If you managed to avoid slipping into a coma while watching the Emmy’s the other night, you might have heard the announcement that Kathy Griffin took home a statue for best reality programming for her now two-time award-winning series, Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List. More good news for Ms. Griffin is that her show got picked up for a fifth season by the Bravo network. All this success and these accolades, while amazingly fortunate for her career and her bank account, beg the question: Is Kathy Griffin even on the D-List anymore?
Griffin has made a career out of being snubbed by Hollywood. The biggest laughs of her stand-up act come from the stories she tells of how celebrities literally look the other way when they see her coming or how reporters don’t know her name and often confuse her with Kathy Lee Gifford and “that chick from News Radio.”
A lot of that has changed since the success of her reality show; the main difference being the respect she’s earned. She is now an official Hollywood player. These days, Griffin is introduced on talk shows with “Emmy Award winner” as a precursor to her name. What other D-Lister can say that?
I am an avid watcher of Griffin’s reality program and a religious attendee of her stand-up any time she comes to New York, but I have to confess that I am finding it harder and harder to believe that she’s D-List. (Sorry, Kathy.) In this day and age, when Nicole Richie and Lauren Conrad are more famous than heads of state, how can someone like Kathy Griffin think she ranks beneath or on par with their fame?
My concern is that all this success will kill her career — truly an ironic death given that the goal in Hollywood is to win awards and get your series renewed. Griffin has made a living out of being a wannabe celebrity, and now that she is one, you can’t help but wonder if her shtick (for lack of a better term) will still work in the future.
Griffin has always been that girl on the outside of the velvet rope commiserating with the rest of us that we didn’t want to go into that (insert expletive) club anyway. With her Emmy wins and the success of her show, it looks like Griffin is more and more becoming a VIP.
Griffin is in high demand these days. The announcement of her show’s renewal comes amid reports that she was “aggressively pursued” by other networks to sign with them instead. These networks were supposedly offering her late-night opportunities as well as making award show hosting promises. I don’t know if by “late-night opportunities” they meant for her to host her own show or if they were thinking more along the lines of her hosting 2 a.m. infomercials for her insomniac fan base. I will assume the latter given that they were, after all, trying to woo her.
I would think that this “award show hosting” gig would be along the lines of Emmy or Grammy positions and not some D-List gig hosting the Schemmy Awards. Regardless, Griffin’s camp denies that any offers were ever presented to her. Whether the rumors were true or false, that buzz must have certainly helped her at the negotiation table with Bravo.
While I don’t think Kathy will ever reach A-list status, and I wouldn’t begrudge her the notion that she could achieve B-List stature some day, I would definitely rate her current status as a solid C+. D-List? Not so much; not anymore.
Perhaps the small concern that I have with Kathy’s new success could all be resolved with a simple title change of her Emmy award-winning series — you know, something really no-brainer like My Life Off the D-List.
Should I still have faith that Griffin will remain on the D-List, or is it all uphill from here?
