August 2007 Archives
One of America’s favorite crazies, Crispin Glover (here’s his notorious Letterman appearance), is back with another cinematic provocation. It’s entitled “It is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE.” and Glover’ll be touring with it, presenting it Dec. 7-9 at the Egyptian Theatre with a Q&A. You’ll want to see it, so get your tickets now!
What, you’re thinking that maybe you don’t want to see it? Well, consider that his previous movie, “What is it?”, was called “the fever dream of a crazy person,” and take in this vaguely disturbing art for the film, along with its description:
“‘It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE.’ goes into uncharted cinematic territory with screenwriter Steven C. Stewart starring in this semi-autobiographical, psycho-sexual, tale about a man with severe cerebral palsy and a fetish for girls with long hair. Part horror film, part exploitation picture and part documentary of a man who cannot express his sexuality in the way he desires, (due to his physical condition), this fantastical and often humorous tale is told completely from Stewart’s actual point of view – that of someone who has lived for years watching people do things he will never be able to do. Here, Stewart’s character is something of a lady killer, seducing a troubled, recently divorced mother (Margit Carstensen), her teenage daughter and any number of other ladies he encounters along the way. According to Crispin Glover, Stewart wanted to show that handicapped people are human, sexual and can be horrible. He also states that ‘It is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE.’ will probably be the best film he has anything to do with in his entire career.”
“Glover's latest film is another mind-bending foray into unexplored cinematic territory that will challenge expectations and defy conventions. The screenwriter, Steven C. Stewart, is also the star (Stewart had cerebral palsy and passed away shortly after filming).
“The film begins in a nursing home with our ‘hero’ lying helpless on the floor. While he is being carried back to his bed, his world shifts to a place where his charm is recognized and the ladies swoon, enabling some torrid sexual conquests. But years of frustration at being an outcast have planted a dark and evil seed. Soon his actions take a morbid turn.
“Glover uses his visionary cinematic skills to bring to life the graphically explicit psychosexual fantasy world of a man shunned by women and society but who lusts after intimacy, acceptance, and long hair. The beauty of his direction is his ability to create an atmosphere that is strange and unsettling, yet sensual and erotic. Through Stewart's caustic fantasy life, Glover subverts the conventional devices of a suspense film and creates an audacious statement on the conundrum of sexual politics from an outsider's perspective.”
Did we mention Glover’ll present it Dec. 7-9 at the Egyptian and then explain it to you afterwards? Because he totally will!
And by the way: Glover says this is what he did with his earnings from the “Charlie’s Angels” movie.
Since advertisers tend to be a little wary about being associated with child slavery, CBS is showing them an “early cut” of the series to allay their fears. Ad buyers're still taking a wait-and-see approach to the show, though.
CBS hasn’t gone to the trouble of doing the same for critics, who started the whole hullabaloo in the first place back in July at the TV Press Tour. Things have spiraled further out of control for the network, with reports about how the production flagrantly and cynically skirted child-labor laws, injuries on the set and so on.
It’s produced much media hand-wringing, ranging from this “Mr.-Moonves-tear-down-this-show” screed to this if-life-gives-you-lemons-publicitywise-make-lemonade take. And all, with no one writing about the show actually having seen an episode.
CBS’s little sister network UPN had a similar problem once that they likewise mishandled: A reality show entitled “Amish in the City” had critics livid that the network was trivializing the participants’ faith, and a TV Press Tour session with UPN executives focused on that nonstop. Later in the day, UPN finally screened the first episode and most of the concerns were pretty much allayed. Had UPN unveiled the show before their executive session, they could’ve spared themselves a lot of headaches and vitriol.
That CBS has not seen fit to let anyone see “Kid Nation” less than three weeks before its premiere suggests that perhaps they do have a problem on their hands. Certainly, all the kids-in-anguish drama that was manufactured for the trailer is likely being second-guessed. And any delightful kids-accidentally-drinking-bleach montage has no doubt wound up on the cutting-room floor, as well.
But CBS’s wall of silence isn’t going to work forever, if, in fact, it’s even working now. As our pals Larry Craig and Alberto Gonzales have learned, it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up (OK, in their cases, it was the crime, too). It’d be nice – not to mention refreshing – if CBS’d come up with a coherent response and let us see the friggin’ thing already.
Enjoy those episodes of “The Office” on your iPod while you can: NBC-Universal and Apple can’t reach a pricing agreement, so, come December, its programming will no longer be available from iTunes.
Not good news for iTunes, as NBC’s content accounts for 40% of its video downloads. And iTunes, of course, is the go-to site for digital downloads. Which apparently has gone to its head – NBC’s not the only company hacked off that Apple controls all iTunes pricing and not the only business that thinks it should be making more money off their iTunes offerings.
Of course, if Apple caves in to NBC, then other companies will want similar say over pricing their wares, and that’s anarchy, people. On the other hand, Apple needs what NBC and these other companies provide more than they need Apple. Which is not to say that those companies don’t need iTunes.
This could get messy. Can’t our digital brethren all get along? (Short answer: Well, no, not while everyone’s still trying to figure out how to make themselves some money off these Internets.)
* UPDATE: In a “We’ll Show YOU” move, Apple today announced it won’t be offering NBC’s new shows – “Chuck,” “Life,” “Journeyman” and “Bionic Woman” – on iTunes this fall. New episodes of shows already on the air will still be available. Kids, kids – can’t we all work this out? And NBC – $4.99 for an episode of a TeeVee show is crazy talk.
* ANOTHER UPDATE!: As coincidence would have it, I spoke with "Chuck" star Zachary Levi this afternoon, and asked him about it. His response:
“That’s kind of a bummer. Damn! I was hoping people would find us at places like iTunes like people found ‘Heroes’ and ‘The Office.’ I hope they can clear that up. I’m an Apple guy. I love Apple and I obviously love NBC, so I hope they can work something out.”
Ladies and gentlemen, I believe we have found our intermediary in this little spat. Let the healing begin.
I don’t know who Lehigh University journalism professor Kimberly Meltzer is, either, but she or a flunky sent me an Email offering her insights on Katie Couric’s first year in CBS’s news-anchor chair.
Oh, and they sent a sentence explaining her street cred, too. Meltzer, author of “Irreconcilable Differences: An Analysis of Television's Difficult Marriage with Journalism Through the Lens of Its Anchors, 1950-2006” (apparently, she was paid by the word, starting with the title), was a former assistant to Couric, so her views may be somewhat colored based on how well or poorly Katie treated her.
"Couric has become a personality type, against which all other anchor personalities are compared and contrasted. She achieved this status while on the Today show. Viewers and critics now measure her CBS performance against this well-developed and ingrained archetype she and NBC created while in her former role."
On Katie going to Iraq:
"It is also with the 'Today Katie' back story in mind that we fear for her safety as she ventures to Iraq, perhaps more than we would with either of her competitors. Even though CBS has returned to a more traditional hard news format since Couric debuted last year, we still remember Today's Katie and all that we knew about her.
"Critics and competitors will watch to judge her CBS anniversary performance; fans will watch to be reassured that she is alive and well. And some viewers will actually watch to hear her report on the situation as she finds it on the ground."
Finally, on how journalism is screwed:
"In terms of predicting what will happen to journalism next, history points to the increasingly fluid boundaries of the craft. The threat of new technology and new forms of news media to the existing journalistic community in general does two competing things: They make the community cling even more steadfastly to its present and traditional principles and standards, and, in some instances, force it to be flexible in adapting and reinventing it so that it doesn't become obsolete and expendable.
"We've seen the return in the course of the past year to a more traditional news broadcast, and we've seen all three network news broadcasts create anchor blogs, webcasts, podcasts and make use of new technology in other ways to try to maintain a more mobile and tech-savvy audience."
OK, I guess that was useful.
Well, someone’s gotta feed the Beckham tots
$250 million sure doesn’t buy what it used to.
David Beckham, that British soccer hero who was handed $250 mill to transform America’s blasé attitude toward the sport, continues his reputation this side of The Pond as an utter bust, falling victim to yet another injury that pretty much ends his first Stateside season. Which translates his paycheck to: $50 million per goal, $50 million per hour and $50 million per nation filled with fans and potential fans feeling like they’ve been ripped off.
So much money hasn’t been desultorily tossed out a window since Dick Cheney’s White House threw all those billions at Halliburton to lose in various cubbyholes in Iraq.
Hence, the responsibility for actually working in America has fallen to Becks’ wife Posh Spice, who has landed a job on ABC’s “Ugly Betty,” playing the challenging role of Victoria Beckham. “Ugly Betty,” you might recall, was a show that was all about not rewarding the anorexically trim and superficial and brain-dead.
Of course, a mere six weeks ago – six weeks? How coincidental – that’s how long Becks’ll be out of commission – Posh was insisting to Your Mayor that she wasn’t moving to L.A. to rev up an acting career:
"I must be the only person in Los Angeles who doesn't want to be in film. … Did you see 'Spice World'? It wasn't that good. I wasn't really that good. I'm not coming to L.A. to form a career, you'll be glad to hear.”
As Larry Craig might note, the devil’s in the details: Notice she said she didn’t want to be in film, but didn’t mention TV.
Not that we like to say “We told you so” (though, of course, anyone who has such a chance absolutely cherishes such an opportunity), but Your Mayor noted what thoroughgoing b.s. the Beckham hype machine was back when otherwise sane minds got steamrollered by it.
And yet somehow, shockingly, sane, dispassionate intelligence is valued waaay beneath blithering idiocy. Which explains why you and I will never see paychecks in the seven (or even six) figures, while Posh – with her 50, 60-word vocabulary and perhaps fictitious jewel-encrusted vibrator – will never be challenged in her assumption that she’s far better than us.
Just think how many promising athletes the Galaxy might’ve signed for $250 million. Worse, consider how many insightful media pundits might’ve profited from such a financial outlay (take me out of the equation, 3, maybe 4).
From the outset here, we’re going to warn those under the age of 17 to just skip this entry, because it’s inappropriate for you. As Kaitlin Olson of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” notes below, “That works. That warning really makes people not watch.”
Are they gone? OK.
First, if you haven’t seen it yet, you must watch this probably NSFW video at funnyordie.com featuring “Sunny/Phillie’s” Brain Trust or very little of what follows will make any sense. (For those who refuse to watch, your loss, but we’ll recap simply by saying that Danny DeVito has needs, and fortunately for him, having them met is contractually mandated.)
So DeVito, Olson and “Sunny/Phillie” stars/writers/executive producers Rob McElhenney and Glenn Howerton were at USC today, autographing T-shirts in the 100-degree heat for two solid hours.
Meeting/greeting with fans complete, the four stepped inside the “Sunny/Phillie” trailer that’s on a tour of college campuses and was making a pathetic but heartbreakingly endearing effort at cooling the air. And so, fighting off heat-stroke, they began discussing what most civilized people routinely discuss:
Giving Danny DeVito hummers.
Continue reading "It's Always Sunny" when Danny DeVito is happy.
You may recall we recently described the three dynamics operating when booking presenters for the Emmy Awards: This is Mutually Beneficial, I Need Help Promoting My Show and I’m Doing You a Favor.
This proved so profoundly popular and edifying that we’re going to do it again, with the second wave of announcements of celebrities who will give trophies to other celebrities. And we’ve added a new category!
This is Mutually Beneficial: Marcia Cross, America Ferrera.
I Need Help Promoting My Show: Alec Baldwin and Tina Fey, Joely Fisher and Brad Garrett, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Jennifer Love Hewitt.
I’m Doing You a Favor: Stephen Colbert (his appearance last year – “I lost to Barry Manilow!” he wailed to Jon Stewart – probably ensured him a win this year), Ellen DeGeneres (she hosted last year; she needn’t accept a demotion like this, particularly since Ryan Seacrest swiped her gig).
And now, the new category:
What More Do You Want From Me? (celebrities who have comforted and oiled the Emmy machinery beyond the call of duty): Kyra Sedgwick, Jon Cryer.
Both, you may recall, hosted that ghastly early-morning announcement ceremony unveiling this year’s nominees, even though they themselves have never won an Emmy (and in fact, both left last year’s awards show branded losers). If these two walk away Sept. 16 without a heavy pointy object in their clammy hands, they need to understand that they’re in an abusive relationship with Emmy and need to realize that the love apparently only goes one way and they need to quit coddling the Academy with their star power and find something else better to do on the evenings of future ceremonies. Maybe start up a little Mah Jongg club together.
Last week, "Mad Men" graced us with the immortal line "I don't speak 'moron'" (delivered while watching a focus group of women trying different cosmetics). This week, Roger (John Slattery) - who's banging Joan (Christina Hendricks), the ad firm's world-weary secretary - gets to deliver not one but two misogynistic bon mots:
* In a bar where the women don't seem to be all that interested in him, he opines, "It's like they hit 30 and somebody puts out a light."
* When Don (Jon Hamm) invites Roger to dinner at his home, Roger hits on his wife (January Jones). Later, he apologizes: "At some point, we've all parked in the wrong garage."
Are you starting to get the feeling things will not end well for Roger, no matter how much milk he mixes into his vodka?
Anyway, the inevitable backlash against the wildly acclaimed "Mad Men" has begun, since falling into lockstep and liking a show everyone else likes doesn't draw much attention to one's critical acumen: In the past week, I've come across two separate disses of the show, both essentially grousing that the production design is too rich and the rest of the show is too shallow.
Both, it turns out, were written by women, whose niggling ulterior motives seem to be to decry the attitudes of the show's male characters. These women actually dare to challenge the preconceptions of fictitious men. Dames these days!
It's one thing, of course, to take issue with the show's pervasive sexism. It's another to translate that into saying that the show trucks in some sort of overall crappy gestalt that renders its aesthetic anemic.
"Mad Men" doesn't, under any circumstances, celebrate its characters' sensibilities; it's, in fact, careful to provide foreshadowing of what happened post-1960 (when the show is set) that underscores how backward their thinking is. At the same time, it allows viewers to wallow in transgressive behavior, just as "The Sopranos" did, and just as many other breakthrough mainstream entertainments did.
If viewers find themselves empathizing with the "Mad Men," they likewise are challenged as to why they're doing so - just as those who grew to love Tony Soprano had to confront his more violent impulses - which makes these all-style-no-substance arguments feel, ultimately, as empty as the lives the "Mad Men" aren't aware they're living.
- "Mad Men:" 10 tonight; AMC.
Oh, and if you've missed any or all episodes, AMC is thoughtfully running a marathon of the first seven Sunday beginning at 10 a.m. TiVo away.
“The Daily Show” chooses the damnedest times to go on hiatus: Imagine the comic hay they could be making out of the Larry Craig scandal.
Thankfully, others have been stepping up to provide comfort and solace in Jon Stewart’s stead:
“Countdown with Keith Olbermann’s” “Dragnet” parody.
Larry Craig’s smoove airport pickup techniques.
More smoove airport pickup techniques – if you don’t have a box of chocolates, a puppy’ll do.
Seen others? Post links in your comments. Just make sure they’re funny.
Boy, you go to all the trouble to create a TV show that won’t be confused for any other, and this is the thanks you get: “Kid Nation,” one of our new favorite whipping boys, is in the soup, again: The Writers Guild and AFTRA are looking into allegations of abuse on the set of the “Lord-of-the-Flies-Lite” show.
“The folks who write, produce and shoot these shows were subject to illegal and unfair working conditions,” WGA president Patrick Verrone told TV Week. “They don’t get paid overtime, they violate consecutive days of work [rules], they don’t get meal breaks. We’ve been saying that for two years now. It’s unfortunate that this kind of business model is now treating kids the same way they’ve been treating adults.”
“We are concerned about reports of abuse arising from ‘Kid Nation,’” AFTRA (the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, for the acronym-challenged), said in an issued statement. “AFTRA is investigating whether the terms and conditions of the Network Code were violated in the production of ‘Kid Nation.’ We will take all legal and moral steps available to protect the rights of the performers and children on this program.”
“Producers have admitted to writing scenarios that contestants are asked to carry out,” lovely and talented acquaintance-of-Your-Mayor Maria Elena Fernandez writes. “And contestants have revealed that they work long hours and are often asked to do different takes of scenes to make them more interesting or controversial.
“For these reasons, union representatives argue that the shows have writers who should be compensated according to union guidelines and that some contestants are performers who could be covered under collective bargaining agreements.”
“Kid Nation” executive producer Tom Forman insists the children participating were not “employees,” though they were each given $5,000 for 40 days of participation. But it’s indisputable that Forman and CBS will be making money nonetheless off of presenting the kids’ labors as an entertainment. So I guess we can say that if they weren’t employees, Forman and CBS engaged in child slavery. That should go over well with the folks who might be induced to watch the show.
Here’s how Larry Craig should’ve handled his press tete-a-tete yesterday, courtesy the comedy troupe Little Britain.
Katie Couric really doesn’t want to read those “Katie: One Year Later” stories.
Instead, she’s traveling next week to the Middle East, where she’ll sit in war zones rather than endure the pundit navel-gazing over her rocky first year as anchor of “The CBS Evening News.”
She’ll be in Baghdad on Tuesday and Wednesday, ostensibly getting a sense of the situation on the ground as the White House is busy polishing the report General David Patraeus was supposed to, but won’t, give to Congress about the situation in Iraq. An interpreter working for CBS News was murdered in Iraq recently, and Kimberly Dozier has endured 25 operations after being injured in a blast in May 2006 that killed cameraman Paul Douglas and sound-man James Brolan.
From there, it’s on to Damascus, from which she’ll report on Thursday and Friday.
Rick Kaplan, executive producer of the newscast, shrugged off the timing of Couric’s globe-trotting in a chat with the Associate Press, telling them, "I don't do anniversaries."
Bet he would if Couric’s ratings were better.
After some grim going, “Rescue Me” has lightened up agreeably in the past couple of episodes. And tonight’s episode continues the trend, with Tommy (Dennis Leary) stumbling through another date with Beth (Amy Sedaris), his captain’s daughter. Remember how she took a cellphone call from her shrink mere seconds into their first date? This one doesn’t get any better.
