be a hurricane of chaos that was almost as horrible. While people were scrambling to survive and get help, a Houston hip hop duo The Legendary K.O. decided to take action.
They created a song that inspired a movement and political protest, as well as awareness. It turned into one of the most famous protest songs to come from the 21st century: “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People”. The title of the song itself, along with its intro, was said by none other than Kanye West on live TV.
Tom Cruise and Oprah’s Couch
When talk show legend Oprah invites you onto her show you generally say yes. She’s synonymous with great talk TV. With all that working for her, guests know they have to have some sort of decorum when they’re on that couch. Nobody told Tom Cruise that. When he took to the show he just couldn’t seem to contain his excitement for Katie Holmes (his then-girlfriend). No matter what Oprah said, Cruise just spiraled into some sort of love-fueled mania!
In front of Oprah, the audience, and the world, Cruise kept getting more and more erratic. His mania reached a fever pitch when he proceeded to jump up and down on Oprah’s couch (WITH HIS SHOES ON). Love may make us do crazy things, but that’s ridiculous.
Steve Harvey at the 2015 Miss Universe Pageant
The Miss Universe beauty pageant is considered to have one of the most glamorous runways in the world. Each year women representing their countries take to the stage in hopes of being crowned the most incredible among the contestants. The evening isn’t just about them. Each year we’re treated to a special celebrity host. In 2015, comedy great Steve Harvey took to the stage to host the prestigious evening.
When it came down to the final two, people weren’t sure which name was going to be called. Harvey opened the envelope and then called…Miss Columbia! After leaving the stage he was told he called the wrong name! As it turns out, Pia Alonzo Wurtzbach (Miss Philippines) was supposed to be called. Despite Harvey going back out to correct his mistake, the backlash was pretty intense.
Sinéad O’Connor wasn’t a fan of the Pope
Saturday Night Live has been known to cross the line and push people’s buttons. That’s kind of the point of comedy: cross the line and have some fun. Usually, that job is reserved for the comedians of the show. The weekly musical guest is just supposed to entertain in their own way. In 1992, that was probably the intention of everyone when Sinéad O’Connor was booked to perform.
She apparently had other plans. Opting to perform a rendition of a Bob Marley song, O’Connor ended her performance by ripping up a photo of the Pope live! It happened so quickly that the scene wasn’t cut before the photo was ripped.
Everyone knows who Samuel L. Jackson is!
Working hard and achieving a level of fame and celebrity comes with some unique perks. One of them being that everyone knows who you are and what your name is. That’s one of the very first things that happens when you’re famous. You may even do interviews with people about your work. Most of the time, this means the interviewer should know your name.
When Samuel L. Jackson was booked to promote his movie Robocop, the interviewer confused him with Laurence Fishburne! Instead of letting the slip-up go, Jackson made a quick rebuttal. By quick we mean that he used the rest of the interview to explain the difference between some of Hollywood’s great actors and how not to confuse them.
Wendy Williams overheated on stage
Radio DJ turned media mogul Wendy Williams is pretty well-known. She’s one of the leading talk show hosts in the nation and always seems to be a meme. Even her less than laughable moments have made their way into the public’s eye for other reasons. During her 2017 Halloween show the host seemed to lose her balance mid-sentence and then collapse!
With the audience’s reaction and frantic movement of people onstage, this was certainly no prank. After a moment Williams was right back up and offered her take on what just happened. Due to overheating she was a bit winded. However, nothing can keep Wendy Williams down and she stayed on to complete the broadcast!
Balloon Boy’s bubble eventually popped
There are a few moments in pop culture/news history where everyone knows where they were. Remember Balloon Boy? It was that 2009 horror story of parents who lost their kid in a helium balloon. The balloon then floats away and the world watched in terror until it landed…completely empty. Oh no! Where’s the kid? He was hiding in the attic the entire time.
The entire nation was both relieved as well as outraged. Why? We were all forced to watch this and that really cut into our Thursday evening cartoons. In a later interview, the kid who went missing let loose a skeleton from their attic. The entire thing was a hoax to get on television!
No words are worse than the wrong ones
Saturday Night Live continues to deliver some incredibly weird moments. Even outside of the skits people on the show can’t stop attracting attention. During 2004, Ashlee Simpson was booked to perform two songs off her album. The first hit went off without a hitch. When she came back on to do her second song people started to travel back in time. The vocals from her first song began to play!
