With the 2024 Emmys airing on ABC on September 15 and a slew of fashion trends still to come, we can’t help but look back at past awards shows and how it’s been 30 years since Joan and Melissa Rivers changed the red carpet forever.
It all started in 1994 with a simple question posed to awards show celebrities: “Who are you wearing?” The trailblazing comedienne, who died in 2014, couldn’t resist delivering her spontaneous, often campy jokes on subjects ranging from Botox to body odor. She was the loose canon for Melissa’s eye-rolling straight (wo)man.
You always got at least one really stunning moment – Joan really said That to an A-lister? There were also so many LOLs when the preshow, which aired first on E! and later on the TV Guide Channel, became the real must-see event of the night. It was the one you tuned in to and couldn’t stop watching.
“The difference with the red carpet was that we got to have fun,” Melissa tells Yahoo Entertainment while promoting the comedy event on Nov. 7. Dead Funny: A Living Tribute to Joan Rivers For God’s love we deliver. “It was full-on guerrilla television. It was the rise of cable. It became destination viewers. It was the right time, the right place, the right team.”
Their inimitable bond – moments of annoyance, sighs and all – was behind it.
“We had such a unique relationship,” said the Group text by Melissa Rivers podcast host says. “We were both professionals in our fields, but the things we could say to each other were within the confines of a mother-daughter relationship. If a co-host rolled their eyes, shook their head, or said to someone else, ‘I can’t believe you said that!’, that was rude. But between me and my mother, it was different. To this day, people come up to me and say, ‘That was my relationship.’ It struck a chord. We didn’t hold back. You saw the frustration. You saw the annoyance. You saw the humor.”
These days, “you’re not allowed to have fun,” Melissa says of the red carpet coverage, with its polished production values and polite banter. “The interesting thing is that no one has asked me to go back on the red carpet. Probably because I’ve also said very openly that I would never do it. It’s never going to be as fun. It’s never going to be the same. We’re never going to be able to do what we did.”
Rivers’ red carpet act was such a sensation that E!’s Fashion Policeco-created by Joan and executive produced by Melissa, was born in 1995. While there were several co-hosts and iterations of the show, Joan would lead the group in critiquing A-listers’ outfits — while firing off zingers. Melissa says that show, which ended in 2017 following Joan’s death three years earlier, wouldn’t work today either.
“If I could figure out how to do it, I would, but you can’t,” the producer says. “You can’t say anything about it. Not only can you not say anything funny, you can’t say anything honest. You can’t say you don’t like someone’s dress. You have to qualify it with what a great person they are, and that they’re so beautiful, and that they’re nice to little animals, and that they’re fantastic, and that they look great most of the time.”
“Wouldn’t you fall asleep within the first 30 seconds?” she asks. “I would change the channel.”
Another change that has occurred at awards shows in recent years is that it has become increasingly difficult for producers to find a presenter for the ceremony, which used to be a coveted job.
This year’s Emmy Awards ceremony will see father-son duo Eugene and Dan Levy share hosting duties, but Jimmy Kimmel and John Mulaney have both turned down the 2025 Oscars. This year’s Golden Globes only secured host Jo Koy 10 days before the show — and the reviews have been poor. How does Joan, who hosted the 1983 Emmys, feel about comedians turning down the job?
“She was like, ‘It’s time you guys smartened up,'” Melissa says. “It’s a horrible job. People decide who they like and who they don’t like way ahead of time. Some of the best hosts were never asked to do it again because they were criticized. Why put yourself out there like that? It’s a thankless job.”
After co-hosting the Emmys with Eddie Murphy, Joan said, “I’m never going back there,” Melissa recalled. “It’s a lot of work and you run the risk of it being a disaster.”
Melissa is currently planning the comedy tribute show in honor of her mother, after recently marking the 10th anniversary of Joan’s death at age 81 during a routine endoscopy. She teases that they have “some wonderful people committed, that I can’t announce yet” to the event at the Apollo Theater during the 20th annual New York Comedy Festival. She and her son, Cooper, 24, will be in attendance.
There is also a play, Jeanneat the South Coast Repertory Theater in Costa Mesa, California, from October 27 to November 24, chronicling the career of the famed comedian.
Next summer, the National Comedy Center, which has acquired Joan’s comedy archive, including her famous card catalog of 65,000 typed jokes, will open an interactive exhibit in its galleries in Jamestown, New York.
“It just seemed like the best fit,” Melissa says. “The Smithsonian and the Library of Congress contacted us right after she passed” about acquiring the archive, “and I kept thinking about the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark in that giant warehouse” where the Ark of the Covenant is placed in a wooden crate in a huge storage room with thousands of other crates. “I thought, I can’t have her in a box” between exhibits. “It really haunted me.”
A museum dedicated to education about the comedic arts “felt like the right place,” she says, to house her mother’s work alongside the archives of other greats like Carl Reiner, Don Rickles and George Carlin. “Because if I put her in a warehouse, oh God. I mean — this was a woman who appreciated a good view. I couldn’t have her looking at boxes.”