Tommy also has another friskily bewildering rendezvous with Gina Gershon’s horny mystery woman, attends another fractious family AA meeting and battles a newfound fear of heights that has befallen him after his father (Charles Durning) informed him that he suffered from same as a child.
Meanwhile, Franco (Daniel Sunjata) is shocked to discover who his former fiancée is now dating, and Lou (John Scurti) continues to have the most Daliesque personal life a TV show has ever depicted.
- “Rescue Me:” 10 tonight, FX.
Much Schadenfreude and mirth on the cable news channels today over the plight and humiliation of Larry Craig, the family-values-touting Senator from Idaho arrested for lewd behavior in a Minneapolis airport bathroom – not to mention his spectacularly ill-advised nationally televised statement in which he admits to perjury and blames all his woes on, yes, the media.
Consensus: Dude’s toast.
That out of the way, the scandal devolved into sitcom banter on MSNBC’s “Live with Dan Abrams,” in which Abrams, Joe Scarborough and Tucker Carlson were discussing the case, and Carlson mentioned he had once been propositioned in a men’s room (must’ve been the bowtie).
Whoa, whoa, whoa, Abrams declared (I’m paraphrasing); back up. Carlson clarified: Yes, he had been approached in a public restroom.
I’ve never been approached, Scarborough interjected with mock disappointment.
Carlson then continued to try to make his point, to little avail. What happened? Abrams wanted to know. Tucker explained that he went and got a buddy and they returned to the men’s room and grabbed the guy, hoping against hope that that would put an end to the story – apparently not realizing the anecdote could go in myriad directions at that point.
So Abrams pressed: Then what happened?
Increasingly sheepish, Carlson explained he smacked the guy’s head into a wall and summoned a cop. Abrams and Scarborough laughed their way through Carlson’s little tale of derring-do. Boys will be boys.
(No doubt as we speak, bloggers are Googling to see if they can corroborate Tucker’s tale.)
But perhaps it is hard to take seriously a story this salacious involving this much sanctimonious hypocrisy (newscasters also delighted in running – and rerunning – a clip in which Craig denounced then-President Clinton as a “naughty, nasty boy”). As Jack Cafferty noted on CNN this afternoon, you couldn’t write this stuff.
(Also: hilariously obsessive footage of the actual airport men's room in which the arrest took place, with the cameras roaming into stalls, peaking under doors at men's shoes, etc. That's journalism!)
Biggest disappointment with the Craig thing (dubbed Craigslust in the link above) – and no, it’s not the political hypocrisy; that’s become a given these days – is that, once again, one of my favorite stories of the past year – the loony-love-triangle astronaut (she’ll be pleading temporary insanity) – was yet again denied the attention she so richly deserves. As you may recall, Lisa Nowak’s quixotic cross-country drive – she wore diapers in order to cut down on her travel time and bathroom breaks in order to do, well, something to a romantic rival (Nowak had enough weaponry to make the next installment of the “Saw” movie series) – got lost in the shuffle of Britney Spears’ buzzkill of her coif and the death of Anna Nicole Smith.
And now, today, her announcement that she’ll be pleading not guilty by reason of temporary insanity is overlooked thanks to a Senator with restless leg syndrome. Girl can’t catch a break.
In honor of yesterday’s resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, liberal blogger Josh Micah Marshall has assembled a nice collection of Fredo’s Top-10 dissemblings. His roundelays with Senators Charles Schumer and Arlen Spector boast verbal acrobatics unseen since the Cirque du Soleil troupe got really smashed.
Well, here’s one way of staying in the public eye once your low-rated cable show gets the axe: Former CNN anchor Paula Zahn – who was memorably introduced to CNN viewers a few years ago with a quickly-yanked promo touting her sexiness – has again reluctantly re-entered our consciousness with the revelation of a diary detailing her tryst while married to one titan of industry with yet another titan of industry.
The story linked above is rather long given its surfeit of actual salacious information. We’re given a blind source promising, “It's quite lurid – let's leave it at that,” and that’s about it before a bunch of boring minutiae of the grubby bickering between Zahn and her ex.
A similarly embarrassing bunch of letters written by Hillary Clinton when she was a struggling, oh-so-deep college student popped up recently, which has inspired this latest public service from Your Mayor:
THE MAYOR OF TELEVISION’S TIPS FOR MAINTAINING YOUR DIGNITY THROUGH THIS WRETCHED LIFE
* Don’t ever write a friend, relative or acquaintance a letter.
* Don’t write anything down, not even a grocery list, unless the items on it are fairly generic and you have an operational paper shredder at the ready.
* Don’t ever write so much as an Email.
* Don’t blog, either.
* Don't commit an opinion or a personal anecdote to any medium that can be read - or even perceived - by others.
* Text-messaging is probably OK, since it’ll be hard for posterity to figure out what you were on about.
* Do not allow anyone to take a digital image of you that can be Photoshopped into a humiliating tableau.
* Do not venture out in public in a city filled with security cameras. Avoid ATMs.
* Probably best not to speak to anyone of the opposite sex, particularly in public but especially in private.
* Failing any of this, don’t even think about becoming famous.
The New York Times is constantly amazed that Stephen Colbert manages to call a lot of attention to himself, but then they only continue to encourage him, this time with a story about his broken-wrist antics.
As we previously noted, Colbert muscled himself past the White House gates, and got Tony Snow and Nancy Pelosi to sign his wrist cast.
Since then, he pestered NBC's Brian Williams and CBS's Katie Couric into performing the same service. The Times suggested that ABC's Charlie Gibson is too much of a grumpy Gus to play along.
Gibson's reticence scarcely seems to have had an effect on bidding on the cast on eBay, which is now up to a staggering $15K with almost a week to go. Nor does the fact that Bill O'Reilly and Tim Russert's autographs also appear on the cast.
Proceeds go to The Yellow Ribbon Fund, a non-profit assisting injured servicemen returning from Iraq. Plus, since it's spent weeks stewing in its own juices inside that cast, the winner'll discover just what Colbert's wrist smells like. (Hint: a little like his ice cream.)
TMZ took a breather from its usual celebrity-baiting to unveil the new list of “stars” who’ll be competing on ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars” this fall, and if they’re correct, the show’s actually inching toward luring real celebrities – or, at least, getting B- and C-list people rather than C- and D-listers.
Most bewildering/intriguing addition: Billionaire tech guru and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, whom you’d think’d have better ways of spending his time. On the other hand, since he put a moratorium on kvetching about NBA referees on his provocative personal blog, maybe this’ll give him a new group of refs over whom to get livid.
Cuban, you may recall, hosted a short-lived ABC reality show, “The Benefactor,” that was kind of an “Apprentice” knockoff. So “Dancing with the Stars” is the reality version of ABC’s “Private Practice,” which hired a bunch of people who used to headline their own shows – Tim Daly, Amy Brenneman, Taye Diggs – as supporting players in an ensemble cast.
And Cuban will be competing against:
* Vegas crooner Wayne Newton (many years ago, Your Mayor ran the overnight shift for an automated easy-listening radio station; my job consisted of making sure the music reels didn’t run out and, every 15 minutes or so, burbling some insipid folderol like, “For those beautiful moments, add the easy-listening sounds of 104.1 FM!” Invariably, around 3 or 4 in the morning, I’d get a call from a drunk woman requesting that I play “some Danke Schoen music.” So if she’s still alive, you know who she’ll be pulling for in this competition.)
* Aaron Carter, washed up at such an early age
* Erstwhile “Medicine Woman” Jane Seymour
* Tori Spelling, whose own reality show must not be humiliating enough
* Jennie Garth, who, after suffering a legion of indignities as Kelly on “Beverly Hills, 90210,” can’t really embarrass herself any further
* Boxer Floyd Mayweather, Jr.
* Erstwhile “Hulk” Lou Ferrigno
* Nia Peeples, who never really quite got big enough to become washed up
* TeeVee journalist Richard Quest, whose CNN bio touts his “dynamic and distinctive style”
* Model/former Leo squeeze Gisele Bundchen
* Indie racer Helio Castroneves
* Sabrina Bryan, the youngest contestant and, as a star of the Disney Channel’s “Cheetah Girls” movies, one with actual dancing experience (though, reportedly, Mark Cuban made money while in college teaching disco-dancing)
Yeah, yeah, I know: Slow news day.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales resigned today, putting an end to a reign of error, Constitution shredding and possible malfeasance and corruption that was the subject of bipartisan Congressional revulsion – until Bush appoints his replacement, that is.
But what’s been on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News and apparently for much of the morning? The Michael Vick infomercial hawking dog food from China. As appalling as Vick is, was it really necessary for all three networks to carry the bloviating statements from Atlanta Falcons management?
Nicely played, “news” networks. Hey, we hear Owen Wilson’s in the hospital – get to it, willya? Then you can ignore Gonzales altogether.
* UPDATE: CNN thoughtfully interrupted its Vick coverage momentarily to deliver one of those unrevealing he-said/she-said reports that passes for journalism these days: Democratic apparatchik: “Good riddance;” Republican apparatchik: “There’s no evidence of any wrongdoing.” (Hard to get evidence when no one in the Administration can be bothered to testify before Congress, doofus; anyway, that’s pretty much what die-hard Falcons fans were saying about Vick.) Then back to file footage of Vick walking and talking.
After but one abysmal airing, Fox cancelled "Anchorwoman," its crap reality show about a crap anchorwoman trying to make a name for herself at a crap small-town Texas station. Reviews were largely -- uh, apocalyptic -- but even the notion that critics hated it could scarcely convince viewers to tune in.
Next week, in the same time slot, Fox will offer the hot new reality show "Bowel Movement."
Fox had similarly awful ratings for another reality show, "On the Lot," but since one of its executive producers was Steven Spielberg, they sucked it up and kept airing the show anyway. Its ratings got even worse, making even E! ratings look good by comparison.
Heartened by this, Spielberg announced a new Fox show, "Steven Spielberg's Bowel Movements," which Fox renewed through 2010.
“Parents of minors starring in ‘Kid Nation,’ the controversial new CBS reality show, signed away their rights to sue the network and the show's producers if their child died, was severely injured, or contracted a sexually transmitted disease during the program's taping.”
CBS’s lawyers – whom, I’m sure, enjoyed writing this particular legal document – indemnified themselves against pretty much every bad thing that could ever happen, up to and including every plague and catastrophe mentioned in the Book of Revelation. And 40 sets of parents happily signed the waiver. So Child Protective Services has another 40 families to investigate.
Commenters at Defamer.com have stepped up on this one, saving me the trouble:
* I imagine the average parental response to all this was something along the lines of "Look, are you going to kill my kid or not? I'm already late for my wax."
* This is the same waiver Britney has to sign every time the kids go to K-Fed's house.
* Rock avalanches, hypothermia and "loss of orientation in primitive areas"? When is this show on again?
This entry is dedicated to the Indiana State Fair, which recently banned trans fats in its funnel cakes and all the other crap foods it serves alongside the frayed bungee-jump ropes, rickety, tiny rollercoasters and skeeball kiosks. Having been to the Indiana State Fair, I can say that transforming it into a venue for healthy cuisine is like trying to turn the Special Olympics into Mensa: a sweet but misguided idea, because that’s simply not what it is.
Anyway, some Brits are all in a lather because they discovered that – egad – foods tied to cartoon characters aren’t particularly good for kids. Moreover, “Three-quarters of parents interviewed … said they thought it was irresponsible for companies to feature cartoon characters on unhealthy foods.”
I want to hear from the parents who thought it was a good idea, and then I want to see their kids model their “Husky Child” sportswear.
So here are some of the most egregious examples:
Bratz: Bon Bon Buddies Bratz Fabulous Biscuits contained 24.6g of fat, 15.4g of saturates and 37.6g of sugar per 100g.
The Simpsons, promoting Honey Nut Popcorn from Butterkist with 41.3g sugar per 100g.
Shrek the Third offered tickets if you bought boxes upon boxes of Kellogg's Frosties (37g sugar per 100g).
Spider-Man comics came in Nesquik Chocolate Cereal (36.1g sugar per 100g).
But my favorite was this: “(C)haracters from the film ‘Flushed Away’ on packs of Burton's Jammie Dodgers and on Kellogg's Coco Pops Straws.” Who cares how healthy or unhealthy the snacks were – people actually bought food associated with a movie about London’s sewage system?
So you thought the CNN/YouTube debate was surreal: Now, MySpace and MTV will “host a series of discussions between U.S. presidential candidates and Internet viewers.”
It’ll take place on several college campuses, stream live on both sites and feature 11 candidates from Hilary Clinton to Rudy Giuliani. Audience members can ask questions directly, while online participants can Email, IM or text-message questions, promising all manner of amusing technological glitches.
"Neither of us wanted to see yet another event with a dozen candidates giving consultant-crafted answers," MySpaceTV general manager Jeff Berman told Reuters, adding that the result will be "unfiltered direct conversations." Yeah, will good luck with that. Have they ever seen these candidates? They have a perpetual teleprompter running in their brains; you couldn’t produce a spontaneous moment if you popped a balloon behind their heads.
Of course, the candidates’ stiff efforts to appear “cool” for the “kids,” who are after all “America’s future,” will be outdone only by the myopic craziness promised by the questions:
“What’s your favorite band?” “Don’t you think it’s unfair to have to take finals?” “My regular dealer got busted – do you know somewhere to get some X?” “SUP??!!?1!! KTNXBAI!!11!!”
Despite the advance hype re: Stephen Colbert’s “trainwreck” interview with Richard Branson about the newest member of his Virgin Air fleet, Air Colbert, it proved a bit of a wash, and not just because Branson tossed his mug of water on Colbert. Branson – “the rebel billionaire,” as Colbert repeatedly referred to him – just seemed to be rebelliously playful, hardly angry, when he flung his liquid; Colbert kept his cool, returned his fire – er, water – and Branson didn’t seem to mind, either. Rather than “uncomfortable,” as one advance review described it, it just came across as a comedy bit that wasn’t all that funny.
“The Daily Show’s” Rob-Riggle-in-Iraq thing this week really hasn’t resulted in much sustained hilarity, either (to be fair: not entirely unexpected). Riggle’s going to the doofus persona far too often. Not much of a Jon Stewart interview with Barack Obama tonight, either: The questions were a little too softball-lob-by, allowing Obama a lot of aw-shucks responses about meetin’ the people and the energy of our youth.
But everyone’s entitled to an off night.
The three stages of death Emmy presenting
Presenters at the Emmy Awards, it seems, falls under three categories:
1) This is Mutually Beneficial: The Presenter is hot, but not so hot that s/he couldn’t use some additional publicity, so Presenter’s presence gives his/her show a little more juice and spruces up the ceremony while it’s in its doldrums.
2) I Need Help Promoting My Show: Someone with a new show, or a show that needs a boost in the ratings.
3) I’m Doing You a Favor: Someone so successful that if they said “No” to presenting no feelings would be hurt, but – omigod! – they said “Yes!”
The first batch of Emmy ceremony presenters was announced today, and herewith, we thoughtfully parse them into the aforementioned categories:
This is Mutually Beneficial: Hayden Panettiere of “Heroes,” the cast of “Entourage.”
I Need Help Promoting My Show: Kyle Chandler (“Friday Night Lights”), Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton (“Back To You”), Jimmy Smits (“Cane”), Kate Walsh (“Private Practice”), the cast of “Entourage.”
I’m Doing You a Favor: Steve Carell (“The Office”), Jon Stewart (“The Daily Show with Jon Stewart”), Kiefer Sutherland (“24”), Katherine Heigl (“Grey’s Anatomy”), the cast of “Entourage.”
But, wait, you interject, practically sputtering – how can you possibly put the cast of “Entourage” in all three categories? Are you off your meds, or did you just happen to wander too close to Anne Heche and catch whatever it is she has?
Hear me out, I respond. I almost gave Kiefer Sutherland the same treatment (mainly due to “24’s” stumble last season and its subsequent stagger out of the gate in production for next season), but in the end refrained because, after all, Mr. Sutherland already has his Emmy.
The “Entourage” group, on the other hand, are still trying to make a name for themselves. Yes, Entertainment Weekly does a story about them every other week, but that hasn’t translated into the sort of mainstream hit for HBO that “Sopranos” or “Sex and the City” were. In that way, that makes it a mutually beneficial arrangement.
On the other hand, it seems the heat has drifted from the show a bit, so the “Entourage” guys need the publicity.
On yet another hand, few in Hollywood seem to recognize that fact, and everyone here still loves the little wish-fulfillment fantasy (with a side-order of snark) that is “Entourage.” So the live audience will be far more jazzed to see the show’s cast up onstage (I think they’ve been pegged to present the prestigious Outstanding Achievement in Makeup in a Multiple Camera Production trophy) than most of the viewers at home will be.
The slow drip-drip-drip of information surrounding CBS’s upcoming reality show “Kid Nation,” a kinder-gentler “Lord of the Flies,” is probably starting to wear on the nerves of the network’s and show’s executives, particularly the latest revelation that the New Mexico state attorney’s office warned the production in advance that they were likely breaking the state’s child-labor laws.
From the story:
“Four children received medical treatment for accidentally drinking bleach, one child was burned on her face with hot grease while cooking in an unsupervised kitchen, and most of the children were required to work 14 hours or longer per day. They received a payment of $5,000 for their participation. …
“(T)wo weeks after a state labor inspector was turned away from the site, Andrea R. Buzzard, a New Mexico assistant attorney general, warned in a letter to lawyers for the production that the state did not agree with the network's interpretation of state labor law.
"‘We are not certain that those laws are limited to traditional “employment” relationships,’ Ms. Buzzard wrote, citing part of the state child-labor statutes that say that a child's frequent presence at a work site ‘shall be prima facie evidence that such child is unlawfully engaged in labor.’"
