Sometimes it’s useful to think of what “value” means.
In choosing this year’s Most Valuable Player in Philadelphia broadcasting, I looked beyond favorite commentators and hosts and settled on someone I considered to bring the most dynamism and personality to both the program on which he’s heard and to broadcasting in general.
This year’s MVP is always exciting to hear. He brings energy and edge that makes you want to listen to what he has to say.
He shows leadership that makes it seem as though he may share a radio show with other hosts, but that he is in the driver’s seat.
His show depends on him for a spontaneity that puts it above other programs of its kind on the same station.
This year’s MVP is articulate, with a vocabulary one of his micmates doesn’t always understand. He is quick to challenge and put in perspective anything he notices as a contradiction, being without logic, or controversy for controversy’s sake.
Mostly, he keeps his show lively and endows it with fun. Even when discussions get serious, or heated, he finds a way to keep it breezy and enjoyable.
Clues lead to someone who does a talk show, who works as part of a broadcasting team, and who deals subjects that allow for a range of opinion.
The subject is sports. The station in WIP 94.1 FM.
The MVP is someone with whom I don’t always agree and can criticize, not for his opinions and outlook as much as his penchant for practical jokes, wagers, and some juvenile games and attitudes, but who always entertains me even when I think he’s gone overboard.
For instance, when he wants to enforce penalty or penance from a colleague who said, did, or proclaimed something he found errant.
The MVP is not the person whose ideas I admire most on his own show. He is not my favorite host on his station.
He is the person on local broadcasts I find the most fun, the quickest with a sharp response, the most gifted at putting complicated things in perspective, and a shrewd interviewer when a guest has to be asked a difficult or controversial question.
The Most Valuable Player for 2025 is WIP’s afternoon host, Spike Eskin.
The guy just knows how to engage a radio audience. Even the commercials he reads have pizzazz. He makes you think you should buy those windows, go to that store, or enhance your intimate adventures.
Eskin knows how to move a show, keep it engaging, egg on his co-hosts and guests to keep conversation bright and often funny.
To double back, the person whose perspective I enjoy most on WIP is Ike Reese, one of Eskin’s afternoon show sidekicks who I considered as a partner to the MVP title.
My favorite hosts on WIP are Rob Ellis and Jody McDonald, Ellis for his calmness and ability to invitediscussion rather than argument, even when he disagrees with a caller or studio partner, McDonald for his jauntiness and guy-on-the-next-barstool approach to bringing sports news to his audience.
Choosing Eskin as MVP over any of those, or over Ashlyn Sullivan, who I think is one of the brightest and most sensible bulbs in WIP’s pack, underscores what I mean by value.
I may want to hear more of what Ike Reese has to say, I may cringe when Eskin suggests one of his pranks or punishments, especially if it involves an Eagles cheer at a Phillies game. I may find Spike negative at times and given to odd omens, and I may not agree with his perspective, especially when it comes to Alec Bohm, but I always appreciate his presence on the radio.
I always key into the verve he of all the people on radio, not only at WIP but throughout the dial, brings to his broadcasts. I always miss him the rare time he’s not on the air.
I listen to every WIP show. The afternoon show with Eskin, Reese and Jack Fritz is by far the best of them.
It knows best how to bring its audience the issues of sports while keeping things open and fun.
You can tell Eskin is not just a sports commentator but an overall broadcaster who understands radio and how to entertain, who knows how to bring some wit or life into a discussion.
He adds value to his show, his station, and to his profession and does it with a style that is unique to him.
He is the guy in the crowd who keeps the conversation moving and has a good time doing it.
He provides a good time, too, which is why Spike Eskin is this year’s MVP.
Golden Globes picks
Television had a better year than movies in 2025.
The Golden Globe nominations for programs and movies from last year tell me so.
In the television categories, I see a number of shows that took original approaches and could be categorized as excellent.
Two programs, “Adolescence” on Netflix, and “The Pitt” on HBO, demonstrated how gripping and moving television can be.
