With No Civilians Present, No One Even Pretends To Care About The Games On NBC's New Year's Eve Game Night

Last night NBC thought, as part of its New Year's Eve primetime-plus programming block, it would do a variation on Hollywood Game Night: it put up a fake living room at 30 Rock; it installed Andy Cohen as host; it found eight celebrities willing to put off their serious drinking for a few hours...OR NOT; it had writers put together five HGN mainstay games and the usual Celebrity Name Game bonus round; and it broadcast the whole thing live. Someone even made a PA make a trophy...

...which I guess the four members of the winning team will trade amongst themselves on a quarterly basis? Or, more likely, not, since clearly none of them cared about being there. In their defense, they shouldn't; this was a shambolic hour of television, and without any regular people the celebrities would normally be trying, to greater and less degrees, to help win a significant cash prize, the stakes were no stakes. AND IT SHOWED. Here are your single high and many lows.

Most Gratuitously Dirty And Incomprehensible Joke

Straight out the gate! The episode opens with a pre-taped "comedy" segment in which we hear the thoughts of Cohen, party guest John Stamos, and NBC's actual countdown host Carson Daly, supposedly before he takes off for Times Square, as their respective pros primp them. This is pretty banal until Stamos's fellow player Whitney Cummings enters.

So the implication here is that Stamos thinks Cummings might secretly be a transwoman? I guess we're not supposed to be that worried about the "joke" of a person's sexual identity being tone-deaf in the very last moments of 2015 if Stamos is into the idea of fucking her anyway? NEAT.

Most Gay-Panicky Pair

You know how there's a certain kind of straight guy who will joke so much about being gay himself, when you know he isn't, that it kind of cancels out the idea that his jokes could in any way be those of a gay ally and just come back around to being homophobic? tl; dr: Nick Swardson. Well, meet the Nicks Swardson of NBC's New Year's Eve Game Night: Bob Saget and John Stamos! They kick things off with a comedy grope at the Clue-Boom stand...

...and swiftly move on to a rapid-fire description of their long friendship, going back to their Full House days. Bonus: this isn't just redolent with gay jokes; there's a rape joke in there too!

Rapiest Rape Joke

I shouldn't be that upset about Cummings's joke about Chris D'Elia, since it is at the expense of one of my mortal enemies and also confirms what I might suspect about him anyway. But since Cummings screws up the Watch What Happens Live "game" Plead The Fifth by whiffing an easy one about the stars of one of the shows she created when one is pretty sure either of those ladies could have handled being fake-thrown under the bus, she has to answer a gross one about D'Elia.

That this joke aired just two days after comedian Beth Stelling set the comedy internet ablaze with an Instagram post about her abusive relationship with a fellow comic -- a post that Cummings, as part of that community, had to have seen -- the timing on this crack couldn't be worse. Just kidding, there's no good time!

Most Racist Joke

First, Cummings ruins one of my favourite games, Off The Top Of Your Head, by ending up on the side that has to give clues in the category of Star Wars and reacts in the most predictably fake-feminine-helpless manner.

Then this comes out of her face.

Most Gratuitously Dirty Joke Runner-Up

Bob Saget needs you to know he's not as clean as his time on Full House and America's Funniest Home Videos might lead you to believe, and I mean he literally never misses a chance to make a filthy joke to remind you. Though to be fair, in this case Cummings kind of set him up.

Most Focused Celebrity

More like "Only Focused Celebrity." You will notice that this post doesn't track any actual gameplay, because there was very little on display. But a special shout-out goes to Sasheer Zamata, who made it all the way to the very last round and still managed to care about the rules, as we hear.

I knew I liked her. They should have her on the real show sometime so that she can actually, I don't know, play and have fun rather than good-naturedly absorb racial slurs pointed in her direction -- because, oh yeah, THAT HAPPENED TOO.

I never thought I would miss the strict hosting and focused players of the regular Hollywood Game Night. NBC's New Year's Eve Game Night, I guess you did serve a purpose after all.