So, here’s what we glean from the story: The producers argued that the children weren’t employees of the network but instead camp attendees. But, understanding they could very well be in some sort of trouble, they wouldn’t allow state officials on the set and ignored requests for copies of the network’s agreements with the children, then bolted as soon as they were finished, rendering any further investigation moot.
“Kid Nation” executive producer Tom Forman obfuscated at length on this subject at TV Press Tour in July:
“I mean, the truth is, I think -- and this may be more information than you want -- it's less child labor laws than labor laws. One of the issues we run into when we make reality television shows or news and documentaries, the participants are just that. They're participants. They're not acting.
“We went ahead and made this show as we make every reality show with the understanding that they're going to do whatever they do, and we're going to tape it. We're not going to consider them actors. We're not going to feed them lines. We're not going to give them set schedules. And on that basis, we didn't see a labor problem.”
At this point, the fact that CBS will be profiting handsomely off the labor of kids to whom they paid a meager $5K each (for 40 days of up-to-14-hour days before the cameras) is going to raise questions not of child labor laws but of child slavery. Their next installment will have to be shot in Singapore.
You can just about hear Forman whining, “Why can’t they take their stupid old laws somewhere else and let us continue to be the Magic Factory we’ve always been? After all, we’re Hollywood, dammit!”
From the outset, “Deadwood” fans have always been the most inventive in their arguments as to why the show should be renewed. Hardly the most successful, obviously, but clever nonetheless.
We’ve been discussing fan attempts to resurrect cancelled shows of late, and for every failure – “Gilmore Girls” (the stars couldn’t be bothered to take The CW’s money no matter how much their fans were addicted to the show), “Everwood” (sure, some fans rented an amusement-park ride to parade before executives’ offices, but then they forgot to show up themselves) and “Veronica Mars” (no matter how rabid your fans may be, if there are less than two million of them, you don’t belong on broadcast-network TV) – there’s the shockingly surprising success of a “Jericho,” which a lot of people (myself included) wrote off when it returned from its midseason hiatus to a sizable drop in viewership.
Nonetheless, thanks to a quirky style of postal terrorism (40,000 pounds of peanuts poured into the CBS offices) and – perhaps even more importantly – Nina Tassler’s discovery of obsessive fan message boards revealing a depth of dedication to the show that she, frankly, didn’t envision (and probably unnerved her just a little), “Jericho” emerged from the ashes of TV’s landscape of nuked shows.
So, back to “Deadwood.” Since the series was on HBO, fans could play a card never before laid on the table: Bring back this show or I’ll cancel my HBO subscription. Didn’t work so well at the time, because, after all, they still had the “Sopranos” finale, and then David Milch’s new show, “John From Cincinnati,” which was desultorily cancelled after but 10 episodes. So this might actually work now, but wait! – “Flight of the Conchords” is so friggin’ brilliant. Damn you, HBO, for reducing the quality gusher to a trickle, albeit a trickle we can’t quit!
The second tactic: After HBO executive Chris Albrecht got into that nastiness in Vegas and re-entered rehab, I got a few Emails from fans vociferously arguing that Albrecht’s alcohol issues proved that he was guilty of some sort of TV-executive malpractice, that his thinking was too fuzzy and blitzed to make sound programming decisions; hence, his decision to cancel “Deadwood.” Again: Not remotely successful, not remotely actionable and probably a little dubious logically (Albrecht certainly managed to keep HBO financially profitable even given his problems), but, yes, brilliantly imaginative.
Fans emerged from the Deadwoodpile to urge critics to press the new HBO executives during TV Press Tour to commit to those two “Deadwood” movies we were promised when Albrecht cancelled the show. We tried, but they proved resistant, not to mention a little obfuscating – they had to have known they would be canceling “John From Cincinnati” in but a few short weeks but couldn’t say so, because they didn’t want to hack off Milch, because he wouldn’t give them those “Deadwood” movies, which they didn’t seem too keen on in the first place, since they kept saying the cast had all moved on.
And now, a “Deadwood” fan sent me a letter she had sent David Milch, which read in part (she granted me permission to reprint it here):
“In your most recent efforts – Deadwood and John from Cincinnati – you channeled an overriding vision of the collective in which each character came to act and sometimes even understand their part in a larger organism. It was a holistic view of the world that enthralled and touched me beyond measure and one that I [foolishly] began to think of as your own perception of it. Imagine my disappointment to find out otherwise…! In reality, sir, you seem to adopt an approach that is far from the Kumbaya vision of ‘we are one’ that you parlay so effectively on television.
“Contrary to what you may believe, Deadwood is not yours to do what you want with. When you put it into the world in 2004, it assumed a life of its own and touched millions of people in myriad ways that you [and no one else] can begin to fathom. While you may not consider yourself under obligation to these nameless and faceless people, your pseudo-philosophy on life would dictate otherwise (...)
“You have waxed lyrical on many an occasion of your interpretation of the artist as an emissary of god; if that is the case, sir, let me ask you think what happens when god's messenger decides to shut up? You seem to have been so blindsided by your ego that you – to use your own lingo –have lost sight of god, and by extension, his people.”
From there, of course, this fan confronted Milch with a put-up-or-shut-up proposition: If you actually buy these mystical horseapples you’re serving up in your series, then you ipso facto owe fans those movies; if not, you’re just another hypocritical hack to which none of your fans own any future allegiance. Brilliant! Well-played!
But there’s one last step to pressure those “Deadwood” reunion films, and here’s my challenge to a “Deadwood” fanatic: Go to imdb.com’s “Deadwood” entry,” click on each cast member and see just how busy they are. Not now, because there’s no script ready, but in a few months, when there very well could be. Based on some of the stuff these people have done, I’m guessing Timothy Olyphant (currently free, per imdb), Ian McShane (all projects in post-production; hence, currently free), Molly Parker (currently working on CBS’s “Swingtown”), Brad Dourif (hell, yeah, he’s available), Robin Weigert (safe to assume she’s currently busy, given an indie film project and a possible return to “Lost”), John Hawkes (shooting some indie, but then, he’s always shooting some indie – anyway, you get the idea; it wouldn’t be as hard to round them up as HBO suggests.
Today at noon East Coast time, a yawn-stifling 9 a.m. here on the West Coast, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and filmmaker Robert Greenwald are holding a press conference decrying what they perceive as the Fox News Channel’s ongoing efforts to lead a propaganda campaign to convince us to attack Iran with the same rudderless zeal with which we attacked Iraq.
Of course, some will argue that Greenwald – producer of the films “Uncovered: The War on Iraq,” “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism,” “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price” and “Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers” is a propagandist himself. Fair enough, but “propaganda” doesn’t necessarily mean lying, and Greenwald at least puts himself in the general neighborhood of facts, something the Fox folks can’t be bothered with when it’s just so much more fun to try to scare people silly, as this video, comparing Fox News Channel rhetoric in the run-up to the war with Iraq with its current blathering, suggests.
More copious Fox drum-beating can be found here.
Whether or not one believes Fox is ratcheting up the hysteria or whether there are enough Kool-Aid addicts for the network to sway opinion in a substantive fashion these days, the chief question is: Just who the heck’s going to fight Iran, anyway? With our military strained to breaking and being forced into tours of duty months longer than any reasonable human could withstand and with the suicide rate within the military jumping shockingly last year, we’re closer to that TV commercial’s bravado about “An Army of One” than we’d like to think.
Of course, some wingnuts are perfectly happy to advocate nuking the Middle East, then having Americans move into those Arab-eradicated territories (radiation levels be damned), then having President Bush instate himself as “President-for-Life.” And when other neo-cons aren’t certain whether such a proposal is a joke or a menace or a good idea, that red-pill-or-blue-pill conundrum from “The Matrix” isn’t feeling so much like science-fiction anymore.
Additional numbers from “High School Musical 2” continue to astound. Thanks to “HSM2” and its halo effect, last week cable network Disney Channel was the third-highest-rated network, period, behind only CBS and Fox. Disney scorched its mother network, ABC – it averaged 5.8 million viewers in primetime; ABC, a mere 4.4 million.
8.4 million watched the film on Saturday, and 7.5 million tuned in (again?) on Sunday. More fun facts, courtesy Disney: two out of three kids aged 6-11 and tweens 9-14 saw “HSM2.” Four out of five girls aged 6-11 saw it. Three out of eight world leaders watched it, two out of seven housepets watched it and 100% of the world’s omnipotent deities saw not only it, but all those who watched it, as well.
Come January, “Mr. Show” alumni on “24” will outnumber “Lost Boys” veterans: TV Guide is reporting that Janeane Garofalo will join the cast as a government agent.
Clearly, it’s type-casting for the sardonic Garofalo (who, like Mary Lynn Rajskub – who plays the perpetually petulant Chloe – appeared intermittently on “Mr. Show,” the sketch-comedy series that was a cult favorite amongst almost everyone, save those who actually worked for HBO): She played a cop in “Cop Land,” a political operative on “The West Wing,” a patriotic-ish crime fighter named the Bearded Clam on “Freak Show” and, otherwise throughout her career, acerbic, wise-cracking slacker gals who would never seek a government job.
So the “24” guys still may not have a clue as to what the plot will be next season, but at least they’re sure to have an interesting cast, and with Garofalo and Rajskub together again maybe the show’ll become the comedy it’s always threatened to evolve into.
As if college students need any more reasons to blow off studying: An online contest will reward one lucky essayist with a HAVA gizmo, which allows you to access your home TV’s cable/satellite/TiVo from your computer, thereby saving you yet another cable/satellite/TiVo bill. In other words, you can basically pirate yourself. (See? College students would benefit most from this, though they’re usually techno-savvy enough to figure out how to access anything they want online for free already, and also, pretty much everyone likes something for free.)
All you need do is click on the above link and cook up some b.s. essay about how great HAVA is. Winner gets the service, and you probably don’t even really have to be a college student to win, just make yourself sound really poor and needy and deserving. Perhaps a heart-rending soliloquy on how dodgy cable service is in the remote, plague-infested Africa jungle where you’re serving the Peace Corps will tug at the judges’ hearts.
Let’s not mince words: Fox’s new reality series, “Anchorwoman,” is a boldly transgressive piece of art that acutely reveals how we’ve allowed ourselves to be intellectually diminished. It’s also an utter, irredeemable piece of sh!t that makes everyone involved with it look like a thoroughgoing lobotomy patient.
Its concept: Lauren Jones (or whatever her name might be; I took scant notes and tossed the press release long ago), a wrestling diva and “Price is Right” model, decides she wants to read TeeVee news. A struggling channel in tiny Tyler, Texas (which I’ve visited: The city’s big contribution to global culture is a Fire-Ant Festival) decides to roll the dice and hire her as a teleprompter reader during the 5 o’clock news.
The Tyler community is scandalized, sort of, but the local talking heads “Anchorwoman” quotes are ever more blitheringly clueless than Lauren herself. The local anchor, bitter than she’s not quite as tall or nearly as blonde, opts to rest on her journalistic laurels, which, punishingly judicious editing suggests, ain’t much. “Anchorwoman’s” brutal subtext is that everyone’s an idiot and we all deserve the crappy news coverage we get.
Or: Conversely, “Anchorwoman,” unwittingly (or, perhaps, otherwise), is an insightfully blistering critique of the utter glib idiocy of TV news (thank God Hal Fishman isn’t here to see this). Because, on the whole, what Fox is revealing in this tiny Texas market is the medium writ large: Pretty faces, smiley-faced stories, cleavages to which attention must be paid (at the risk of sacrificing valuable facts). This almost seems the Fox network’s mea culpa for sister outfit Fox News Channel: We apologize, they’re saying, for reducing public discourse to this abject level.
There’s a cagey visual motif: frequent shots of signs on executives’ doors revealing readings in Braille. Because: A) The blind don’t need the visual bells and whistles that Lauren offers; B) The executives are blind to how they’re eviscerating the art of journalism; C) Both, proving meaningful discourse is doomed.
- “Anchorwoman:” 8 p.m. Wednesday on Fox Channel 11.
BlogTalkRadio is taking credit for resurrecting “Jericho” after CBS cancelled it.
Shaun Daily, host of a “Jericho”-themed program at the site, first suggested sending peanuts to the network as a form of protesting the network’s initially kicking the show to the curb. (You can hear that immortal rise to arms here.)
More than 40,000 pounds of peanuts wound up at the network, prompting Entertainment president Nina Tassler to order seven more episodes to air sometime this upcoming season. She would’ve held out until 80,000 pounds arrived, but the circus elephant specially trained to carry her through the executive suites was getting too big to fit in the hallways.
Hence, a valuable lesson for all network showrunners: Pick something kind of cute and kicky as your series’ visual meme. Recommended: Sprinkles Cupcakes, iPhones, Toyota Priuses. (“Pushing Daisies”’ creator Bryan Fuller is clearly thinking ahead, having his protagonist run a pie shop.)
Not recommended: Fried Twinkies, anvils, AK-47s. (The folks behind “Dirty Sexy Money” and “Big Shots” are clearly not thinking ahead, incorporating plotlines involving trannie hookers.)
Yet another reason not to care about the Emmys: Less than a month before the Sept. 16 event, Ryan Seacrest has been named host of the ceremony.
Usually, of course, they get someone funny.
Usually, of course, they announce the host much earlier.
Usually, of course, they recruit someone who won’t look so out of place as the TV Academy “celebrates” “excellence” within its ranks. And getting the host of a reality competition show seems like a smack in the face of all the scripted programming that will be honored that night.
One of the broadcast’s producers threatened that Seacrest would be “a perfect match for some of the innovative things we have planned."
Amongst the innovations: Forcing supporting acting nominees to perform duets of Ashley Simpson songs; allowing Paula Abdul to burble to the nominees about how they really made their roles their own; and allowing 14-year-old girls to vote for Outstanding Drama and Comedy Series nominees during the ceremony via text-messaging.
One more and we’ll have a new trend – justice in this world.
It was a year ago today that this blog first exploded in the consciousness of about 4 or 5 people and soon became an indispensable fount of wisdom for another 6 or 7. (And let me tell you what a great idea launching a blog in the dead of August, when nothing’s really happening in the world of Television, really is.) Realizing that no one gives a rat’s hind quarter about such arbitrary anniversaries, Your Mayor will simply provide you with but one example of the kind of raves this blog has been receiving –
“Very good site. Nice job.” – Valium without a Prescription. (I think it’s a trade publication.)
– and provide you with a little Trip Down Anxiety Lane, Your Mayor’s Greatest Hits, the entries that have made the other entries worth slogging through:
* Your Mayor’s Gloriously Humiliating Appearance on Fox News.
* In which Your Mayor created a new art form: TV reviews as haikus.
* The leaked Rumsfeld memo, rewritten to refer to the woes befalling Television rather than Iraq. (Seemed like a funny idea at the time.)
* My humble acceptance speech upon being named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year.
* Exclusive: The Bahamian Government’s Anna Nicole Smith Museum!
* A mash-up of “Children of Men” and “American Idol’s” Sanjaya that I thought was pretty funny (other people, not so much).
* Political satire at its most obtuse! President Bush’s statement upon commuting Scooter Libby’s prison sentence is rewritten as ABC’s statement on renewing Your Mayor’s favorite punching bag, “According to Jim.” (Have you noticed a lot of these involve plagiarism?)
There. Now all you newcomers are caught up. Something else as edifying and insightful and absorbing as the above might appear here at any moment, so you’ll want to return and visit often!
Yet another record for the “High School Musical” franchise: “HSM2” debuted last night on the Disney Channel to an all-time record audience for basic cable, 17.2 million viewers. And it’s re-airing tonight and Sunday, so Zac Efron, Vanessa Hudgens and the rest of the gang could reach around 40-million sets of eyeballs in one weekend.
To put this in persepective: Broadcast network programs over the summer have ranked No. 1 for a week without managing even 10 million viewers, and a huge chunk of network fare hasn’t drawn close to half of what “HSM2” did. And broadcast has a far broader reach than Disney Channel has on cable, and numerous viewing parties means the final total may have actually been much larger.
Also: The other big “teen” flick this weekend, the Apatow entertainment machine’s acclaimed “Superbad” (granted, they're aimed at waaay different audiences), earned an impressive $12 million at the box-office on Friday. But that still translates into fewer than two million tickets sold.
Other records: It’s the all-time TV champ in terms of kid viewers 6-11, only the 2004 Super Bowl had more tween viewers and it’s the largest audience for a Friday-night TV show on any platform in more than five years. (Damn, these Disney folks are good at uncorking statistics.)
So it’s safe to say that there’ll be a “High School Musical 3,” and no doubt the Disney leviathan will optimize their profits by making it a theatrical release. As if they haven’t already maximized their income with the CDs, DVDs, games, toys, clothes, etc., etc. Paul Krugman, economist and columnist for the New York Times, estimates that once the “High School Musical” phenomenon is over, only parents in the top 3% income bracket will actually have been able to afford to buy their kids all the affiliated products Disney will have produced.
Now that you’ve spent yet another grueling week at work, how does it feel to suddenly discover that you may, in fact, not exist; that you may possibly just be another random avatar in some computer geek’s sadistic cyber world?
Doesn’t really make all that effort seem like it’s worth it, does it?
Per John Tierney of the New York Times:
“Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.
“But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.”
[snip]
“Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.
“Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century …”
[snip]
“‘My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that,’ (Bostrom) says, ‘is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.’”
Well, that’s enough to drain one of the will to live – er, occupy bandwidth – the notion that we’re nothing more than the deterministic pawns of some cyber-nerd bored enough to cook up West Nile virus, rehabbing celebutards, bobble-head-doll collectors, “The Legend of Bagger Vance,” the Foucault pendulum, American Apparel advertisements, chickpeas and Comedy Central roasts of Flavor Flav.
