NBC Photo: Dana EdelsonThere's something fishy about this year's Peabody Award winners and his name is Jeremy Piven Ari Gold.
HBO's hit series Entourage is among the recipients of this year's prestigious George Foster Peabody Awards, honoring the best in broadcasting.
In addition to Vince and his crew, which the Peabody committees called "affectionately merciless," other winners include the "genre-bending" Lost, AMC's "improbably funny" Breaking Bad, the heavily lauded (Emmy, Golden Globe, SAGs) HBO miniseries John Adams and NBC's coverage of the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony, which was dubbed, quite simply, "spectacular."
But that was nothing compared to how the Peabody peeps described Saturday Night Live's campaign-abetted resurgency.
SNL's political satire in the run-up to the presidential election was chief among those making the cut on the ever-eclectic and increasingly topical list of recipients.
Not shying away from putting too fine a point on its influence, the awards committee, comprised of TV critics, industry execs, academics and arts and culture experts, said the show "stole the election-year thunder from its satirical competition on cable and may have swayed the race itself."
Non-TV honorees included the Onion News Network and another startup site you may already be mildly familiar with: YouTube.
The 68th Annual Peabody Awards will be doled out by Brian Williams May 18 in New York.