The Golden Globes became the first awards show to tap into the growing podcast craze this year when it launched a new “Best Podcast” category for the annual late-winter Hollywood extravaganza.
And while the previously released short list included both The Bill Simmons Podcast and Pardon My Take, neither appeared on the final list of nominations released Monday.
The Golden Globes’ short list utilized data from a podcasting analytics company (and likely was based upon submissions from each show’s parent company) and included the biggest hits in the industry, including the two longstanding sports shows from The Ringer and Barstool as well as The Joe Rogan Experience, This Past Weekend with Theo Von and even racier pods like Candace and The Tucker Carlson Show.
In the end, the Globes opted — as is typical for the show — to keep things light.
The final list of nominations for Best Podcast for the Jan. 11, 2026, awards show is as follows:
- Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
- Call Her Daddy
- Good Hang with Amy Poehler
- Smartless
- The Mel Robbins Podcast
- Up Next
This fairly predictable group of inoffensive, easily digestible pods (as best exemplified by the title of Poehler’s) will give the Globes what it likely wanted with the Best Podcast category: A new group of famous people to attend the show, and a ready-to-share clip of the winner’s acceptance speech.
Simmons certainly could have been a fit in this cadre, but The Ringer is represented by way of Good Hang. But a PMT nomination would have run the risk of an aggressive Barstool campaign and open season at the Beverly Hilton for the notoriously frisky sports brand.
The most puzzling absence on both the short list and in the nominations, from a sports standpoint, is New Heights. The Kelce brothers-hosted smash published the first-ever podcast interview with Taylor Swift and remained atop the charts most of the year. Perhaps the Globes’ reliance on audio data rather than YouTube views led the SiriusXM show to miss the cut, a mistake that led to the Globes missing a chance at the NFL stars and perhaps Swift herself attending.
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.