10 Wild and Weird New Year’s Eve TV Moments

New Year’s Eve might be the biggest party night of the year for some. But with its ridiculously packed crowds, freezing cold weather, and overpriced drinks, it's little wonder that others choose to spend it watching all the frivolities from the comfort of their own home. 

Indeed, ever since NBC started broadcasting the famous Times Square ball drop in the 1940s, the small screen has helped to ring in the New Year, with Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve (now titled Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve with Ryan Seacrest) becoming just as much of a tradition as making resolutions and singing “Auld Lang Syne.” 

Of course, most NYE television is interchangeable from one year to the next. But occasionally, the usual festivities will be interrupted by something that not even Nostradamus could have seen coming. From surprise marriages and technical malfunctions to inebriated outbursts and royal announcements, here’s a look at 10 truly wild examples (in no particular order). 

1. Maria Menounos Gets Married in Times Square 
2. Don Lemon Gets His Ear Pierced
3. The Queen of Denmark Abdicates
4. Kathy Griffin Strips Down to Her Underwear
5. Mariah Carey Suffers On-Stage Nightmare
6. Jamie Kennedy Hosts “Anti-New Year’s Eve Show” 
7. Howard Stern’s Beauty Pageant 
8. Live Into ’85 Kills BBC Tradition
9. Australia’s The Loop Rings in the Wrong New Year
10. Andy Cohen Starts Beef With ABC Rivals

Maria Menounos Gets Married in Times Square 

Maria Menounos and Keven Undergaro certainly weren’t media-averse when it came to taking their relationship to the next level. The pair got engaged on Howard Stern’s radio show in 2016 after nearly two decades together, and a year later, they decided to tie the knot on Fox’s New Year’s Eve special in the company of Steve Harvey (who married them) and millions of people watching at home. The idea of a live wedding had actually originated from a Fox producer who then joked that the TV personality should step up. “And I was like, ‘Ha ha, no,’ “ Menounos recalled to People. “I was nervous, but I got in the car and kept thinking about it and I was like, ‘Wait, this really is kind of perfect.’ ”

“You have to think you're outside in Times Square, it's freezing, you need something beautiful but appropriate,” the former Extra host said about choosing a wedding gown for 9-degree temperatures. And it turns out that she had the support of another E! regular in getting hitched in such an unorthodox way: As Menounos explained to her parents, who were just as surprised by the nuptials as the rest of us, “Kris Jenner told me on Christmas Eve the other night ‘tomorrow’s never promised’ and she’s right.” The couple later had another wedding ceremony in Greece.

Don Lemon Gets His Ear Pierced

It seems fair to say that Don Lemon took advantage of CNN’s hospitality funds while hosting the network’s New Year’s Eve coverage in 2016 from a New Orleans bar. The anchor  appeared to get tipsier as the night went on thanks to the tequila shots he and co-host Brooke Baldwin were downing.

Lemon had promised viewers that he’d either get a piercing or a tattoo before the clock struck 12. And as a man of his word, the Regional Emmy Award winner allowed a professional tattoo artist to put a hole through his left ear. Lemon yelled and groaned through the procedure while worrying about getting blood on his suit, which was on loan. “This is what happens when a lot of tequila happens,” Baldwin told Anderson Cooper and Kathy Griffin. After the countdown, producers seemingly cut off Lemon’s mic as he started to bemoan how “awful” 2016 had been. Later, he declared, “people are saying I’m lit. Yeah, I’m lit. Who cares. New Orleans is lit!”  

The Queen of Denmark Abdicates

Queen Margrethe II certainly knows how to make an exit. On New Year’s Eve 2023, the then-reigning queen of Denmark announced in an unexpected live TV address that she’d be abdicating and handing over power to her son, Crown Prince Frederik. 

Following the death of Queen Elizabeth II the year previously, the then-83-year-old had become both Europe’s longest-serving monarch and the only reigning queen in the world; she’d decided it was the right time to step down earlier in the year, when she was recuperating from major back surgery. The royal didn’t give Danes much notice: She also revealed that the change would happen in just two weeks, on January 14, 2024—exactly 52 years since she had ascended the throne.

Kathy Griffin Strips Down to Her Underwear

Kathy Griffin alone could almost fill this entire list with her various stints co-presenting CNN’s New Year’s Eve Special. In 2008, the comedian silenced a heckler with the comeback, “I don’t go to your job and knock the dicks out of your mouth.” A year later, she caused a stir by uttering the F-word and joking with co-host Anderson Cooper about pleasuring himself. And then, after being on her best behavior in 2011, she returned to her chaotic ways in 2012 by removing most of her clothes.  

On this occasion, Griffin left Cooper practically speechless by stripping to her bra and underwear just as the famous Times Square ball was about to drop. “Gonna admit, a little bummed I’m not in jail, after my CNN New Year’s strip down so Cher could show up with my mom and bail {money},” the redhead later tweeted about the stunt.   

Mariah Carey Suffers On-Stage Nightmare

During her 2016 appearance on Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest, Queen of Christmas Mariah Carey had sound issues out of every performer’s nightmares. She made it through a performance of “Auld Lang Syne,” but the night went downhill from there. During “Emotions,” when she clearly couldn’t hear her backing track, Carey told the audience, “We didn’t have a {sound} check for this song, so we’ll just say it went to No. 1 and that’s what it is, OK?” She made some attempts to sing, but mostly continued to visibly and audibly express her frustrations at the unfolding chaos, which continued into her final number, “We Belong Together.” The star allegedly gave her creative director their marching orders over the debacle, while her team argued she’d been deliberately sabotaged by the show’s producers. However, Carey redeemed herself when she returned a year later for a set that proved she was the ultimate pro. 