With the possible exception of Joachim Trier’s Norwegian film “Sentimental Value,” which deals with the fragile relationship between an internationally famous film director who is absent to his family and his locally famous daughter, an actress who felt and feels that absence, no film I’m seen this year seems perfect or unflawed.
Admission: There remain a half-dozen films I have to see to make a total case that 2025 was the year of promise that ultimately succumbed to the self-consciousness and polemic so damaging to 21st century art. But so far…
The Golden Globes, given by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, distributes its awards to the best in television and movies at 8 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 11.
The ceremony airs on CBS, locally Channel 3. The host is Nikki Glaser, who I thought did a mediocre, and self-conscious, job as Globes emcee last year.
The nominees for Best TV Series-Drama feature several usual suspects.
Only “The Pitt” and Apple TV’s late entry from “Breaking Bad’s” Vince Gilligan, “Pluribus,” with “Better CallSaul’s” Rhea Seehorn, veer from the same-old same-old.
That said, “The White Lotus,” “Severance” and “The Diplomat” upped their games from earlier seasons, especially “Severance,” so you can see there was mettle in the tried-and-true.
Or at least room for improvement. “Slow Horses” stayed as steady, and as enjoyable, as its title implies.
“Pluribus” hasn’t gotten much traction, but “The Pitt” is an instant classic. Long for a series, with 15 episodes each chronicling one hour in the shift of a busy doctor (Noah Wyle) at a large Pittsburgh hospital, it proved gripping to the point of being impossible to miss.
Look for “The Pitt,” which has earned a second season, to jump ahead of more established shows and claim several Golden Globes.
In the Best TV Series-Comedy category, another newcomer, “The Studio,” from what is becoming the most interesting streamer, Apple TV, may also triumph over long-runs like “Hacks,” its main competition, “The Bear” or “Only Murders in the Building.”
Among Best TV Series-Limited, “Adolescence,” with its look at a murder from so many perspectives, should find the success it had in Emmy competition last September.
Acting categories, as they should, recognize performers who have done exceptional work. Nominees in the dramatic categories vary more than usual while in the comedy division, they boast the same contenders as in most recent years.
Sterling K. Brown in “Paradise” and Marc Ruffalo in the locally set “Task” certainly deserve consideration as Best Actor in a TV Drama.
Adam Scott also had more chances to show his range in the latest season of “Severance,” but Noah Wyle, returning to this hospital setting was as intense and compelling as “The Pitt” itself.
Wyle should be part of a “Pitt” sweep in major categories.
Best Actress in a Drama is not as lustery a field in spite of Kathy Bates (“Matlock”), Helen Mirren (“Mobland”) and Keri Russell (“The Diplomat”) being in its ranks.
I tend to like that trio, and none of them disappoint.
Bates is witty in what is essentially a dual role, a wily attorney and the woman who wants to use her knowledge of the law to eke justice from a situation that gnaws at her.
Russell is sharp and pert as she wends her way through the toughest yet most delicate of political webs.
Mirren is her assured and chameleon-like self.
Any of them could justifiably claim the Golden Globe, but if I had a vote, I would veer towards Britt Lower for playing the suspicious, rebellious and aptly named Helly among the severed in Dan Erickson’s complex series.
Best Actor in a Comedy Series contains everyone you’d expect — Jeremy Allen White, Martin Short, Steve Martin, Adam Brody from the overpraised “Nobody Wants This,” and Seth Rogen for “The Studio — along with Glen Powell, a surprise for his role as the disguised quarterback in Hulu’s “Chad Powers.”
There is something about White’s character in “The Bear” that draws me to him, but I think this is Rogen’s year, and I expect him to take home the Globe for “Studio.”
The Best Actress in a Comedy Series is even more predictable, with the witty Jean Smart likely to take the field again as Deborah Vance in “Hacks.”
Best Actor in a Limited TV Series is the most interesting among Globe categories.