Instead of trying to cover and catch up, Simpson proceeded to do some weird hoe-down/line dance and then run off stage. She didn’t even finish lip-syncing to the song! Needless to say, she offered an apology before the episode finished. That doesn’t change what we all heard, and didn’t hear, from the performer.
Kanye had something to say
Before we go on, we have to let someone interrupt Taylor Swift for no good reason. During the singer’s genre crossover from country to pop, she worked hard and got a video nominated for a VMA! This was a huge deal and she was stoked. The only thing standing between her and the award was Beyonce. What video was Taylor’s up against? Single Ladies. OOF! The nominees are called. Then…TAYLOR SWIFT WINS! The audience, Swift, EVERYONE was pleasantly surprised and happy.
Before Swift could even deliver her speech Kanye West storms the stage! In a remarkable reality tv moment, West decided that was the time when he needed to tell the world he preferred Beyonce’s video to Swift’s! People were baffled, but Swift (along with most others) managed to get through the evening just fine.
BBC Dad is a doctor
During the pandemic, it took a moment for the world to adjust to working from home. Once we got used to it we learned how much better it could be. In those early days, we were still kind of stuck in a weird place. Doctor Robert Kelly was interviewing for the BBC from his home. In the middle of the segment, his kids burst in wanting to play! It was a wholesome moment during some dark days.
Later down the line, Doctor Kelly has embraced the incident. He even let people know why he wasn’t able to get up and help get the kids to leave. The good doctor wasn’t wearing any pants!
The kiss seen around the theater
Sometimes live television is so surprising that it feels like it was staged. Regardless of how rehearsed, they seem, they’re still pretty remarkable. In 2003 Madonna and Britney Spears pressed the reset button on pop culture. All it took was a giant wedding cake, Christina Aguilera, and a kiss or two. Madonna appears in a beautiful suit, delivers her number, and proceeds to lock lips with the two pop stars!
Remember, this was 2003, so this was HUGE at the time. When the queen and princesses of pop kiss on a televised performance people paid attention! Unfortunately, some people took it as a dig at Spears’ former boyfriend, Justin Timberlake. Does anyone else remember when the world was a simpler time and this was the biggest news of the day?
Television doesn’t always show the good moments
Before footage went viral it was must-see TV. Before must-see TV there were shocking moments. One of the most well-known happened in 1986. Challenger, a space shuttle carrying seven astronauts, was preparing to take off. Their mission was going to make history. Unfortunately, they never even made it to space. During takeoff, everything started off pretty well despite some concerns. The temperature was possibly going to affect the O-rings on the shuttle.
Those concerns weren’t deemed important enough to scrap the mission. During the ascent, a plume of smoke could be seen by the crew as well as mission control! Due to previous concerns, it seemed that the O-rings eroded and contributed to fire overtaking parts of the rocket! Before it could even head to space the shuttle broke up as it began to return to the surface (all while on live TV).
Things weren’t chilly for Milli Vanilli
In the late-eighties and early nineties, Millie Vanilli was at the top of their game. The musical duo was doing well and getting a lot of fame. When they were signed to perform at an MTC concert it seemed that their star was going to continue to rise. Once they began to sing, a couple bars felt off. Or was it, they didn’t quite right. The computer playing the background vocals was on the fritz!
What made it worse was that the duo didn’t know their own words! It turns out they were only the face for the band that was brought in to make them sound good. Turns out you gotta know a bit about singing if you’re going to be a singer.
Poker packs a punch sometimes
The wild world of poker is pretty intense. Even when there aren’t huge amounts at stake people can get nervous. During a poker tournament in Berlin, some people were just worried about getting out alive. In the middle of the on-air Poker tournament, a group of four young men (the youngest being 19) ran into the room with guns!
They made off with one of the larger pots before fleeing the scene. They were eventually caught but not before spending nearly 4,000 Euros worth of the cash. Being televised made it pretty easy to find who did it. Crime doesn’t pay and neither does not planning before committing one.