It blew Keith Olbermann’s mind, too (scroll to the bottom), and so he discussed it with philosophy professor William Irwin:
“OLBERMANN: The classic answer from Descartes to the question of existence, I think therefore I am, perhaps more correctly stated as, a guy clicks a mouse, therefore I am. … Like a super advanced version of the SIMS.
[snip]
“IRWIN: [T]here are three possibilities really. That technologically mature societies go extinct before they reach the stage of being able to produce these kinds of things, in which case nuclear holocaust, that sort of thing. Or, second option, that they simply wouldn‘t do this or would find it boring or ethically troublesome.
“OLBERMANN: Like that has ever stopped science before.
“IRWIN: Unlikely. I would put that as a low probability. The third one is that they would get to this point in this technology and then, perhaps, they would make these worlds. If there were a billion people in such a world, each of whom is running a virtual world with people in it, say a billion people, it becomes a billion to one shot that you are one of the people in the real world.
[snip]
“OLBERMANN: Is human existence a research experiment? A video game? Is somebody winning? Is there a high score?
“IRWIN: Who knows. But, in any case, we are not the players in it if this scenario holds true. We are simply being played. We are the pawns in chess, if you will. Who knows what the point of the game is? Someone‘s science experiment, someone‘s hobby, whatever the case might be.
“OLBERMANN: One of my favorite jokes has always been there‘s evidence that there is a god, but there is just as much evidence that it's clearly a part-time job. That would explain everything. Even if this is a research project somewhere, the guy goes home at night and it could be a million years in between visits. Right?
“IRWIN: It makes a lot of sense when you think about it. The classic question in philosophy is how could this world be the product of an all knowing, all loving, all powerful god? It takes a lot of faith to believe that. However, if this world is simply a virtual simulation, maybe it is run by a fourth grader who has forgot about it or a part-time creator.
“It begins to explain what? Deadly hurricanes, cancer, the Lindsay Lohan scenario and the on going popularity of ‘American Idol.’”
Not to be outdone, Anthony Zuiker has decided to turn his show “CSI: New York” into a virtual game in the online digital village Second Life. Ellen Gray of the Philadelphia Daily News (home of our favorite terrorist-loving lunatic) (but don’t worry; Ellen’s cool) reports that Zuiker’s creating an episode in which Gary Sinise’s character “will download an avatar and chase a killer into the virtual-world community.”
"What you'll see is Gary Sinise's avatar be downloaded . . . He'll walk and he'll fly," Zuiker told Gray.
And then, you’ll be able to go to Second Life and help solve murders yourself:
“(T)here's a Zuiker Blog, where you can go in and see a dead body and then give your opinion about what happened to the body, and then I'll rank, 1 through 10, the Top 10 people,” Zuiker, whom you think would have plenty to do, seeing as he already oversees three hourlong TV dramas, declared.
So, now you can spend your weekend pondering whether your miserable existence even exists. Have a good time! – oh, why am I even bothering talking to you? You may not even be you.
This just in: Merv Griffin was wasn’t was gay
Ray Richmond, the Hollywood Reporter TV critic and blogger who earlier this week dismissed my magnum opus “The History of Television” as a work of parody, is off causing more trouble.
Richmond, who worked with Merv Griffin during the last year of his talk show, today in the Hollywood Reporter just flat came out and said what was pretty much on everyone’s mind:
“Merv Griffin was gay.
“There. Is that plain enough for ya? No gossip, no scandal, no snickering behind the back. Just reality. Why should that be so uncomfortable to contemplate? Why is it so difficult to write? Why are we still so jittery even about raising the issue in purportedly liberal-minded Hollywood, in 2007?”
And for his troubles, his story got scratched from the Reporter’s website. (The above link is from his blog, where the story remained.)
Richmond crabbed about it to another blogger:
“Q. Do you think they were pressured to take it down?
“A. Sure. I’m sure it was taken down because there was fear of litigation, and that the post was libelous and/or defamatory. And I certainly don’t believe that to be the case.
“Q. Have you talked to your editors or bosses at The Hollywood Reporter?
“A. I will have discussions with them, and I will hope at some point we can have it restored online. It seems that scotching the post gives the appearance of liability when there isn’t any. It was simply a factual, very informed discussion of the larger issue of the media’s difficulty in allowing someone to be labeled as gay in the mainstream, as if that is somehow a huge shame. My whole reason for doing the piece for the Reporter was to shine a light on that fact. Unfortunately that appears to be the case...even internally.”
And so – ta-daa! – The story returned, albeit with changes.
Not a good start for the Reporter’s new editor, Elizabeth Guider, who misguidedly ordered the story yanked, which basically only resulted in egg on some faces.
Were Griffin not dead or the fact not so well known – the Daily News’ Greg Hernandez mused on the possibility immediately after he died on his Out in Hollywood blog, for just one example – then Richmond might’ve overreached. But his point is an excellent one: We’re all adults here. What’s the value in being so childish on matters of sexuality?
(Though I’m still miffed about the whole “parody” thing. That was a meticulously researched project, dammit!)
Bonus Merv fact: His final project, the game show “Merv Griffin’s Crosswords,” will debut in Los Angeles Monday, Sept. 10 at 3 and 3:30 p.m. on KNBC Channel 4.
“Many of our employees contribute significant hours of overtime during our production season. This is quite common within the television industry,” a publicist blithely informed Page Six, confirming the overtime.
So the Page Six-er’s hit the Dashboard function on their iMacs and did the math: If said employee worked a five-day week, she averaged 18.5 hours of work a day, whereas were she working all week with no days off, she was only clocking 13.2 hours a day. Slacker.
As we noted, TV Guide reported that Oprah pulls down $260 million per year. Would it kill her to take a pay cut of, say, a million a year and hire a couple of extra people so the rest of her team can have lives?
A running joke on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” is the green screen before which its ostensibly globe-trotting correspondents report. Next week, the green screen gets a rest, as the show’s Rob Riggle actually decamped to Iraq to gather some comedy material. (Because, you know, if there’s comedy material to be mined, it’s clearly in Iraq.)
From the press release: “While on this trip to Iraq, Riggle toured with Horatio Sanz, Rob Huebel and Paul Scheer performing comedy sketches for the troops as part of the USO/Multi National Corps – Iraq entertainment tour entitled ‘Operation Feel the Heat.’ A Major in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Riggle served in Liberia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, and received more than 19 medals and ribbons, including the Combat Action Ribbon.”
He’ll also show the new titanium and carbon-composite C-leg with a microprocessor-controlled pneumatic knee that he got there when his own got misplaced during a comedy bit in which he pestered some Sunni insurgents.
Meanwhile, Ben Karlin, the guy who polished “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” into the sleek, shiny objects they now are, has signed a deal with HBO. What he’ll do for them is either vague or all-encompassing: He’ll develop series, specials, TV films, even theatrical releases. He will be paid 70-quadrillion dollars.
I haven’t addressed Joseph Gannascoli’s pool-cue-to-die-for controversy – you know, the “Sopranos” actor whose character was sodomized and beaten to death with a pool cue took it on himself to market potential instruments of hate crime – and subsequent withdrawal from the market. Because, you know, there aren’t many ways to approach this that don’t involve offending those who want to protect our precious future.
But you do sort of wonder what anyone involved in this was thinking. Gannascoli has naturally destroyed the good will he engendered from the gay community with his portrayal of a gay mob guy, and who in their right mind would buy something that would be associated with such a grisly sex and hate crime? It’s almost like some half-baked scheme that Chris Hansen and his “To Catch a Predator” crew would cook up.
On “24,” of course, Jack Bauer can’t call for a timeout. But “24’s” producers can, and in fact have for a second time while in production for the upcoming season.
We previously discussed the first suspension of production, when Fox wouldn’t pony up for some location shooting in Africa (couldn’t they’ve shot in the Africa-world section of EPCOT Center?), necessitating a retooling of the plotline. Since then, producers have announced that Cherry Jones will join the cast as the President of the United States – and that’s about it. Production has been pushed back from late July to late August and now to mid-September.
(Apparently, the producers weren’t sufficiently impressed with the storyline I offered them, gratis, at the time of the first delay.)
In a year’s time, “24” has gone from being an Emmy-winning drama to, thanks to the disappointment of the past season and now these delays, a production perceived to be in trouble. But, honestly: After featuring a President in league with Russian terrorists, an equally corrupt Vice President, an assassination of a former President and the detonation of a nuclear bomb in the U.S., where do you go from there?
Maybe the producers could borrow a page from the James Bond playbook and, “Casino Royale”-like, revert to a less fantastical scenario with less crazy, where’d-that-come-from? plotting (only avoid the 90 minutes of poker playing, ’cause that stuff drags). I’ve also thought they’ve missed a good bet by not having a season with Jack as a mercenary in some overseas hellhole (why not, since they’ve just about killed off everyone else in the cast at this point?).
Anyway, best of luck to them, because not even Jack Bauer can save people from low ratings.
Feel free to share your thoughts on what'd make a great - or serviceable, or even stupid - plotline for the upcoming season. Who knows? They might get so desperate they'll use yours.
As the Republican War Machine sputters, the wheels, it seems, are likewise rattling off Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel. First, we have this report that Wikipedia entries are being tidied up or mucked with, depending on whether you work for Fox or are MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, from computers inside Fox News. Bill O’Reilly’s sexual harassment suit, for example, got loofah’d from his Wikipedia bio, while Olbermann got discretely smeared.
To be fair, Fox News is hardly the only perpetrator: Computers inside The New York Times and even the Vatican have offered some stilted editorializing on Wikipedia. Stephen Colbert, who elevated Wikivandalism to an art form, suddenly has a lot to answer for.
OK, so on that one, we’ll just say that Fox News is just keeping up with the Joneses. But this next item offers sliminess on only a level Fox News can manage: Fox’s John Gibson mocked Jon Stewart’s heartfelt monologue on the first night he aired after Sept. 11, 2001, and called him a “phony.” And he did this, by way of justifying that lunatic Philadelphia Daily News column begging for another terrorist attack.
Anyone who heard what Stewart said that night knew he was speaking from the heart. In fact, the fact that Stewart has gotten even more obstreperous since then speaks not to his phoniness but to his anger over how the country was so quickly divided following that sudden burst of patriotic fervor and the belligerence of those still trying to attack critics of the war. Still, Fox News (which recently cancelled its ripoff of “The Daily Show,” apparently since O’Reilly et al were consistently funnier) persists in painting critics of this Administration as unhinged, leftist lunatics, which means that only about 70% of the country are unhinged, leftist lunatics.
Murdoch’s crew doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo: Although Fox News, by damning anyone leaning left of the far right, may have helped usher us into this war, there are precious few folks marching in lockstep behind their banner these days. But that doesn’t really matter, because cable TV only needs the Kool-Aid-drinking True Believers to keep watching to draw decent ratings, and that’ll always be enough for Fox News. On the other hand, more people seem to be joining the ranks of the reality-based community, as a Bush Administration guy (suspected to be Karl Rove) once disparaged them to the New York Times, though a few too many seem willing to check out of reality altogether and focus on the troubled starlet du jour.
Hiram Johnson, a Republican senator in California, stated, during World War I, “The first casualty, when war comes, is truth,” and he never even saw the Fox News Channel: He died on Aug. 6, 1945, the day the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
“It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” maybe the funniest sitcom currently in production (certainly, the most gleefully offensive), won’t return for its third season until next month (an extremely problematic scheduling decision on FX’s behalf – even were it not on Thursday, the week’s most hyper-competitive evening, it’d still risk getting buried under the avalanche of the broadcast networks’ new fall launches), but they’re offering a sneak-preview episode today through Aug. 23 at the show’s MySpace site.
Here’s how good this show is: The offering in question, “Mac is a Serial Killer,” probably doesn’t rate in the top 50% of episodes in “Sunny/Phillie’s” oeuvre, and yet it’s still very funny. It’s kind of sloppily plotted, relying on a fairly rote communications misunderstanding and even foggier thinking than the characters usually manage. But the scenes that save it are so deliriously funny that those shortcomings almost don’t matter.
For the uninitiated: “Sunny/Phillie” concerns four abjectly self-centered and epically imbecilic cretins, Mac (series creator Rob McElhenney), Charlie (Charlie Day, who also writes), Dennis (Glenn Howerton, who also also writes) and Dee (Kaitlin Olsen) and the last two’s demented dad Frank (Danny DeVito). When they’re not stabbing one another in the back or doing something spectacularly dubious, they run a crap bar that somehow manages to stay open.
So, in this sneak peak, a serial killer is dismembering attractive blondes in the town, prompting the guys into a debate as to whether Dee qualifies as a potential victim (she’s the only one who seems – adamantly and, even, hopefully – to think so). Somehow, this segues into Frank’s theory that Mac’s recent behavior pegs him as the serial killer, and he’s gonna get the chainsaw to prove it. Mac’s real secret, however, almost proves even more revolting to the group: “It’s not that I’m ashamed of you,” he tells the person he’s dating; “I’m ashamed of me.” (You can imagine how well that goes over.)
Throw in a clever “To Catch a Predator” parody and you have another winsome slice of anarchy from the most demented brain trust currently working in TV. Comedy fans can only hope this show doesn’t get lost in the fall season’s Thursday crush.
Another terrific episode of "Mad Men" tonight: Don's (Jon Hamm) winning an advertising award brings an unwanted repercussion: The appearance of his long lost brother, who tells him their mother is dead. "Good," he replies.
More trouble for Don: His secretary Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) overhears his mistress (Rosemarie DeWitt) calling him, beseeching him for sex. More repercussions, and this ping from his wife (January Jones): "You probably know more about him than I do," she tells Peggy.
And boy, are these guys petty, and venal, and self-destructive, and all that: When a colleague gets a short story published in Atlantic Monthly, wormy Pete (Vincent Kartheiser) gets so jealous he implores his new wife to seduce her first lover into getting him published. She succeeds, sort of, humiliating Pete all the more.
"Mad Men" continues to be rich in character and dialogue and the small incident; there's no big, splashy showdowns or shouting to the rooftops here, which might explain why only about a million people or so are watching it any given Thursday (still, that's a lot better than what AMC usually does). Nonetheless, if it keeps up at this rate (and the next couple of episodes are pretty good, too), the show threatens to enter the pantheon of greatness. But don't hold that against it; just enjoy.
- "Mad Men:" 10 tonight, AMC.
Life may be miserable for just about everyone in “Rescue Me,” but that doesn’t mean they still can’t shoehorn in one of those bizarrely improbable sex scenes for Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary), and tonight, it’s Gina Gershon who does the honors. Last week, she stuck her phone number in his pocket in front of his date; this week, he phones her up, is told, “Get over here right now,” obeys, is immediately groped, is asked, “You don’t think I’m being too forward, do you?” and we’re off to the races. Oddly enough, it doesn’t end all that satisfyingly for Tommy.
Boy, this episode is all over the place. One minute, they’re staging an intervention for Teddy (Lenny Clarke) and Maggie (Tatum O’Neal) – when told they want to discuss her “problem,” Maggine replies “Which one?”; Teddy demands of Tommy, “Does being sober make your life any easier?”; when Tommy responds, “Not really, but …” Teddy offers a defiant, “There you go!” – and discuss having Gavin family AA meetings, but that’s the end of that. (One imagines those meetings will appear in future episodes, but including one here could’ve tied this episode together a little, and no doubt would’ve no doubt been mordantly funny, as well.) Then, there’s another NYPD/FDNY hockey scrum, with Tommy suited up to play for the cops in honor of his late brother – there could’ve been a lot of potential in that, as well, but they dispatch that in just a few minutes.
And Janet (Andrea Roth) and Sheila (Callie Thorne) have a little skirmish over custody over Janet’s baby, and there’s a quick fire scene offering Tommy some heroic derring-do, and Leary gets to deliver another one of those Emmy-clip soliloquies about 9/11, life, death, love, etc., etc. There’s about three episodes worth of incident crammed in here, but like that sex scene with Gershon that opens the episode, it’s all rushed and doesn’t provide much of a payoff.
Oh, and remember how executive producer Peter Tolan promised that Jerry’s suicide would result in the other characters ruminating over his loss? Not so much – still.
- “Rescue Me:” 10 tonight; FX.
CBS today introduced (sort of) the stars of their upcoming reality provocation, “Kid Nation,” which, as we’ve mentioned, has become controversial thanks to the way it skirted labor regulations and pulled kids out of school to engage in what the network will describe as a “social experiment” (unless they realize they’ve burned those words to the ground in using them to describe “Big Brother”).
They introduced the kids by their first names and ages only, then added ostensibly interesting tidbits and quotes. Here’re a few that might actually be edifying. Then again, maybe not.
ANJAY (12)
Political views: "If I could hold one office in politics it would be Secretary of the State, so I could suggest the policies for the future of the U.S.A."
Role Model: "Mahatma Gandhi, because he gained India's independence without firing a single shot or shedding a drop of blood."
BLAINE (14)
My Perfect Day: "There is nothing I like better than to spend the day at the beach, waiting on the perfect wave to surf on my favorite board."
CAMPBELL (10)
If I could switch places with someone: "I would like to switch places with the President of the United States so that I could perform the daily duties and protect the wildlife."
COLTON (11)
Accomplishments: "My football team made it to the playoffs and was named the All-Star team. Also, I won my first belt buckle at the Wadsworth Rodeo."
GIANNA (10)
When I grow up I want to be: "I want to be an actress or President of the United States."
GUYLAN (11)
Goals and Aspirations: "To stop global warming; to seek out new life and civilizations and to boldly go were no man has gone before."
LAUREL (12)
If I could write one law: "I would make a 'no bullies' law. I believe bullies are truly cowards and I think if bullies were gone the world would be a better place."
LEILA (9)
Favorite hobbies or sports: "I have been doing beauty pageants since I was a baby. I usually do about 15-20 pageants a year. I also enjoy riding horses with my oldest brother at the barn and going to my other brother's high school football games."
If I could change one thing in the world: "I would want to make people more honest and nice with each other."
MADISON (11)
Goals and aspirations: "I have always dreamed of being an actress, being in movies, and in many plays."