While Stephen Graham from “Adolescence” has the same bead Richard Gadd did last year for “Baby Reindeer,” the Globe nominator recognize excellent work from Jacob Elordi in the underrated “Narrow Road to the Deep North” and Matthew Rhys as the neighbor being studied in “The Beast in Me.”
Best Actress in a Limited Series is star-studded category yet one without the kind of stick out performance Graham gives in “Adolescence.”
I liked Amanda Seyfried in “Long Bright River,” even though I wasn’t overly impressed with the series. Claire Danes always finds a way to get my attention, and I like what she brings to the writer investigating her next-door neighbor in “The Beast in Me.”
The Golden Globes combine drama, comedy, and limited divisions for supporting categories. Considering all the competition for nominations, that makes receiving one all the more of an achievement.
Owen Cooper as the troubled murderer in “Adolescence” should walk away as Best Supporting Actor category, although Walter Goggins from “The White Lotus” and Trammell Tillman from “Severance” could contend.
Best Supporting Actress, like Best Actress in a Comedy Series will probably head towards “Hacks” and Hannah Einbinder, although Carrie Coons has done some fine television acting in recent years and might earn a Globe for “The White Lotus.”
Among Best Picture-Drama nominees, I favor “Sentimental Value” and “Frankenstein” over “Hamnet,” which has some stirring sequences but could also bore.
Best Picture-Comedy, for once is the more hotly contended race.
The one movie I don’t want to see honored is the one most touted to glom awards this year, “One Battle After Another, “ which I thought botched the satire in Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland,” the novel it was inspired by. Paul Thomas Anderson had far too heavy a touch.
He seemed to be advocating what Pynchon was ridiculing.
Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Bugonia,” also nominated, comes far closer to showing the monomania of the true believer in a movement, spoiled by an ending that makes it clear the conspiracy theorist had a point.
Only Benicio Del Toro’s performance as a rebel with great flare for a cause captured the sense of blind lunacy Pynchon suggests.
Sean Penn, a possible winner for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of a craven army general, matches Anderson in overdoing and misunderstanding where the comedy is in Pynchon’s story.
I’d probably have to give Best Picture-Comedy to “Bugonia” by default. Richard Linklater has two entries in that field — “Blue Moon” and “Nouvelle Vogue” — but both seem a bit labored.
Interesting, but understandable that “Wicked: For Good,” which only rallies in scenes from the original 2003 stage musical, “Wicked,” failed to receive a nomination for Best Comedy.
In movie acting categories, Jessie Buckley did wonders with the weak material in Chloe Zhao’s “Hamnet,” especially in sequences when Anne Hathaway in at her most individual.
Buckley and “Sentimental Value’s” Renata Reinsve should vie for the Globe.
Leonardo Di Caprio may have clearest sailing for Best Actor in a Comedy for “One Battle After Another,” but I don’t think he understood the type of comedy needed to make the piece have meaning. Again, only Benicio Del Toro does.
I’d rather see Ethan Hawke receive the award if only for endurance in “Blue Moon” Or Jesse Plemons for his scarily pathological and prescient turn in “Bugonia.”
Oscar Isaac is eloquent in “Frankenstein,” by another Del Toro, Guillermo (no relation to Benicio), although Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen or Wagner Moura from “The Secret Agent” may be given Best Actor in a Drama.
Cynthia Erivo deserves some recognition for her riveting work in the “Wicked” movies, but Kate Hudson in “Song Sung Blue” or Rose Byrne in “If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You,” or even the perennial favorite Emma Stone will likely be named Best Actress in a Comedy.
For Best Supporting Actor, Stellan Skarsgård would be my choice for “Sentimental Value,” but I think Sean Penn may win the Globe.
Inga Ibsdotter Lilleas is marvelous in “Sentimental Value,” but Teyana Taylor for “One Battle After Another” or Ariana Grande for “Wicked: For Good” may stand a better chance to receive Best Supporting Actress in a movie.