Marathons aren’t supposed to involve dodging
The purpose of spectator sports is to allow the public to watch people more athletically gifted than themselves compete for prizes. It’s fun and genuinely doesn’t involve disruptions (depending on the sport). One of the least disruptive sports would probably be Formula One racing and long-distance marathons. Neither of those should have anyone from the crowd causing havoc. That doesn’t prevent some from thinking they’re above the unspoken rules.
A former priest and general nuisance to racers, Cornelius Horan, is known to make a scene or two. During the Olympics in Greece (2004) and previously at a racing event in 2003, Horan tried to disrupt the games! He grabbed the leader of the foot race and ruined their Olympic dreams and dodged race cars for funsies.
There’s a lot wrong here
Trying to maintain relevance and ratings in daytime television is a pretty tight game. People will probably do just about anything to make their broadcasts pop. Whether it’s intentional or not, we can’t help but be amazed at what happens on local news. A reporter in Hartford, Connecticut was feeling peckish during a show one day. In the middle of a broadcast reached down to eat cereal off of the floor.
Why? Only he knows. After eating it he proceeds to make a series of exaggerated cartoony faces to indicate something is wrong about eating floor cereal. He later stated he may have eaten dog poop. Don’t panic, he didn’t. It ended up being cat vomit!
Why does Alaska hold grudges?
The United States is slowly evolving and legalizing cannabis. Why the country (and many others) chose to police a naturally growing plant is beyond us. Anyways, in some places of the US the stuff still isn’t legal. To help protest and raise awareness, a television anchor quit on-air. She went on to open her own dispensary. Mysteriously, the dispensary was raided by authorities shortly after she admitted to owning the business in an interview!
While it’s hard to say that correlation doesn’t equal causation, this one is a bit odd and seems somewhat obvious. Realitory? It kind of seems that way. While she claims to not have sold any cannabis, the incident helped reignite the former reporter’s desire to fight to get the plant legalized!
Tucker Carlson can work even while asleep
Fox & Friends isn’t just for audiences that want to stay awake. To further expand their reach, Fox & Friends also wants sleeping people to tune into their show. To appeal to the unconscious they brought on TV personality Tucker Carlson! In-between segments it appears that maybe Carlson needed to take a quick cat-nap or two. When the show returned from a commercial break it opened on Carlson dozing on live TV!
The co-hosts did their best to be gracious. When they got him awake he seemed a bit out of sorts. Carlson wasn’t even sure if he was on TV or not. Maybe spinning all those yarns takes a lot out of him?
Mike Tyson takes a bite out of history
Being one of the greatest sports stars in history comes with a famous moment or two. While you’d prefer for them all to be positive, the occasional shocking and not-so-happy one slips in. Mike Tyson’s meteoric rise to fame is nothing short of amazing. At the height of his career in 1997 he was on top of the world (kind of). He was facing off against legendary boxer Evander Holyfield.
In the third round Tyson was beginning to lose his cool. He eventually spit out his mouthguard and bit off a chunk of his opponent’s ear! After taking a quick break the two returned to the fight. Tyson then went and took another chunk out of Holyfield’s other ear!
Was Oswald killed as a killer or just by one?
To this day it’s pretty hard to believe we’re not entirely sure who assassinated President John F. Kennedy. One of the most highly viewed events in American presidential history and the world is still in the dark. A lot of people believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin. This guy was eventually arrested for the President’s murder as well as the murder of J.D. Tippit.
To make things even more traumatic, Oswald never got charged (or released) for his accused crimes! What happened? Even while surrounded by police, someone managed to run up to Oswald and shoot him on live television! A nightclub managed named Jack Ruby was charged for Oswald’s murder (and Kennedy’s case is still left to speculation).
Faye Dunaway at the 2017 Oscars
The Oscars are a time to celebrate some of the greatest achievements in movie history made in the past year. Everyone comes together, sings each other’s praises, and goes home with a massively overvalued goodie bag. While all of that is fine, sometimes the best moments are the unscripted ones that nobody expected. At the 2017 Oscars, it was a close call between two titans in film taking home one of the most coveted awards of the night.
Cinema legend Faye Dunaway took the stage and began to announce the night’s winner. The audience waited with bated breath and then she said Best Picture would go to La La Land! The crowd goes wild. It’s pandemonium. Everyone’s excited. Then it turns out that Moonlight was supposed to have been announced instead!