Images via YouTube

Way back in 2012 comedian(?) and actor(?) Jamie Kennedy did a New Year’s Eve special. If you’re familiar with some of Jamie’s Kennedy’s work especially his hidden camera show the Jamie Kennedy Experiment, his movie Kickin’ It Old Skool, and that time he showed up at an E3 press conference and spent the entire time on stage mocking his audience then you have an idea of how great the quality of this New Year’s Eve special was.

One of the blogs I found that covered the special after it originally aired called it a “surreal experience” while Cracked.com described it as massively embarrassing. I would best it describe it as just a step above a live stream of an out of control dumpster fire.

From what I understand the idea for the special came from Jamie Kennedy watching the 2012 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Using what pull he still had in Hollywood, Kennedy put together the special attracting sponsors such as Carl’s Jr., Commerce Hotel and Casino, and Energy Upgrade California, as well as other celebrities. Some of these celebrities include:

Stu Stone, who has been Jamie’s sidekick/partner in most of his works and who also spent the ’90s doing voicework for a variety of children’s cartoons was one of Jamie’s cohosts.

Jessi Cruickshank who was an MTV Canada VJ was another one of Jamie’s cohosts.

Celebrity appearances include:

Shannon Elizabeth of American Pie fame and that Jack Frost horror movie where she got raped by a mutant snow man.

Drake Bell, the Drake half of Nickelodeon’s Drake and Josh.

Former Playboy Playmate Bridget Marquardt who was one of Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends on The Girls Next Door.

And Olympic track and field athlete Dawn Harper.

We also had musical performances by

Macy Gray

Bone Thugs-n-Harmony

And DTK.

For broadcasting, Kennedy managed to get KDOC, an independent television station based in Orange County California to air the event locally in Southern California as well as Sacramento MyNetworkTV affiliate KQCA.

I don’t know that much about KQCA since I don’t live in Sacramento but KDOC I’m actually pretty familiar with. Today most people would dismiss it as just another television station whose programming is bloated by whatever television shows whose syndication rights they can pick up cheaply, however I mostly remember KDOC from Launch.com and Are-Oh-Vee, two shows late-night shows which allowed me to watch music videos in my no cable, pre-internet, pre-YouTube years, (Are-Oh-Vee I remember was really cool because they introduced me to Linkin Park and Gorillaz before they got big), I also remember KDOC from the late-night Girls Gone Wild infomercials and Poorman’s Bikini Beach, a public access show produced and hosted by former KROQ DJ Jim “Poorman” Trenton where he just wandered around Orange County beaches talking to hot girls in bikinis.

Some of the highlights of the special include interviews and cutaways to other celebrities whose star power is equal or less than Kennedy’s own star power, bizarre and in some cases extremely offensive and cultural insensitive sketches and spotlights that were basically half-assed lip service to the main sponsor— one of which was Jessi Cruickshank telling Bridget Marquardt to eat a jalapeno turkey burger in a “sexy way.” Other highlights include Jamie interviewing two random African-American women on camera with one telling him that her New Year’s resolution was to “get rid of all her haters,” before Jamie asked the other one if she liked white boys before telling her she “should try white because it’ll keep her vagina tight,” and a comedy sketch featuring Jamie Kennedy and puppets filled with rape jokes—and this was just the stuff that went right for them.

As I stated earlier the best way to describe First Night 2013 with Jamie Kennedy is an out of control dumpster fire, and what really made it memorable wasn’t the bizarre and in some cases offensive programming but instead it was the extremely poor quality and many technical problems that were caught and aired. You had microphone gaffes that caught a few f-bombs and an extremely confused Jamie Kennedy wondering what the hell was going on, poorly timed cuts from host to host, a drunken or at least asshole party guest mocking Stu Stone by reading off of his cue cards and mouthing the words behind him, a drunken Macy Gray attempting to perform on stage, poor sound quality during the musical performances, the hosts ringing in the New Year 10 seconds late, and for a grand finale a fight broke out on stage while Kennedy was trying sign off.

https://youtu.be/hMSo8bmh880

If you want to see for yourself what a spectacular trainwreck First Night 2013 with Jamie Kennedy was you’re in luck because one pirater uploaded it in its entirety to YouTube, however this version is missing some of the more disastrous moments. According to the comments it’s speculated that this version was taped from an encore broadcast that had those moments edited out.

Fortunately, somebody who had the special in its entirety made this handy montage showcasing the moments that made this such a spectacular clusterfuck.

You can also see the sketches that Jamie filmed for Commerce Casino including the Native American one that pissed off a lot of people. I’m tempted to go into a little bit more detail on them but I don’t think that’s really necessary—just look at those teaser images, you can already tell they’re super offensive.

Between Jamie Kennedy’s sense of humor, the amount of star power he still has in Hollywood and the truncated time-table he and the other producers behind the special were working with, it was no surprise that First Night 2013 with Jamie Kennedy was such a disaster. Kennedy would go on to defend the special’s poor quality by saying it was an “anti-New Year’s Eve show” that was intentionally unrehearsed and was unpredictable and that it was his plan from the beginning to have a special that was the complete opposite of other New Year’s Eve specials such as Dick Clark’s which would always go through relatively smoothly. In fact, professional wrestler Adam Pearce who made an appearance on the special stated that while he didn’t see anything out of the ordinary he did speculate that certain aspects of the show were done intentionally in order to increase the possibility of disorder.

Dismissing mistakes by saying “I meant to do that” might have worked in the early 2000s but this was back in 2012/2013, and while that excuse might have worked with the drunken audience members and the incredibly offensive sketches they don’t do much to explain the microphone gaffes and poor camera work which can only be explained as pure incompetence.