Quote: "If I could change one thing in the world I would change people's desire to be perfect. NO ONE is perfect, and you don't need to be a Barbie to be loved. You are perfect in someone's eyes."
MICHAEL (14)
If I could write one law: "I would allow gay marriage. I think it's time to stick to equal rights."
NATASHA (13)
When I grow up I want to be: "I'm still finding my place in the world and I'm not absolutely sure what I want to do when I'm older. I'm young and I'm still experimenting my skills in different subjects so I want to first find my strengths and weaknesses and then go from there on what I'll be most committed to."
NATHAN (11)
If I could switch places with someone: "The President of the United States, so that I could run the country and make all the rules."
RANDI (11)
If I could write one law: "No one over the age of 65 is allowed to smoke. Also, we would all have to go back to riding horses."
SOPHIA (14)
If I could write one law: "I would outlaw ignorance. I would write a law that said that everyone must be literate and aware of what is going on in the world around them."
TAYLOR (10)
Miscellaneous: "I am passionate about pageants because I want to be Miss America or Miss USA one day. Also, I enjoy hunting for arrowheads with my family. I have over 2,000 arrowheads in my collection."
“Americans, especially Americans on the left, love discrimination. Not that they love to practice discrimination; they love to deplore the fact of discrimination. And they love to propose strategies for lessening it: affirmative action, the celebration of diversity, the promotion of a culture of respect.
“The reason we love those strategies … is that they involve cosmetic changes that allow us to feel good about ourselves while also allowing us to turn our eyes away from the economic inequalities that remain untouched as we busily respect everyone in sight. …
“So bring on the cavemen. If … the differences we ritually complain about are the differences we love (because beating our breasts about them is a cheap form of virtue), any controversy that the show might provoke will fit right into the society’s unwillingness to contemplate real social change.”
“The cavemen are black? I thought they were gay.”
Bad news/good news/more bad news regarding Your Mayor’s struggle to get the clueless boobs at PBS to hire him to serve as a highly-paid consultant/talking-head “expert”/author of the coffee-table book version of the Service’s impending documentary miniseries, “The History of Television.”
Bad news: PBS, self-abnegatingly, persists in ignoring me.
Good news: Attention has been paid.
More bad news: Said attention comes from the scurrilous reprobate Ray Richmond, the Hollywood Reporter’s TV critic, in his blog pastdeadline.com.
Longtime readers of this blog will recall when Richmond scandalously libeled me as being “clearly very ill and in need of new meds to keep his schizophrenia in check, as will become instantly obvious upon reading his blog,” not to mention “marvelously twisted and sublime,” adding his faux hope that “the voices inside your head pipe down real soon.”
Well, this time, the rapaciously repellant Richmond has the temerity to insinuate that I have an opportunistic M.O. in my valiant effort to explicate, soberly, said “History of Television:”
“Kronke wants to either write a parody tome or get hired as a talking head/expert and has taken the unusual step of openly campaigning for both jobs by penning his proposal right on his blog. Think of it: marketing your qualifications for one job while fulfilling the obligations of another. Brilliant! Bravo, I say!”
OK, I’ll accept the “brilliant” and “Bravo!” part of that assessment. But where does this so-called “Mr. Richmond” arrive at the notion that my carefully researched “History of Television” is a “parody?” His glibly withering condemnation of my work sinisterly undercuts my burgeoning reputation as a “talking head/expert,” as well as my potential for future income.
Mr. Richmond’s critical assessment of my earnest endeavor to enrich society when it comes to explicating to PBS publicists what they’re f@cking promoting is admirable, but, of course, utterly misguided.
Honestly: I haven’t attempted to contact PBS publicists (most networks check in on TV bloggers, but PBS, well, PBS, they’re a little too refined to give a sh!t about what people have to say about them, even when someone’s trying to restore honor to their network), so they may not realize what insight is being dispensed here.
Hence: Here’re some PBS Emails. Use them at your discretion. But, be advised, whoever inspires a positive response via their Email from PBS will receive a bunch of TV-Press-Tour-tchotchkes. (How cool this is: You might get a CourTV punching guy in which you can place the photo of the man who’s most done you wrong, as well as a Police coffee-table book, something from HBO’s recently cancelled “John from Cincinnati,” some crappy toy truck from the History Channel’s “Trucks Who Kill Human Men” or whatever it’s called, and a whole lot of other junk that I need to clear out of my place.)
OK: So you have to sell “The History of Television” to the point that PBS responds to me that they’re A) either excited about my insights or B) appalled that I’m alive.
Here’re who you should convince that Your Mayor has documentarian insights:
Phil Piga: ppiga@pbs.org
Ellen Dockser: ellen_dockser@wgbh.org
Olivia Wong: olvia.wong@wgbh.org
GSN will this weekend air a whole mess of game shows produced by Merv Griffin, who died Sunday. But you’ll have to get up early on the West Coast if you want to partake.
On Saturday, from 10 a.m.-3 p.m. EST (7 a.m.-noon PCT), it’s all “Wheel of Fortune,” all the time. Included – hold your breath – will be Vanna White’s 1982 debut.
Sunday, it’s “Jeopardy!” and the million-buck masters tournament of champions episodes.
They’re also offering a couple of things featuring Griffin himself: “Play Your Hunch,” which was Merv’s first network gig, and “To Tell the Truth,” featuring him as guest-host, Sunday at midnight and 12:30 a.m. (PCT), respectively.
How bad are things at CBS News? Page Six is reporting that professional dancers stormed the offices and forced the “CBS Evening News” staff to dance to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller:” “A CBS insider claimed morale is so low over Katie Couric's continued horrible ratings that executive producer Rick Kaplan plotted the pick-me-up after seeing a YouTube clip in which inmates of a Filipino prison grooved to the song.”
Maybe it’s just me, but I wouldn’t want to associate my news staff with Filipino prison inmates in any fashion.
And more: “A CBS News flack insisted, ‘Morale is actually so high, we not only produce a network news broadcast daily but we also have our own choreographer for good times. When morale is low, you hand out Kool-Aid. Everyone knows that.’”
That quote is so lame that it must’ve been made up. That, or CBS has just thrown in the towel.
We called it a while back (though we were hardly alone): Mitch Yost won’t be getting back in the game anytime soon, as HBO has fed David Milch’s “John From Cincinnati” to "Deadwood's" pigs.
This was actually probably foreseeable back in January, when Milch presided over a TV Press Tour session that left most critics just scratching their heads in bewilderment (click here for a distilled version of it or here for the whole messy thing). TV critics don’t like to be made to think they’re dumb, even if they are, and on that day Milch had most of the room feeling like Kindergarteners.
Boyoboy, the “Deadwood” fans are going to be apoplectic now. First, HBO cancelled “Deadwood” – a show with a feverish cult base – so that Milch could pick preciously at philosophical string theories with “John,” with nary a “Deadwoodian” c@cks#ck&r” to be heard. Then, as we noted last month, the network’s new brain trust seemed less than sanguine about the chances of those two promised “Deadwood” movies ever being realized (Milch is tuckered out, too hard to reunite the cast, etc., etc.).
Those suits said they wanted to be in the David Milch business, as they say, but for the time being, they ain’t. They’re gathering more coffins for Alan Ball, however: They’ve greenlit the “Six Feet Under” producer’s latest, “True Blood,” based on a series of “Southern Vampire” books. In this world, vampires drink synthetic blood imported from Japan and so a Louisiana small-town waitress (Anna Paquin) who can read minds decides to date one (Stephen Moyer).
And they thought “John from Cincinnati” was recherché.
You know that thing we did last week about Harvey Keitel joining the cast of “Criminal Minds?” Eh, not so much.
Instead, Joe Mantegna – an actor with a far more affable persona – will join the cast in the fifth episode of the upcoming season. Though, if the press release is to be believed, he’s joining the show to work the craft-services table:
“He's an incredible actor, a genuinely nice person and, as a fellow Chicagoan, I can tell you he makes fantastic Italian Beef sandwiches and Chicago Style Hot Dogs,” said executive producer Ed Bernero.
Like Keitel, however, he has a role in his past that’ll help him fit right in with the show’s high twisted factor: In David Mamet’s terrific “Homicide,” he played a Jewish detective who allowed himself to be seduced by a Jewish group into terrorizing a neo-Nazi group.
Meanwhile, Mandy Patinkin shot one last scene to ostensibly provide closure for his character on the series. Sources told TVGuide.com that no one in the cast wanted to work with him after his 11th-hour abandonment of the show.
I spoke with a couple of the cast members during TV Press Tour just after the Battleship Patinkin departed the “Criminal Minds” waters, and they didn’t sputter the sort vitriol that squares with that scenario. Paget Brewster, in fact, seemed still to consider the guy quite lovely and said she hoped to keep in touch with him and wasn’t at all miffed that he might’ve torpedoed the first really successful show, ratings-wise, upon which she has had a starring role.
Memo to next producer who hires Mandy to star on their show: Go ahead, let him sing “Danny Boy” once, even if it’s not germane to your plotline. It may not help in the long run, but then again, it might buy you an extra season before he bolts.
TMZ has more video of paparazzi-abusing celebrities: This time, it’s “’Til Death’s” Brad Garrett popping one of their stalkerazzi. True, another guy was baiting Garrett over an apparently racist remark, not the cameraguy in question, but you wonder what value the footage would’ve had if Garrett had simply gotten in his car and driven away.
Per TMZ: “(T)he 6'8" behemoth reached his boiling point when the same black photog questioned him about the alleged comment. Apparently confused, Garrett approached TMZ's cameraman instead and unleashed his right hand, smashing the camera into the photog's face.” At which point the cameraman, apparently unharmed, kept shooting, beginning to bait Garrett himself.
We’ve previously discussed “CSI’s” Gary Dourdan’s going after a TMZ cameraman; additionally, Matt Dillon also gave one of their employees a little love tap, so that makes it a trend. (TMZ histrionically described this altercation – and even “altercation” seems too severe a word – by saying Dillon “smacked the s**t out of his camera.” As a commenter noted, “He barely did anything. You guys are such babies. You're annoying people so don't expect to be treated differently.”)
Commenters on the Garrett thwack also pointed out: “Once again..... it's never the fault of the TMZ photographer, much easier to blame the other guy. Keep your cameras out of people's faces and there won't be any problem;” “The paparazzi deserve every bitch slap they get. What a bunch of bottom feeders;” “Good for him. You bitches cross the line EVERY time you get close enough to get smacked. Any normal human would have done the same.”
One wonders if TMZ’s business plan expects income from lawsuits filed against celebs who snap. Because, you know, I can’t really think of many people who’d tune in to watch footage of Gary Dourdan or Matt Dillon or Brad Garrett simply strolling down a sidewalk or through a parking lot (actually, I can’t really think of many more people hungry to view these sort of brief, pointless showdowns, either). These camera guys aren’t going to get any attention with uneventful footage.
Obviously, TMZ and the paparazzi in general have every right to engage in these public roundelays, but just because they can doesn’t mean they should be proud of it. It’s not like they’re making some sort of positive contribution to our society at large, just making us look meaner and more blithering and clueless and …
Oh, hey, what’s up with Britney and K-Fed’s custody battle?
What do you think? Do paparazzi go too far? Or are they suffering for their art, and so now it’s our turn?
The name Rubin Postaer and Associates may mean nothing to you, but they’re a huge media buyer on the West Coast. As such, it behooves them to divine broadcast network trends before anyone else, and they essentially deliver. Chuck Bachrach, a 40-year veteran in the advertising trenches, last year foresaw (as did many critics, but, surprisingly, few network executives) that the glut of serialized dramas would result in fierce cannibalism; that few of those shows would survive. And so it came to pass.
RPA was thoughtful enough to send me their projections for the 2007-08 season, a binder bulging with data and conjecture about which networks will win/lose/draw this year, and I herewith am thoughtful enough to condense RPA’s hard work down to the hardscrabble factoids, on a night-by-night basis, with you, you lucky, lucky (illegitimate children).
(Note: I’m not describing what the new shows are about; if you don’t know at this point, the networks have failed abysmally at their jobs. If you’re curious about certain shows, leave a comment and I’ll describe them for you in a future entry.)
MONDAY
RPA thinks NBC’s new lineup – “Chuck,” “Heroes” and “Journeyman” – has a chance of clicking with viewers, and that ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars” will invariably help the network on a night when it has sucked wind since losing “Monday Night Football.” They think these networks will wrest the ratings title from the evening’s perennial winner, CBS, and that in the fall, Fox’s combo of “Prison Break” and “K-Ville” won’t work too well.
Me, I think RPA likes “Journeyman” too much and doesn’t appreciate CBS’s “The Big Bang Theory” and ABC’s “Samantha Who?” enough. But I agree that CBS faces a major challenge this season here from the networks RPA cites.
TUESDAY
RPA likes The CW’s “Reaper” as much as critics do, but likes Fox’s “New Amsterdam” (its placeholder for “American Idol”) far better than buzz otherwise suggests. Like everyone else, it hates ABC’s “Cavemen” and “Carpoolers.” It expects Fox to win (largely on the strength of “House”) and thinks CBS’s “Cane” will break that network’s “Judging Amy” curse of abject failure at 10 p.m.
Me: Never thought I’d say this, but the best show on this night (aside from “House”) is on The CW: “Reaper.” Were it not on opposite “House,” and were it not on The CW (which has the credibility problem that dogged UPN, which could never transform “Veronica Mars” into a success because not nearly enough people believed UPN would air a quality show), it’d be a sure-fire hit.
WEDNESDAY
RPA thinks The CW, again, will succeed, with “America’s Next Top Model” and new, WB-friendly “Gossip Girl.” Otherwise, it’s not particularly bullish on the other new shows (including Fox’s “Back to You,” CBS’s “Kid Nation” and NBC’s “Bionic Woman” and “Life”), though it thinks ABC has a promising lineup with “Pushing Daisies,” “Private Practice” (in particular, given that it’s a “Grey’s Anatomy” spinoff) and “Dirty Sexy Money.”
Me: Pretty much everyone at Press Tour loved “Pushing Daisies,” though many of the critics fretted over its chances at finding a sizable-enough audience. And there’s a sizable contingent that thinks “Bionic Woman” may be critic-proof. Otherwise, RPA seems pretty much on the money.
THURSDAY
RPA thinks CBS should remain on top, thanks to moving “Without a Trace” back to the night, but thinks Fox’s “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” and “Kitchen Nightmares” will finally make it a contender on this night. They’re not convinced NBC’s comedies and “ER” or ABC’s new “Big Shots” will be players.
Me: It’s a wildly competitive night, but RPA’s contention that quality won’t result in success is probably correct.
FRIDAY
RPA’s not all that interested, given that viewing levels on Fridays are seriously waning, but predict success for CBS.
Me: Whatever.
SATURDAY
Who cares? Certainly not the networks.
SUNDAY
RPA sees big trouble ahead for CBS, given “Viva Laughlin” (which many see as competing with “Cavemen” for garnering the quickest cancellation of the fall) and “Shark’s” move out of a protected timeslot. NBC’s football and ABC’s “Desperate Housewives” and “Brothers & Sisters” will remain strong and The CW might finally have something with “Life Is Wild.”
Me: What RPA said. Did James Woods convey to CBS executives that he was getting burned out on working on a TV schedule? Because that’s what flopping “Shark” and “Without a Trace” suggests – that they want to have a reason for canceling “Shark” without blaming the star.
Your Mayor must have some pretty avid fans, if these Urban Dictionary definitions of “Kronke” are any indication. (Warning: They’re not particularly nice.)
Full disclosure: Your Mayor never quite got the hoopla surrounding the tragic death of Princess Diana. (Even England’s Guardian still isn’t sure what to make of it.) Tragic and senseless as it was, it seemed the outpouring of grief came from people who should’ve had something better to do (her family and friends excluded, of course). Though, in retrospect, it did result in the excellent film “The Queen,” so silver linings and all that.
That said, I’ll shamelessly plug WE tv’s auction of one of her frocks – or, per WE’s press release, “the famed pale blue silk chiffon evening dress … which Lady Diana Spencer Princess of Wales wore to the Cannes Film Festival in 1987 and at the opening of Miss Saigon in 1989.” This, part of WE “celebrat(ing) Princess Diana’s life and legacy” and plugging some of its programming: “Diana Revealed,” as if there’s any more to reveal at this point, and “Diana: The Night She Died,” which gives voice to sundry conspiracy theorists on the accident – er, “accident.” Both premiere Aug. 31, at 8 and 10 p.m., respectively. (Lifetime, too, is jumping on the Lady Di bandwagon, with a TV movie, “The Murder of Princess Diana,” starring “House’s” Jennifer Morrison – no, not as Diana, thankfully; as a journalist who witnesses the tragedy and is convinced that it was no mere car wreck.)
More on the gown: “The pale blue silk chiffon evening dress of classic style is designed by Catherine Walker and has a strapless bodice composed of draped and tucked fabric with a crossover yoke. The skirt falls straight, with an abundance of draped fabric that complements the fitted bodice, and is accompanied by a matching long stole of the same material.”
In case you’re hoping to wear it after you empty your piggy bank at eBay, the dimensions are: Bust: 36, waist: 29, center back length from top of dress to hem: 50”. The zipper is 15” long. The stole measures 126” x 22” when laid flat.
Starting bid is $125,000; proceeds go to charity. So, it’s win-win: You get a piece of history, WE helps needy children and bolsters its schedule. Oh, except for Diana herself: She doesn’t win so much.
Merv Griffin may have lived the 30 most lucrative seconds in human history. He was noodling around on his piano when he created what became one of America's best-known tunes: the theme for his game show, “Jeopardy!”
I spoke to Merv Griffin – who died today at age 82 of prostate cancer – some years back, on the occasion of his winning BMI’s President’s Award. Yes, the Emmy-winning TV producer and hotelier also won a songwriting prize.
