Paul Drinkwater/NBCCritics had a real problem with Tina Fey and Amy Poehler at Sunday's Golden Globes: They didn't think the hosts were on stage enough.
That was the consensus opinion as the two Saturday Night Live alums handily won over the tapping-typing-and-judging crowd.
A sampling of the raves:
• "Lovely, brilliant and utterly fearless…" (Los Angeles Times)
• "[Poehler and Fey] killed. They killed." (Vulture.com)
• "[T]heir onstage banter felt real and fond…" (London's Guardian)
• "They were totally correct to leave us wanting more—but we shouldn't stop wishing for an encore either." (Cinemablend)
• "Good luck following that, Seth MacFarlane." (HitFix)
The aforementioned MacFarlane is on tap to host the Academy Awards on Feb. 24.
Topics that Fey and Poehler beat MacFarlane to include: the "torture" of being married to James Cameron; the desolation of appearing at the Oscars with James Franco; and the way porn careers just kind of happen. (As Poehler cracked in the opening monologue, "None of us have plans to do porn.")
TV ratings for Sunday's show, also highlighted by Jodie Foster's debatably cryptic coming-out speech, were as strong as the reviews. The telecast averaged nearly 20 million viewers, per final numbers as reported by NBC, the biggest audience in six years and up considerably from Ricky Gervais' last outing as Globes emcee.