Jamie Kennedy Hosts “Anti-New Year’s Eve Show” 

Plagued by technical issues, guests who appeared to have overindulged at the open bar, and just general incompetency, KDOC-TV's First Night 2013 with Jamie Kennedy was the kind of car-crash spectacle you didn’t think they made anymore—so much so that some theorized it was an elaborate hoax.  

Designed by Kennedy to capture the “anything goes” vibes of Jerry Lewis’s MDA telethons, the self-described “anti-New Year’s Eve show” descended into a shambles from the opening monologue, which included an offensive joke about “Gangnam Style” hitmaker PSY. (There was also a puppet show that dealt in rape jokes, a sketch featuring one of the event’s sponsors that a critic called “racist in its grotesque minstrelsy of Native American culture,” and a Playboy bunny getting sexy with a turkey burger.) Everything that could go wrong did go wrong, from communication issues that sometimes left Kennedy and crew unaware of when the show was live, numerous instances of on-air profanity, a midnight countdown that occurred 10 seconds too late, and a fight during the closing credits. Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t a First Night 2014.

Howard Stern’s Beauty Pageant 

Howard Stern was never going to host an ordinary New Year’s Eve spectacular—but even by the shock jock’s standards, his pay-per-view 1993 special, Howard Stern’s New Year’s Rotten Eve, was remarkably lowbrow: After arriving on the stage at the Newark Symphony Hall on a toilet, the host wore blackface for a sketch involving Whoopi Goldberg, electrocuted a little person’s testicles in a sketch mocking Michael Jackson’s child abuse scandal, and staged a fundraiser for John Wayne Bobbitt, the man who had risen to fame that year for having his manhood cut off. 

The centerpiece, however, was a grotesque beauty contest presided over by Stern in which contestants given nicknames such as “The Girl with a Lisp” and “Miss Good Head” competed to win $50,000. Star Wars legend Mark Hamill, boxing icon Joe Frazier, and singer-songwriter Janis Ian were just a few of the random names who served as judges (and no doubt subsequently fired their agents) during what the New York Post dubbed “the most disgusting two hours in the history of television.”

Live Into ’85 Kills BBC Tradition

BBC1 had been broadcasting specials about Scotland’s Hogmanay celebrations for more than 30 years until Live Into ’85 single-handedly killed the tradition until 1998. In fact, the special was so shambolic that according to comedy historian Graham McCann, TV bosses pulled the plug on the broadcast in some areas of the UK before its scheduled finish. 

For one thing, producers had failed to secure exclusivity to its chosen venue, the Gleneagles Hotel, meaning that its guests were in the audience, and they were free to wander in and out of shot and have loud conversations as they pleased. (As McCann put it, “the Gleneagles Hotel was full of ‘ordinary’ people, who had paid considerable amounts of money to eat, drink and be merry on New Year's Eve in a five star establishment, regardless of what any TV crew might want them to do.”) Poet John Grieve forgot his lines (and appeared to find it hilarious, too), comedian Chic Murray spent his screentime chastizing the show’s technical team, and the Pipes and Drums of British Caledonian Airways reportedly refused to march out of the warm hotel and back into the frozen car park they’d been shivering in (perhaps understandably, considering they were all sporting the traditional kilts). Host Tom O’Connor later reportedly said that his video of the special was labeled “The Show That Died of Shame.”

Australia’s The Loop Rings in the Wrong New Year

Australian TV's The Loop appeared to jinx itself in 2016 when it pranked viewers by ringing in the New Year with a pre-taped show featuring some remarkably unenthusiastic “competition winners.” The Channel 10 show claimed that the group had won a prize to help celebrate the festivities live on air, only for said group to look like they’d rather be anywhere else than on a shiny studio floor. “We decided … there’s going to be fireworks on on another network, and people are going to be out partying, so people who are watching and our regular Loop viewers, let’s have a little fun with them,” one of the hosts, Scott Tweedie, explained after the fact, saying the aim was “to make {it} as awkward as possible.”

Just two years later, the same show (and the same presenters, Tweedie and Olivia Phyland) appeared to suffer a very real embarrassment thanks to a countdown clock that took on a life of its own. Firstly, its numbers malfunctioned, repeatedly bouncing around from 10–5 in a haphazard manner. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the hosts wished everyone a Happy New Year several seconds late before the screen behind them flashed up the wrong year. “If you didn’t quite get things right in 2018, today is the day to hit refresh and try again ... and that includes our graphics department,” the show’s Facebook page later read in acknowledgement. But given the show’s history, speculation started to mount that the chaos may have been another pre-planned stunt.

Andy Cohen Starts Beef With ABC Rivals

One can always rely on Andy Cohen to bring the drama, and his 2021 hosting duties on CNN’s New Year’s Special was no exception. As smoke billowed up behind him, the Bravo regular referenced “Ryan Seacrest’s group of losers that are performing,” referring to the network’s rival show Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve, adding, “If you’ve been watching ABC tonight, you’ve seen nothing.”

Cohen and co-host Anderson Cooper had been knocking back the tequila shots throughout the night, which perhaps explains why the former also took aim at rock veterans Journey (“If it’s not Steve Perry, it doesn’t count”), Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg (“You are messing with all of us”), and Bill de Blasio (“Watching {him} do his victory lap dance after four years of the crappiest term as the mayor of New York ... Sayonara sucka”). Cohen later acknowledged he’d been “overserved” at the time but that his only regret was bringing his friend Seacrest into the drunken conversation. Nevertheless, CNN decided to issue all hosts with an alcohol ban for its coverage of the following New Year.

Read More Interesting Stories About New Year’s Eve: