Andy Cohen and Anderson Cooper rang in 2024 with some boozing on stay tv — bringing again alcohol consumption to CNN after staying sober for final yr’s New 12 months’s Eve broadcast.
“It’s the highest of the hour and we’ve been right here for seven years doing this, and for many of these years on the high of the hour we usually have a toast,” Cohen mentioned early on within the broadcast, turning to Cooper. “I’m listening to from lots of people…does Daddy get his juice?”
“Can Daddy get his juice responsibly?” Cooper requested, earlier than Cohen pulled out a bottle of tequila and shot glasses, and each imbibed to start out the present.
Again in November 2022, then-CEO Chris Licht introduced that CNN can be dialing down alcohol consumption for its New 12 months’s telecast. Common host Cohen was fast to assert that that rule, in reality, didn’t apply to him as a number, although he and Cooper elected to take pictures of non-alcoholic drinks like buttermilk and pickle juice in solidarity with the remainder of the workers.
“CNN mentioned the correspondents won’t be consuming,” Cohen mentioned. “Anderson and I would be the folks partying on CNN, [though] we shall be partying responsibly.”
Cohen was fast to get forward of issues in current months, publicly imploring CNN, now below new CEO Mark Thompson, to permit on-air consuming for this yr’s broadcast.
“I haven’t heard something but, however come on, they should allow us to drink,” Cohen instructed E! Information in November. “It’s New 12 months’s Eve. That didn’t go properly final yr by way of viewer happiness about us consuming. Individuals actually cared and I hope CNN offers the folks what they need.”
Each Cohen and Cooper performed coy concerning the matter in an look on “The Late Present With Stephen Colbert” through the ultimate weeks of the yr, with the CNN anchor declaring, “I feel you’re going to should tune in and see.”
Through the New 12 months’s telecast that rang in 2022, an inebriated Cohen dissed ABC’s “New 12 months’s Rockin’ Eve” and its host, Ryan Seacrest, calling Seacrest and his crew a “group of losers.” Afterwards, Seacrest instructed Leisure Weekly that he didn’t understand how consuming on air grew to become a “custom” and limiting alcohol consumption on the present was “most likely a good suggestion,” addressing Cohen’s roast.
Cohen did find yourself apologizing. On his SiriusXM radio present, he mentioned, “The one factor that I remorse saying, the one factor is that I slammed the ABC broadcast and I actually like Ryan Seacrest and he’s a fantastic man … I actually remorse saying that, and I used to be simply silly and drunk and feeling it,” Cohen completed.
