For Better or Werts : TV Worth Watching

COMING UP: Gervais hosts the Globes

Are you having a laugh? You certainly should when Ricky Gervais hosts January's freewheeling Golden Globe Awards ceremony on NBC.

Nabbing the clever creator-star of The Office (UK) and Extras (HBO) is quite a coup for these also-ran awards of dubious merit. Their sponsoring Hollywood Foreign Press Association is famously a junket-loving group easily swayed by suckups. (Two words: Pia Zadora.)

On the other hand, they're also willing to step outside the box and honor fun/quirky/obscure movies and shows that the stuffier-than-thou Oscars and Emmys won't. Like Anna Paquin this year for True Blood.

And like Gervais, who copped the best TV comedy actor Globe in 2004 for The Office. Which we'd say gained the attention of Emmy voters, except it took them three more years to surprisingly name Gervais their 2007 best comedy actor for Extras.

OK, maybe not so surprising. Emmy votes love sentiment, and Extras, like The Office, had a strong undercurrent of poignancy in Gervais' schlemiel bit-part player.

Extras also hosted hordes of cameos from names like Patrick Stewart, David Bowie, Ben Stiller, Orlando Bloom and Kate Winslet, which should stand Gervais in good stead hosting the star-party Globes on Jan. 17.

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Diane Werts has been glued to the tube since she can remember, growing up in a household where the TV came on first thing in the morning and stayed on till bedtime and beyond. She worked for the USA Film Festival, then for The Dallas Morning News writing about everything from Shakespeare to macrame art to rock music (and has the hearing loss to prove it). She moved to New York's Newsday to edit their glossy TV magazine, then returned to writing about television, specializing in its stranger permutations. She's a past president of the Television Critics Association.

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