“It must be the strangest award they've ever given — I'm a guy who wrote a 14-second song and then turned around and did it in another key,” Griffin noted. “I've written the shortest, most recognizable song. There was a list compiling the shortest songs: ‘Happy Birthday to You’ is 17 seconds. ‘Jeopardy’ is 14 seconds. So I rewrote it in another key, then added the ‘bum-bump’ to get it to 30 seconds, which was the amount of time contestants needed to write the question to the Final Jeopardy answer. Now, it's played at sporting events; I've played it with the Boston Pops in a huge arrangement. It's one of the most lucrative themes in history.”
Griffin - who was in the first week of production on a new game show, “Merv Griffin’s Crosswords,” when he died - also wrote the theme for “Wheel of Fortune. “I visualized that wheel going around and around when writing it,” he recalled. “They've performed it a number of ways — 10 years ago, they did it with a big band; that was a great arrangement. Today, it's a kind of nondescript rock & roll arrangement that's more annoying than anything else.”
Griffin, of course, also hosted talk shows (he helped launch the careers of Richard Pryor, Jerry Seinfeld and Lily Tomlin) until it wore him down: “When I went off in 1986, I was down to listening to soap opera stars solve the world's problems, which was driving me nuts,” he joked. Those soap stars irritated him in a way that a cow who crapped on the stage of his late-night talk show did not. “I said, ‘Ohhh, it's my first bad review,’ and went on with the show. You want people to realize that they need to keep watching because anything can happen.”
In Griffin’s 2003 memoir, he offered this suggestion for the legend on his headstone: “Stay Tuned.”
Nut job of the week month
There are folks so monumentally demented that they don’t even merit a street corner from which to bloviate.
There are people who shouldn’t even be allowed around crayons.
“ONE MONTH from The Anniversary, I'm thinking another 9/11 would help America. …
“Iraq has fractured the U.S. into jigsaw pieces of competing interests that encourage our enemies. We are deeply divided and division is weakness. …
“Turn back to 9/11.
“Remember the community of outrage and national resolve? ...
“What would sew us back together?
“Another 9/11 attack.
“The Golden Gate Bridge. Mount Rushmore. Chicago's Wrigley Field. The Philadelphia subway system. The U.S. is a target-rich environment for al Qaeda. …
“If it is to be, then let it be. It will take another attack on the homeland to quell the chattering of chipmunks and to restore America's righteous rage and singular purpose to prevail.”
Clearly, this guy wasn’t in front of a TV the last time.
Let’s see if I follow this guy's thinking: Since the first terrorist attacks sent the populace cringing so much we allowed a power-mad leader force us into a “patriotic” lockstep and agree to a disastrous war that eventually fragmented our country, we need yet another terrorist attack to send us cringing so badly we’ll allow the same power-mad leader to drag us into another disastrous war (we’ve got our eye on you, Iran!) that will eventually re-fragment our country, so that this guy can uncork another column about how we need yet another …
Here’s guessing this guy turns up on Keith Olbermann’s “Worst Person in the World” sweepstakes sometime soon.
Harvey Keitel is reportedly up for replacing Mandy Patinkin as the lead on "Criminal Minds." Most recently, you may have seen him encouraging Derek Jeter to steal second base then cackling evilly when he does in a promotional spot for baseball, so this would be a step up from that.
First episode he shows, however, they better have a reprisal of his "Show me wit' yo' mouth" scene from "The Bad Lieutenant." Just so, you know, they establish that he does have the keen insight into the pervert mindset necessary to this series for chasing bad guys.
How much damage can cable do to the networks? Consider: This is a breakout summer for cable, the season that cable channels bring out their big guns while the broadcast networks lie dormant with reruns and reality detritus.
So far this summer, cable shows have been giving their channels record ratings, while the broadcast networks continue to slide.
Amongst the success stories: “The Closer,” now in its third season, and newcomer “Saving Grace” on TNT; “Damages” on FX; “Army Wives” on Lifetime; “Burn Notice” on USA; and “Mad Men” on AMC (granted, “Mad Men” – tonight at 10! – isn’t what you’d call a huge hit, but it has doubled AMC’s Thursday night ratings).
“We’re at the tipping point,” Steve Koonin, president of Turner Entertainment, told the New York Times. “It’s our belief that we and the other basic cable networks can begin matching the broadcast networks series for series. It’s only a matter of time before we have as many big hits as they do.”
The broadcast networks may still inspire viewer loyalty amongst older viewers, but to younger viewers, they’re just another stop along the dial while channel surfing. And nothing suggests they’re going to be able to reverse that trend as the three-network universe recedes ever further into history:
* CBS has shed 9% of its viewership from just last summer, 14% in the target demographic of viewers aged 18-49 and 21% in younger viewers.
* NBC has lost about 11% in total viewers, demo viewers and younger viewers from last summer.
* ABC, too, has lost 10% in total viewers, but 16% in demo viewers since this time last year.
* Fox has held relatively steady, while The CW is hard to gauge because at this time last year it was both The WB and UPN (but suffice it to say that The CW isn’t exactly on fire).
Keep in mind – these are losses from just a year ago, not the accumulated trickle of years of audience erosion. This means fewer and fewer viewers are seeing all those promos for the broadcast networks’ new upcoming fall series. And every year there’s a chunk of viewers who, finding they like what they see on cable, don’t have the compunction to migrate back to broadcast come the fall.
So look at broadcast’s hemorrhaging this summer alongside cable’s continued growth, and again, we’ll ask: How much damage can cable do to the networks?
ABC’s “Pushing Daisies,” more or less the favorite new fall series of the assembled critics at the TCA Press Tour last month, won’t air until Oct. 3, but you’ll have the chance to see it and meet creator Brian Fuller, director Barry Sonnenfeld and members of the cast – and hang out in a Hollywood cemetery and see a bunch of celebrity tombstones – next week.
“Pushing Daisies” will be screened Thursday, Aug. 16 at 8 p.m. at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, 6000 Santa Monica Blvd. in Hollywood. The show is one of sinister whimsy, a Grimm’s fairy tale starring Lee Pace as a man named Ned who runs a pie shop and has the peculiar ability to, with a single touch, resurrect the dead. A second touch, however, returns the resurrected to the Great Beyond. That caveat becomes extremely important when Chuck (Anna Friel), his childhood crush, is murdered on a cruise ship – Ned brings her back to life to ask her who killed her, but she doesn’t know, so she offers to help solve the crime, but anyway, it’s not like Ned could ever have put her to death again.
She’s still sweet on him, too, so Fuller has created the biggest, most fanciful case of fictitious unrequited love pretty much ever. “Pushing Daisies” is demented and sweet simultaneously, an impressive achievement that has critics worrying whether the show can maintain its unique tone on a weekly basis.
Your Mayor chatted with Mr. Fuller, and he explained that initially, the show – which is being billed as a “forensic fairy tale,” with Ned and Chuck (joined by Chi McBride as a private detective) solving crimes weekly – wasn’t originally intended as a procedural.
“We said, ‘We will give you the procedural world, if you’ll give us our characters’ world,’” Fuller said, adding that reinforcing the procedural element “gives us a backbone to tell a story on, plus we get our idiosyncrasies in the crime-solving arena.”
Initially, Fuller said, “It was going to be a little more romantic. There were not necessarily going to be crime stories in every episode. But there wasn’t a chasm between what it was and what it became, more like a little rope building a bridge between the two concepts.” He calls “Pushing Daisies” “‘Amelie’ meets ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.’”
Fuller said that after creating some well-loved but little-watched shows (“Dead Like Me,” “Wonderfalls,” the latter about which he said, “So many people (at Fox) liked it and we got great support, but what it came down to was the supporters went to their offices and shut their doors because their boss wasn’t a supporter of the show”), he’s learning to pick his fights.
“I learned on ‘Dead Like Me’ that you don’t have to fight every battle,” he said. “Television is hard – it’s a crazy, stupid job, and you need support from the network if your show doesn’t find an audience immediately. I’m kind of growing up a little bit – I understand that my ideas are not always the best ideas, and when my ideas need work.”
Of course, the entries on her real blog site are almost as unhinged:
* “The fired intern from Myspace (not Joey) has also stolen my private sex tape. I am offering $25,000 for it's return (unless someone would like to distribute it - then I am willing to deal).”
* “Barbara Walters is well over one hundred years old now. She is all head, like joan rivers. I am only at the pee in your pants stage of old ladyism, but look forward to having a huge head in the future. I have seven pigs on my farm and want to eat them! They hide in the grass and hump each other when they think I am not looking...I am getting a shotgun tomorrow, not for the piggies, but just to have, though I wonder if my past mental illnesses will make getting a gun tougher? I will shoot anyone who comes on my land, since I just put up gates that say "no trespassing... trespassers shot on sight"... I cannot wait to shoot someone if need be...right between the eyes. I am a damn good shot too! I once blew a quarter in two at one hundred feet! I need glasses these days to make sure the head wound will be fatal. I hate to see anyone suffer!”
The MySpace entries have been taken down, but live on here, for anyone who wants to compare/contrast and decide if they came from the same mind….
Every celebrity should blog or, at least, hire an underling who’s utterly contemptuous of them to do it for them. That’d certainly give folks like me something to offer sociological insights on when there’s a slow news day.
The NFL is forcing sideline photographers to wear vests covered in logos for Canon and Reebok.
Naturally, this is hacking off both photographers and news organizations who don’t want their photographers turned into walking advertisements before TV cameras, from which the football league profits.
The NFL justifies the logo’d vests with what seems to be some tortured logic: “(T)he Reebok and Canon logos are appropriate because the vests are made by Reebok and because Canon ‘has made the commitment to fund the cost of the vest.’ … Both logos are directly related to the manufacture of the vest. Given this, it is inaccurate to characterize them as advertising messages sold to NFL sponsors or others.” Well, yes, but why force photographers to wear vests at all? What's wrong with the traditional media laminate to ID photographers?
Next thing you know, the NBA will force baseline photographers to dress in the costumes of the home-team's mascot.
And anyway, the NFL further argues, they may be product-placement prostitutes, but they’re product-placement prostitutes with taste:
“If our goal had been media visibility, we would have allowed Canon to display its name in much larger letters on the back of the vests where it could more readily be seen by the television cameras that are located above and behind the photographers. Instead, 'Canon' appears in letters only 0.7 inches high, less than a quarter of the size of the NFL shield logo and no larger than the logo of Reebok, and actual manufacturer of the vest.”
Well, there you go: That’s why we’ll never see an NFL team again in Los Angeles – Hollywood photographers are too fashion-conscious to be seen in cheesy little logo-strewn vests unless they’re cheesy little logo-strewn vests of their own choosing. The NFL isn’t forcing players to wear logo’d uniforms because they know they’d catch hell from athletes who have their own sundry endorsement deals, and they’re not sticking logos on referees because Lenscrafters would be the only effective advertiser. So they’re forcing this on people who aren’t even on their payroll.
Stay classy, NFL, and remember: When engaging in something akin to whoring, only you’re forcing someone else to do the dirty work, the precise technical term is “pimping.”
“Damages,” FX’s terrific new legal thriller starring Glenn Close, was damned today by The Parents Television Council, for being, well, naughty. Which they accepted somewhat stoically when it’s on FX at 10 p.m., but they did pretty much take issue with it when it was on MyNetwork (also owned by Fox) at 8 p.m.:
“The programming executives at News Corp. and its subsidiaries have demonstrated once again their blatant disregard for children and families, in spite of giving considerable lip-service about being responsible. … Such wanton behavior exposes this corporation’s true intentions, despite what executives tell the Congress about their desire to act ‘responsibly’ and treat its viewing audience with ‘respect’. … Their FX channel has proven to be a cable network that regularly – and proudly – attacks the decency sensibilities of most American families, and now this same graphic and gratuitous content is airing on broadcast television at 8 p.m.”
It goes on like this for a while until you can practically see the froth foaming at the mouth of the author of the press release, calling for heads on pikes and censorship for everyone and forcing all TV outlets to air only pictures of pages from the Bible round the clock and so on.
To which I can only respond: Dude, it was on MyNetwork. Trust me, no one saw it.
And anyway, that sex scene you’re crabbing about was shot in tight close-up on the couple’s faces, the violence wasn’t even as grisly as can be seen on other shows that have aired at 8 p.m., “NCIS,” “Cold Case” or “Lost,” and you even admit that the expletives were bleeped out. So take a chill pill and let’s move on and discuss tonight’s episode.
Gotta love the opening-title theme song lyrics, though: “There won’t be anything left when I am through with you.”
Tonight, Patty Hewes (Close) manages a couple of more of those sinisterly manipulative maneuvers she’s so delectably good at, but gets a bit of a comeuppance when, working on a case with an extremely tight deadline, a grenade shows up at her office.
“Who would want to do this to you?” she’s asked.
“How much time do you have?” she replies.
After the grenade incident, six understandably shaken employees take personal days. Understanding humanist that she is, she fires them. Wishing away the threats and the assaults doesn’t stop them, however.
Ellen (Rose Byrne) isn’t one of those tremulous half-dozen, of course, and you know that whole being-engaged thing? She takes her first steps towards throwing that out the window. (Of course, we already know that her fiancé is going to wind up dead, so maybe that’s not such a huge loss in the scheme of things. But we sense a huge guilt trip in the offing.)
Anyway, if “Damages” wasn’t already addictive, tonight’s episode ensures it’s well on its way to being one of the summer’s must-see series. Even without condemnation from the Parents Television Council.
- “Damages:” 10 tonight; FX.
My real job has interrupted blogging today: Working up an obituary for Hal Fishman, the longtime KTLA news anchor. As part of my research, I checked into the rumor that “The Simpsons” character Kent Brockman was in part inspired by Fishman.
Nope, say the folks at “The Simpsons:” They had Jerry Dunphy in mind when creating the stentorian Brockman.
It has been several days now since Your Mayor first unveiled the fount of wisdom that is his prospective tome The History of Television: A History of Television, and still no word has come from PBS, which is creating a documentary miniseries on the same topic. I have long pondered why this might be, and came upon an egregious oversight in my overview of Television's celebrated past, one that I now hasten to rectify:
Supplemental Chapter: PBS: Television's Savior
On Monday, October 5, 1970, viewers across America were seized with an otherworldly delight when they turned on their televisions and discovered that a bold, innovative new broadcasting service had emerged to entertain and edify them: PBS, or the Partially Boring System.
PBS was a content provider like no other: Eschewing insipid comedies and plebian melodramas, it instead offered fascinating historical documentaries, jaw-droppingly incisive inquiries into the world of science, exquisite performances of balletic and orchestral genius of unsurpassable brilliance and sumptuously arid adaptations of British literary masterpieces - everything that Joesph Q. Sixpack, his lovely wife Janice and their two kids, Josh and Britney, hungered to ingest after a long, soul-drenching day laboring at the factory, tidying up around the house and memorizing nonlinear partial differential equations, respectively.
And because, unlike the other broadcast networks, which were beholden to income from commercial advertisers, PBS accepted no money from anyone, except "donor viewers" who phoned in offers of money if PBS would halt the practice of "pledge drives" as well as "corporate underwriters" who reached consumers via on-air messages that, despite all appearances, weren't commercials. This meant that, free of money that could taint the integrity of its content, PBS didn't have enough funds to expend on popular stars or eye-pleasing production values known to appeal to viewers.
PBS has been on the cutting-edge of children's programming, as well, with one of its crown jewels being the long-running series "Sesame Street," a powerful inner-city drama about the denizens of a welfare community unhealthily obsessed with consonants and vowels, conjunctions and prepositions, metaphors and STD's. Some of the beloved characters on "Sesame Street" were "Muppets," first seen on TV grousing about unfair stereotypes leveled against them in a popular series of auto-insurance commercials.
Unlike many other characters in children's programming exploited by opportunistic producers, the "Muppets," in keeping with PBS's doctrine of noncommerciality, were not exploited via sales of plush toys, books, musical recordings or board games.
Another favorite "Muppet"-like character looming large on PBS's landscape was "Ken Burns," a genial historian who related stirring, 15-hour-long tales of Americana employing nothing but banjo music, tintype photographs and voice-over narration inspired by "written correspondence," a form of 19th-century communication similar to today's text-messaging, only employing complete sentences, correctly spelled words and coherent thoughts.
Unidentified Old-Timey Guy Talking Head (speaking over banjo music from "The Civil War"): "The story of Ken Burns is the story of America. Here's this hardscrabble kid escaping from the mean streets of Brooklyn, New York, who put down his switchblade and his snub-nose .22 to pull himself up by his bootstraps at a prestigious school, then eventually won three Emmys, two Oscar nominations and even delivered a commencement address at Georgetown University! What Ken Burns had to tell his countrymen goes to the very heart of what it means to be a well-compensated white man who has complete editorial control over his product in this nation."
In 2007, PBS announced plans for an ambitious, multi-part documentary series on "The History of Television," to be aired in 2009. This project promised to be the finest, most exhilarating and likely most important production in the history of the service, if - and only if - its editorial board manages to locate the most insightful and galvanizing talking-head experts to provide context, heft and critical acumen to Television's complex and celebrated narrative history. America can only hope and pray that PBS finds the wherewithal to select the appropriate memoirists capable of bringing Television's glorious narrative to vivid, evanescent life.
This is the eighth and final installment of The History of Television: A History of Television, but let's face it: The Mayor of Television is just phoning it in at this point, despondent that he hasn't heard from PBS to be on its documentary. It would've been nice if you had joined us from the beginning, but we're glad you joined us nonetheless, and if you're from PBS, throw us a bone, already, huh?
Chapter Eight: TV in the Naughts - and Nowhere Beyond, Because We'll All Soon Be Dead
Television entered the 21st century with a sense of dread, thanks to an innovative, multi-platform, long-running dramedy entitled "The Never-Ending War on Terror," a series uneven in tone and one for which even viewers eventually grew weary, though they found they could do nothing to have the show cancelled. It starred George W. Bush as "A President of the United States" and featured a supporting cast of winsomely bungling Cabinet members and White House staffers whose repeated insistences before Congress of "I don't recall" were intentionally designed to self-referentially recall Sgt. Schultz's comical replies in the '60s series "Hogan's Heroes" of "I know nothink!" (See Chapter Three).
