Anderson Cooper and Kathy Griffin ring in 2009 for CNN

At 9:30pm on New Year’s Eve my friend’s two-year-old son threw up. They left by 10pm. My kids were asleep by 10:45pm. My husband and I took our respective drinks to the couch. We flipped through the channels and were bored by everything on. We didn’t want to put on a movie. We wanted to see and feel the spirit of the night (even though we weren’t actively participating in anything very exciting ourselves). For us that meant watching the ball drop in Times Square. I’ve been to Times Square four times to ring-in the New Year but this year I was perfectly content to be with my family; maybe even, as others have said, I couldn’t think of a single happier way to ring in the new year. ^[1]

So, we chose to watch the pre and post ball-dropping commentary on television. However, I did want to be, at least slightly, entertained — and Dick Clark’s New Year’s Eve ^[2] doesn’t do it for me anymore. Really, I just can’t stand Ryan Seacrest ^[3]. So we turned to CNN. Really, we did!

Anderson Cooper had Kathy Griffin co-host ^[4] the evening with him. What a ridiculously unlikely combination. We flipped to CNN thinking we were going to switch out just as quickly as we’d found them. We didn’t. We stayed. And we liked it. They had a lot of time to fill and did a really good job making people feel like they were part of the evening ^[5]. I’ve never been a fan of Kathy’s — her humor just never did anything for me. However, for this one evening, she was the perfect ying to Anderson’s yang.

Did anyone else watch? Did I miss fabulous programming somewhere? Let me know so I can make note for next year!