Viewers throughout the country were confused as to why neither the networks nor Democrats in Washington could cancel Bush's TV series for all the execrable excesses, while the brain-dead houseguests on CBS's "Big Brother" were capable of banishing on a weekly basis someone who just kinda hacked them off.
"The Never-Ending War on Terror" inspired a number of more palatable spin-offs, such as Fox's "24," ABC's short-lived "Homeland Security," CBS's "The Unit" and "Jericho," Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," MTV2's "Wonder Showzen" and Funny Or Die's "The Landlord."
This last program pointed to a trend disquieting to those who worked in Television: A substantial number of TV viewers began to get their TV sustenance from the Internets from a variety of gadgets ranging from computers to, well, other computers to, uh, the iPod, which was actually just a very tiny computer. Viewers who once could sit still through an eight-part miniseries on slavery in America were now valiantly struggling to focus their ADD-addled minds on a two minute "LonelyGirl15" episode. America couldn't get enough of things that were short and didn't require much thought! Such was the boon to society that "multi-tasking" viewers were now able to watch TV at work, where in the past all they could do was play Spider Solitaire.
With online content expanding exponentially to the point of causing computer screens to burst (forcing yet another recall of Dell laptops), broadcast and even cable television was on the verge of irrelevance. Some pundits argued that the medium had rendered itself irrelevant by not focusing on broader, more important issues in favor of context-free soundbites and celebrity-gossip bullet points, but these pundits were soon drowned out by yet more context-free soundbites and celebrity-gossip bullet points. Meanwhile, interest in the Internets escalated at a dizzying pace, thanks to its diverse offerings ranging from photos of cats in sinks to photos of cats with Hitler mustaches to LOL cats.
In response, Television responded by updating its own technology, developing 72-inch flatscreen plasma TVs and "high-definition" TVs, which were considered a boon to the industry - not the TV industry, per se, but to the makeup industry: People who looked just fine and even kind of hot on regular TV now had to trowel on pancake makeup by the bucket in order to conceal their wrinkles and bad complexions and overly large pores to the point that they recalled Frank Langella's turn as Skeletor in the movie "Masters of the Universe."
Those touting the new Television technologies pointed out the clarity of their images and movie-theater-like quality of their sound systems. Champions of iPods and online content responded that they preferred the mobility and interactivity offered by their technology, so portable 72-inch flatscreen TVs were rushed into production, including the HDTVPhone, which was quickly withdrawn from the market for further tinkering when a number of early adapters threw out their backs answering phone calls.
Another unanticipated result of the burgeoning micro-technology was the horrific TV Critic Uprising of 2007, in which television critics demanded why they had to cover films on the Internets in addition to their tradition 200+ cable outlets, while their paper's movie critics remained content reviewing three or four movies per week. An uneasy truce was reached - TV critics would cover YouTube, while movie critics would handle the iFilm beat - while Television itself attempted to make nice with online programming by offering it on television itself via shows such as The CW's transformative "Online Nation." But it remained a rocky relationship, given that each episode of "Online Nation" began with the host, Alistair Cooke, declaring, "Here's what you could be watching if you weren't watching TV!"
Hence, the question arises: Where will Television lead us in the future? Or, will it be content to merely follow society's trends? Or, might it simply just get out of the way?
As those questions linger in the air, one's mind drifts back to words written by St. Augustine, all the way back in AD 397, in his "Confessions:"
"I hear Television singing, the varied carols I hear;
"Those of edgy cops -- 'You have the right to remain silent,' as they bust the perp's chops;
"The loutish family man singing fondly of his exasperated spouse, as he stumbles and stumbles again, yet his family loves;
"The comical office drone singing his, as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work, but not as he works, for work he does not;
"The dedicated man of medicine singing in jargon OK'd by technical advisors as he scrubs for the O.R. -- the pitchman in paean to his ointments and autos, his beers and burgers;
"The delicious singing of the whimsical single mother -- or of the talk-show hostess singing self-empowerment -- or of the reality star dishing and dissing her peers -- each singing what matters to her, and to none else;
"The infotainment host's song of blockbusters and fallen starlets -- the cartoon rabbit's ode to carrots and beleaguered hunters poor of aim;
"The news anchor's, about scandal in the morning, or scandal at the noon intermission, or scandal at sundown;
"The late-night wit's song, a wry inversion of the day's events;
"Singing, with open mouths, their strong melodious songs. It is all part of Television, glorious Television; it feeds us, it fills our hearts with rapture, and since there are test patterns no more, it simply will not stop."
Indeed, Television's legacy is so vast that it will prove enduring far beyond our lifetimes. Of course, we'll be dead, so we won't really be able to appreciate it, so one would think it scarcely matters.
This is the seventh and most controversial installment of The History of Television: A History of Television, in which the Mayor of Television ramps up his efforts to be salacious in order to get PBS documentarians to pay attention to him. It began here a long time ago but if you read it all, you'll be worthy of a position as an "expert" in the PBS miniseries, as well.
Chapter Seven: The Terrorists Win: Reality TV
Historians generally place the War on Terror as beginning on Feb. 26, 1993, with the initial (failed) bombing of the World Trade Center, or on Oct. 12, 2000, the date of the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen.
In fact, it actually began in 1992, when George H.W. Bush was empowered and MTV premiered "The Real World," the inspiration (if not, actually, the progenitor) for a subsequently noxious genre dubbed "reality TV," the anti-America movement writ large within the realms of American TV itself, a radical-fundamentalist movement to dispirit the hearts and minds of Americans by depicting prototypical young Americans as rampantly vapid, self-involved, distillery-quaffing, opposite-sex-exploiting individuals anxious for vulgar self-promotion and disinterested in the good of the nation.
The fact that initial installments proved so successful in appalling right-thinking Americans only invigorated the insurgents, who further beleaguered the country's can-do spirit with further attention-grabbing explications of stultifying, self-abnegating portraits of socially abject behavior.
Soon thereafter, all networks, incapable of stopping themselves, took to airing their cynical incarnations of "reality TV" - CBS's "Survivor," "Big Brother," "Rock Star" and "Armed and Famous;" NBC's "Fear Factor," "The Biggest Loser" and "The Singing Bee;" Fox's "The Swan," "Temptation Island," "Who's Your Daddy," "Mr. Personality," "Joe Millionaire" and "Nanny 911;" ABC's "Wife Swap," "Extreme Makeover," "Welcome to the Neighborhood," "The Bachelor: Singapore" and "Fat March;" The WB's "The Surreal Life" and "Big Man on Campus;" The CW's "America's Next Top Model," "The Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search for the Next Doll" and "One Tree Hill;" MTV's "Laguna Hills," "Date My Mom," "My Sweet Sixteen" and "The Hills;" A&E's "Intervention" and "Gene Simmons' Family Jewels;" Bravo's "Being Bobby Brown," "Blow Out," "Workout," "Flipping Out" and "Making Out;" Fox Reality's "My Bare Lady" and "Sexy Cam" - each terrifying viewers to an increasingly amplified degree with craven depictions of the most caustically and soul-atrophying superficial behavior in which human beings can aspire.
But even the most diabolical of reality-TV producers were taken aback when VH1 debuted "The Flavor of Love," which featured a crazy street person with a large clock around his neck in lieu of jewelry training women with Down Syndrome in the art of scraping their teeth on concrete. Stunned at the humanity devastated in this project, insurgent producers agreed to meet with viewers' representatives at The Hague for a series of peace talks, and a hasty arrangement was made that reality television would adhere to the Geneva Convention, that such human degradation would never again be permitted, unless, of course, Howard Stern was involved.
Immediately Spike TV halted development of a show, "Masturbating Maniacs." Though the network's official explanation was that their tissue budget was stretched beyond the breaking point, officials privately crowed that The Hague Reality-TV Conference had claimed its first victory. Its second came when A&E quietly removed "Vatican Hookers" from its development slate.
For a genre that purportedly was not scripted, its product was stultifyingly formulaic. An initial episode would invariably begin with a number of participants confiding to a cameraman that they were going to win whatever carrot was placed on the stick before them because they had the moxie and the attitude and the talent and the will to win. Then, to a host of war whoops and guttural shrieks, the participants would meet the program's host, who always had shiny hair (or a shiny bald pate), extremely white teeth and a manner far too urgent for the show's subject matter, who would warn the participants that what they were about to do was extremely difficult and in some cases illegal, but one lucky person would emerge with a good story to tell at a bar when they were in their 50s. Then, as the participants embarked upon their mission, they would invariably complain to the cameraman that this was much harder than they ever imagined and was stretching them to their limits and then they'd weep a solitary tear. Then they'd vehemently bicker with the other participants, and all was well.
A sub-genre emerged: The celeb-reality show, in which someone with whom viewers were vaguely familiar explained that they had a fantastic and kooky life but even if they didn't, the mere fact that they were famous should be enough for viewers to want to watch what amounted to home movies of them shopping and pretending to be nice to ordinary civilians. At some point, the celebrity would visit a psychic, and feign dismay at whatever gibberish the psychic would spout at them.
In each of these programs, a clear message rung out: "Hey, people are stupid."
Unidentified Old-Timey Guy Talking Head (speaking over the strands of the Pussycat Dolls' "Don't Cha"): "Reality TV was the deal-breaker, the life-changer, the thing that transformed everyone, from the most talentless dimwit from the Midwest to the most talentless dillweed from Beverly Hills with a powerful Daddy. Anyone could be a star, anyone, even Rod Stewart's @sshole son, who had neither any discernible ability nor a celebrity parent of significant note who could otherwise call in enough favors to project him into infamy. It was a democratization of television, and viewers soon discovered that they really didn't mind TV's oligarchy after all."
Coming soon: The bitter end.
This is the sixth installment of The History of Television: A History of Television, the Mayor of Television's delightfully educational series that'd serve smashingly as the inspiration for a multipart PBS documentary series. You won't want to miss a verbose word, so start at the beginning and good luck getting back to this point.
Chapter Six: Nothing is Ever the Same Again
(This section - whether on the TV documentary or in the coffee-table book of same - should be accompanied with all manner of computer-generated graphics and swirls and impressive sound effects, since the cable era was nothing if not about cool graphics and sound effects and not so much about content: "Swoooosh! America is over-impressed by 'SportsCenter'-style hyperbole!")
The overriding theory behind cable television was pure genius distilled to one simple thought: These idiots like their TV so much? Let's figure out a way to make them pay for it!
Some date the birth of cable to Dec. 6, 1957, when, on live TV, the United States was boldly propelled into the era of space-age communications when a Vanguard rocket containing America's first satellite exploded two seconds after ignition. (Not a fact you particularly need to know, nor even a terribly germane one, but one that is true and intended to remind us of the seemingly forgotten notion that this is in fact a history lesson.)
Fifteen years later, in 1972, HBO was launched on a cable system in Wilkes-Barre PA using microwave transmission. (Another true fact, though hardly a funny one.) In the intervening years, HBO has emerged as the industry leader in quality television content, so much so that the network rather snobbishly advertises itself: "It's not television. It's HBO."
HBO has created some of the most creatively ground-breaking series TV has ever seen, such as "Sex and the City," "The Larry Sanders Show," "The Wire," "Deadwood," "G-String Divas," "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and "The Sopranos," the first TV series in the history of Television to never end. On the other hand, more recent HBO offerings - "Lucky Louie," "The Comeback," "Rome," "John From Cincinnati" - have either eluded or alienated audiences to the point that all the other networks have created a new ad campaign: "It's not HBO. It's television."
But HBO is a premium cable channel, which means you have to pay even more to receive it in your home. There are only a handful of premium cable channels, but scores upon scores of basic cable channels, with the number still growing, each vying for an ever-limited number of viewers. In fact, it is estimated that by the year 2027, there will be one cable network for every 14 "bloggers" in America, and three "bloggers" for every American.
Basic cable channels call attention to themselves by "narrow-casting" and "branding," opposed to the networks' strategies of "broadcasting" and "hoping for the best." Through "branding," cable channels allied themselves with their "target demographic" and, more importantly, made everyone else feel unhip and out of it and undesirable and past their prime. In other words, the declared aim of the coolest cable networks was to wrest viewers from the mollycoddling they receive from self-help gurus and force them to examine the failed, unfulfilled lives they had, inadvertently or otherwise, created for themselves.
Unidentified Old-Timey Guy Talking Head (speaking over "Swooshing" sound effects and an assortment of music-bites from sundry cable outfits): "Because they do not answer to the FCC, or Federal Censorship Commission for the layman, a government agency created to roll back First Amendment freedom-of-speech protections in order to ensure that devoutly religious parents not hear on broadcast TV the sort of language their progeny employs with their schoolmates, cable channels are able to truck in more sophisticated themes. For example, due to their extremely mature content, the last three years of the Clinton Administration could only be covered on cable."
Here's how some of the more high-profile cable networks established firmly entrenched persona that preserved for them lucratively tiny niches in national discussions emanating from the ever-frantically-spinning top that is the Zeitgeist (or, at least, the folks at Entertainment Weekly who decided that liking everything in popular culture would make them look like they had a clue as to what was going on):
* MTV: Became one of cable's most influential and innovative channels almost immediately, based on the heretofore shocking revelation that a certain kind of viewer just really likes to watch sexy women undulating in a promiscuous fashion.
* VH1: Established itself as the cool place for people who weren't quite cool enough for MTV, becoming so successful at it that eventually VH1 viewers discovered they were no longer cool enough to watch VH1.
* Lifetime: Initially attempted to appeal to women comfortable with the notion of women-as-victims, which, it turned out, was a notion with which a disquieting number of women were comfortable.
* Spike: Boldly targeted 14-year-old boys, a demographic almost no one (except every Hollywood movie studio, videogame manufacturer and lad mag) had dared to target.
* Food Network: Went after two ends of a spectrum - the morbidly obese and the morbidly anorexic - because everyone in the middle didn't have all that much interest in merely looking at food on their TV screens.
* FX: Via edgy programming with just a smidgen less nudity and profanity, lured all those viewers a little too cheap to subscribe to HBO.
* A&E: Eradicated "arts" and "entertainment" - which was what its acronym initially stood for - from its schedule when it discovered many viewers had no taste for either, just lurid reality programming.
* TLC: Similarly, truncated its name to an acronym when its original name - The Learning Channel - proved to be a turnoff to its core audience.
* QVC: Focused on viewers who, when extremely inebriated late at night, lost all sense of equilibrium, taste and restraint and would buy anything put before them.
* USA and TNT: Developed shows that, in the heyday of the broadcast networks, easily would've been greenlit and emerged as respectable successes, but now, given the disarray endemic at said broadcast networks, would've been considered perhaps a little too foursquare to air, forgetting that a whole lot of people are perfectly happy with foursquare entertainment, as long as it delivers the goods, narrative- and character-development-wise.
* TV Land: Aimed at people too confused by the current cable universe and current TV programming and our current society in general, and just want to remember life as it was back when it made sense to them.
This further aided cable programmers in wresting viewers from the broadcast networks, and by the year 2005, only 8% of television viewers were even cognizant of the fact that NBC still existed. By 2003, the average viewer was more likely to tune into a cable program than a broadcast network offering - Animal Planet's least popular production had a more loyal fan base than any ABC sitcom - and the average broadcast-network viewer was more likely to have hip-replacement surgery than an original thought.
By the way, additional off-network original scripted programming has long been produced in syndication - "syndication" coming from the original Greek σύνδικος (syndikos), meaning, "not good enough even for basic cable."
Coming soon: Dark (if influential) clouds on the horizon.
This is the fifth installment of The History of Television: A History of Television, the Mayor of Television's increasingly desperate audition for PBS casting agents looking to populate a new series about "experts" on "Television." It began here quite a while back and none of this will make sense unless you read all of it (actually, none of this will make sense even if you do read all of it).
Chapter Five: It's Just One Damn Golden Age After Another
Emerging from the spiritual, political and sociological morass of the 1970s, Ronald Reagan declared the '80s "Mourning in America," and indeed it was, with TV programs such as "Dukes of Hazzard," "T.J. Hooker," "ALF," "Misfits of Science" and "Manimal."
But the '80s also ushered in yet another "Golden Age of Television" with fare such as "St. Elsewhere," "Hill Street Blues," "Cheers," "The Cosby Show," "The Simpsons," "Roseanne" and "Newhart," an age that continued well into the '90s with acclaimed series like "Seinfeld," "Friends," "NYPD Blue," "Northern Exposure," "The X-Files," "Frasier," "L.A. Law," "Homicide: Life on the Street," "The Practice," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Everybody Loves Raymond," "Pinky & the Brain," "M.A.N.T.I.S.," "Homeboys in Outer Space and "The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer."
New networks such as Fox were created to handle the overflow of excellent series, while newer networks like The WB and UPN were created to handle the crap programming. (In 2006, when producers grew weary of creating lousy programming, The WB and UPN were forced to consolidate their holdings into one network, The CW, short for "Crap Warehouse.")
Unidentified Old-Timey Guy Talking Head (with Huey Lewis and the News' "Hip to Be Square," segueing into Nirvana's "Rape Me," playing in the background): "I defy anyone to find a period with such sustained excellence in the history of television. You could tune in anytime on the primetime dial and find absolute brilliance. This was a time when even Roseanne was funny, for heaven's sake!
"What had happened was, in the early '80s, the network executives had been called on the carpet by the Bilderberg Group, that secret cartel of global leaders who surreptitiously run the planet. They were brought blindfolded to Sandefjord, Norway, and essentially told, 'Look. The traditional methods of distracting Americans with shiny pictures and sloppy scripting will not stand. Your American viewers are getting far too clever for that sort of thing. If they aren't provided more sophisticated entertainment, they'll abandon you in droves. And if they abandon you in droves, they just might start paying attention to the world around them. And if they do that, they might discover our secret plan to rule the world, and we simply cannot have that.'
"Well. This was a wakeup call for the networks - well, more specifically, it was a threat, but let's just call it a wake-up call - and just the thing to inspire them to create such delightful fare as 'Cheers' and other shows that encouraged alcoholism."
But all that didn't really matter so much, because TV was in the midst of eating its young: Cable Television had arrived, and nothing would ever be the same again. Bear in mind that things very rarely stay the same, so that's not quite the portentous declaration it's supposed to serve as. But, honest: Nothing would ever be the same again.
Coming soon: Nothing is ever the same again.
This is the fourth installment of The History of Television: A History of Television, the Mayor of Television's pandering attempt to get his own PBS show. You should start here unless you're one of those people who read the last chapter of the latest Harry Potter book first.
Chapter Four: A Nation Doesn't Chuckle So Much: The '70s
In the 1970s, America was a country cut spiritually adrift, and Television reflected the dissolution of the nation's morale. The ground-breaking series "M*A*S*H" mirrored America's disaffection with the Vietnam War, "Starsky & Hutch" and "SWAT" offered eviscerating, cynically critical portrayals of police officers violently unhinged to the point of lawlessness and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" grimly portrayed the plight of the single woman, battered by injustices in the workplace and the inability to land a decent husband and forced to become a lovable flibbertigibbet.
And Richard Nixon returned to television, albeit in a new program far darker than his '50s series. "All in the Presidency," produced by the innovative icon of the era Norman Lear, was a corrosive comedy starring Nixon now as the utterly corrupt leader of the Free World.
Gone from this series were such softening touches as the lovable pooch checkers; in their stead were such sinister characters as Henry Kissinger, whose war crimes would forever go unpunished, and Chuck Colson, who transformed his life of White House criminality into one of Old Testament brimstone and hellfire. Lighter comic relief came in the form of Nixon's Vice Presidents, the apoplectically inept Spiro Agnew and the genially klutzy Gerald Ford.
Eventually, Nixon and Lear butted heads over "creative differences" involving the direction of his character, and Nixon resigned from the program, only to win an Oscar for portraying himself in a cinematic spin-off, the intentionally similarly titled "All the President's Men." Lear went on to create myriad African-American themed sitcoms that appealed to tens of millions of viewers, a strategy reconfigured recently by the UPN network (now known as The CW) to draw ones of millions of viewers.
Unidentified Old-Timey Guy Talking Head (with Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" playing in background): "Norman Lear understood America. Which is not to say that he understood Wyoming - hell, who understands Wyoming? - or that no one else at the time understood America. I mean, when you come right down to it, America's pretty easy to understand. Except Wyoming, and, well, of course, Idaho - what the hell's up with Idaho? But Norman Lear was the only guy working in TV who understood America. Let's face it, everyone else working in TV in the '70s were f@%&ing drug-addled morons."
Due to such hard-hitting shows as Lear's, plus disquieting dramas as "Supertrain," a cautionary tale of the evils of mass transit (underwritten by the auto industry) and "Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell," a cautionary tale of the evils of egotists lacking the skill set to propel a TV variety show (later remade as "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip'), the '70s were also known as "The Golden Age of Television."
Coming soon: Yet another frickin' influential Golden Age.
This is the third installment of The History of Television: A History of Television, the Mayor of Television's effort to insinuate himself into a sprawling PBS documentary on the subject. To start at the beginning, go here and work your way up. It just might be worth it.
Chapter Three: A Nation Continues to Chuckle: The '60s
Television in the 1960s saw a number of innovations, such as the addition of color to the medium. Although the first publicly announced experimental TV broadcast of a program using the NTSC "compatible color" system was an episode of NBC's "Kukla, Fran and Ollie on August 30, 1953, the excitement was tamped down considerably by the fact that the puppets were black, white and grey.
Unidentified Old-Timey Guy Talking Head (with Richard Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra" playing in background): "I remember seeing my first color TV as if it were a galvanizing, epochal moment in our history's culture. I remember it that way, but in retrospect that might be a little bit of overkill. What I most distinctly recall that was before color TV, if you were watching a science-fiction show, someone would have to say, 'Hey! Look over there at that green-skinned alien!' And then after color TV, you could just tell that the alien had green skin. But that goes right to the heart of the medium's aesthetic edict of 'Show, don't tell,' so all in all, color TV has been a good thing."
Not until the 1966-67 season were all three networks airing all of its primetime programming in color, and not until 1972 did sales of color TVs outpace those for black-and-whites, and then, only because Sears had a big sale. Otherwise, well, we guess there weren't that many other innovations in the '60s.
TV sitcoms, outside of "The Dick Van Dyke Show" (about a beloved character, "Dick Van Dyke," who was petrified of sleeping in the same bed as his wife) and "The Andy Griffith Show" (about a beloved character, "Andy Griffith," who was tailor-made to reflect the big-hearted, nonjudgmental attitudes of the rural South), remained formulaic and in need of "laugh tracks" to point out where the jokes were supposed to be. One groundbreaking comedy, a remake of the '50s series "Dragnet," eschewed the laugh track in favor of hyperstylized performances and hyperbolic moralizing and became a long-running favorite amongst those in the then-burgeoning drug culture.
Other comedies trucked in a new form of humor known at the time as "irony." "Batman," based upon a real-life figure from the '30s who explored the nuances of his complicated sexual identity by engaging in physical altercations with others in costumes as colorful and garish as his own, was popular with audiences until it was revealed that the series had been developed by Pope Paul VI at Vatican II. "Hogan's Heroes," a rollicking farce set at a World War II Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, featured a lovable Nazi sergeant whose repeated chorus of "I know nothink!" is often cited as network TV's first lame catch phrase, and therefore exceedingly influential to future generations of TV gag writers. In fact, the series star, Bob Crane, was bludgeoned to death in 1978 by a TV scriptwriter of great subtlety exasperated by his inability to concoct the sort of comic gold found in such catch phrases as "Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger" or "Heeyyyyy!" or "Dy-No-Mite!"
"Batman," it should be said, was intentionally ironic, while we're only guessing that "Hogan's Heroes" was, because otherwise, there's no frickin' excuse for it ever getting on the air.
Coming soon: Things take a grim, if influential, turn.
This is the second installment of The History of Television: A History of Television (scroll down one entry for the introduction and first chapter). Enjoy and, above all, be edified.
Chapter Two: A Nation Chuckles: The '50s
By the 1950s, the Television Revolution was underway, with a startling array of diverse programming created to mollify the masses and take their minds off the repression and paranoia of the era. Some of the biggest stars were Lucille Ball and Ricky Ricardo, a dizzy wife and her long-suffering husband; George Burns and Gracie Allen, a long-suffering husband and his dizzy wife; Jack Benny and Rochester, a long-suffering skinflint and his equally long-suffering manservant; and Milton Berle, who dressed up in women's clothing so that he could play both long-suffering husband and dizzy housewife and thereby save money on hiring an actress.
Unidentified Old-Timey Guy Talking Head (with "I Love Lucy's" theme music in background): "Lucy was ahead of her time. She could do it all - she could do physical comedy, she was a supreme verbal wit and, when push came to shove, she could file a legal action faster than nobody's business."
Other shows that delighted viewers in the decade were "The Ernie Kovacs Show," which expanded Television's visual palate, "Dragnet," which expanded acting's emotional palate, and "Gunsmoke," which as the longest-running series in American TV history expanded CBS's financial palate.
Then there was "Vice President Knows Best," a light-hearted family "situation comedy" starring Richard Nixon as a beleaguered patriarch beset by Congressional investigations into ethical lapses, his wife Pat and her "Republican cloth coat" (which became as much a character on the show as Fonzie's leather jacket would two decades later on "Happy Days"), daughter Julie, AKA Kitten, whose indefatigable high jinks included marrying the President's son, and beloved family pooch Checkers, whose colorful array of reaction shots (most involving burying his head beneath his paws in anthropomorphological dismay) anytime Richard would say something xenophobic or anti-Semitic would invariably send audiences into paroxysms of laughter.
The '50s became known as "The Golden Age of Television," mainly among those who wallow in a warm nostalgic bath of their own halcyon days. But then, so did practically every other frickin' decade.
Coming soon: Color Television (which we hear was very influential).
PBS is working on an ambitious multipart documentary series on the history of television, whose working title is, inspiredly enough, "The History of Television." It's scheduled to air in spring of 2009, when virtually no one will be able to see it because they'll still have analog TVs rather than the new-fangled digital ones that will be the only ones working then.
Still, those who have upgraded will no doubt be treated to a series rich in incident and context and insight. "Television is a medium in transition and there is no better time to step back and appreciate where it has been and where it is going," Steve Mosko, chairman of the TV Academy Foundation which will co-produce the series with PBS, said. "This is a milestone for our Foundation, a milestone that may well, given what the euphemism 'a medium in transition' means, signal the final nail in Television's coffin."
In a bald effort to get myself hired as a "talking head/expert" for this upcoming documentary miniseries - or, at least, to land a gig as ghostwriter for the inevitable coffee-table-book autobiography of Mr. Television - Your Mayor has thoughtfully undertaken the massive challenge of writing the first draft for both, in a magnum opus we like to call:
The History of Television: A History of Television
Chapter One: Origins and Afterbirth of a New Medium
In the 1920s, Philo Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin separately developed versions of all-electronic transmitting tubes. Farnsworth based his "television" on a tiny screen that came from a 1980s movie theater that chopped up its single screen into a series of much smaller, virtually unworkable ones that he found inside a time machine developed in 2006 that landed on his doorstep in 1924, alongside a note that read, "Is this possible?"
Not sure how to read the note, Farnsworth took up the challenge and his invention opened up a new world of possibilities for the "TeeVee Camera," which had been developed in 1514 by Leonardo da Vinci but abandoned and nearly consigned to the scrapheap of history due to its having, at the time of its conception, no practical applications.
In London, 1926, John Logie Baird presented the world's first television images: A ventriloquist's dummy nicknamed "Stooky Bill" making wan quips about the day's events ("Stooky Bill" would later rename himself "Jay Leno"). Only 29 people saw this first "broadcast," six of those via bootlegged cable. Critics were instantly divided on the presentation: While the Evening Standard declared, "I have seen the future of rock and roll, and its name is Bruce Springsteen" (a prophetic statement, though one whose meaning eluded citizens at the time), Daily Variety groused, "Wooden perf makes this a less-than-boffo preme; expect so-so jingle at the coffers."
NBC made its first public television broadcast on April 30, 1939, presenting the opening of the 1927 New York World's Fair on tape delay (a practice it would later perfect in its Olympic coverage). By the end of the year, its programming was received by an estimated 2,000 sets, though some 650 of those sets, again, were receiving the signal via bootlegged cable.
Unidentified Old-Timey Guy Talking Head (with plaintive passage from Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" playing in background): "It was a miracle, those first TVs. Things were moving around; you could hear something akin to noise. It was just like real life, only tiny and muffled and in black and white. Kind of like my first marriage."
World War II proved an absolute boon to those not aware of the nascent television industry, as production of new TVs and other broadcasting equipment for civilian purposes was suspended from April 1942 to August 1945 by decree of President Franklin Roosevelt who, in declaring "The only thing we have to fear is death itself," banned images of soldiers returning home in flag-draped coffins. (This gambit was revisited during the War in Iraq in the 2000s by President George W. Bush, who, not up to the task of quelling the proliferation of televisions nor capable of banning soldiers' deaths, made cameras and legitimate TV reporters illegal.)
Nonetheless, Television was on its way, and only an over-proliferation of programming choices, a burgeoning public wariness in a monopolized ownership of the medium being consigned to a precious few corporate ideologies and a radical new technology that offered both a greater democratization in communications and the specter of ubiquitous piracy of content could threaten its robust financial future. Like that was ever gonna happen.
Coming soon: Chapter 2, on the '50s, which we understand were very influential.
Since we’re dealing with obtuse math today, here’s a “Star Trek” geek/wonk analyzing the death rate of redshirts on the original starship Enterprise:
“The Enterprise has a crew of 430 (startrek.com) in its five-year mission. (Now, I know that the show was only on the air for 3 years, but bear with me. 80 episodes were produced, which gives us the data to build from.) 59 crewmembers were killed during the mission, which comes out to 13.7% of the crew. So, that will be our overall conversion rate, 13.7%. …
“However, we need to segment the overall mortality (conversion) rate in order to gain the specific information that we need:
* Yellow-shirt crewperson deaths: 6 (10%)
* Blue-Shirt crewperson deaths: 5 (8 %)
* Engineering smock crewperson deaths: 4
* Red-Shirt crewperson deaths: 43 (73%) …
“Another factor that showed to increase the survival rate of the red-shirts was the nature of the relationship between the alien life and captain Kirk. When Captain Kirk meets an alien woman and "makes contact" the survival rate of the red-shirted crewmen increases by 84%. In fact, out of Captain Kirks' 24 "relationships" there were only three instances of red-shirt vaporization.
“The caveat to this is when Captain Kirk not only meets the local alien women, but also starts a fight among alien locals. The combination of these events has led to the elimination of 4 crewmembers (3 red-shirts). …
“Probability of a red-shirt casualty= 53%
14% of fights ended in a fatality (with a 72% chance the fatality wore a red shirt)
Probability of a red-shirt "incident" when Kirk has a "conquest" = 12% …
“The red-shirt survival rate is slightly higher when Kirk meets women than when a fight breaks out. This trend necessitates the question: How often did Captain Kirk "meet" women? In 30% of the missions. …
“Unless we dug into Kirk's personal life, we may never have spotted the contrast of Kirk's attraction to alien females as it related to saving red-shirt crewmen's lives. … Depending upon your approach, you could either doom the project, and future red-shirted crewmen, or you could be visiting planets full of peaceful alien women.”
What all this means, I guess, is that “Star Trek’s” redshirts were about as safe as our nation’s bridges, regardless of whether Captain Kirk was scoring with some alien pulchritude.
Actually, the game itself (courtesy Mediaweek’s ratings guru Marc Berman) isn’t all that hard – you just pick a show from each of the broadcast networks and hope for the best, ratingswise – but the scoring has me scratching my head:
“For example, if your pick "Desperate Housewives" averages 20 million viewers before the game starts, and it ranks #2 in a week during the 4-week period of the game attracting 22 million people, you'll earn 108.90 points (Your resulting points from this bonus will be rounded to the nearest thousandth of a point):
[ { 101 - (2) } * { 1 + ((22-20)/(20)) } = 108.90 ]
This bonus only applies to INCREASES (and not DECREASES) from the season average; if using the same example of the 20-million-viewer average for "Desperate Housewives" and in a particular week, it finishes #2 with 18 million, the original formula is applied [ 101 - (2) = 99 ]”
And more:
“EXPLANATION OF MULTIPLICATION FACTORS
There are numbers like "3.84x" and "0.96x" next to each show. For our game, each respective number is their multiplication factor for each week that show airs to give incentive to anyone who wishes to use them. Obviously, without these factors, for example, a one-time event (which will always have a factor of at least 3.84) or a show that doesn't air a full 4 weeks in the game would not even come close in being competitive in points compared to a show that airs for each week in the 4-week game period.
Factors are determined by the number of potential showings within the 4-week game period: 3.84x for 1 showing, 1.92x for 2 showings, 1.28x for 3 showings, 0.96x for 4 showings. The multiplication factors are more for some select shows that are not expected to do well in the ratings, and in terms of factors for wildcards, they vary from show to show to keep each show competitive. The multiplication factors for topWC, midWC and some botWC shows will take on a fraction form. Here's the format of this fraction:
(Wildcard points target for the game) divided by (projected points show could earn without its mult. factor)
If a topWC that airs just one time in the game is projected to be the #1 show of its week, the multiplication factor is 3.84, which is 384 divided by 100.”
Got it? Then go to it! Deadline on this one is Tuesday.
Actually, this one might be a lot easier: Pick the first five new shows of the fall season to get cancelled. The math’s sort of unnecessarily wonkish on this one, as well (one of the hazards of being a TV-ratings guru, I suppose), but based on early entries, if you don’t include “Cavemen” on your list, you’re just not trying to win. Deadline on this one: Sept. 13.
Fans of Paula Abdul’s celeb-reality train wreck “Hey Paula” know that the prophetic choreographer/costume designer had a unique vision for the “Bratz” movie, based on the toy line of slutty dolls – “I know this movie, I know these girls and I know this project,” she enthused almost comprehensibly – only to get fired off the flick via an Email on her Blackberry.
Bad move. Apparently, what “Bratz” so direly needed was Abdul’s input, her dedication, her passion toward realizing a live-action film version about vacuous teenaged trollops, because what the filmmakers achieved without Abdul’s insights into what makes these characters tick, absent her penetrating stare into the souls of these courageously vacant young women, didn’t impress the critics collected by rottentomatoes.com:
“This is why the terrorists hate us.” – The Onion AV Club
“For all its blather about 'letting your spirit soar,' it’s really about furthering an MTV-defined version of cool, which means too many clothes, too little education and too much money.” – Variety
“The girls in the live-action ‘Bratz’ movie look less - what's the right word? - whorish than the dolls, but the lifestyle their movie is selling is no less disturbing.” – Sun Publications
“You see, when these barely legal billboards walk down the street in short skirts and porn star makeup, they're just expressing their creativity and livin' life to the fullest. Holla!” – DVDtalk.com
“The dialogue is stupid, the plot is stupid, and unfortunately, the stars are as brainless as their plastic counterparts. This is girl power?” – E! Online
“‘Bratz’ is like being raped by MySpace.” – Cinemablend.com
“Bad not for its message or values, but for simply being a flat-out awful abortive trainwreck of a disastrous pile of worthless stupid garbage of an utter mess of a movie, even by the low, low standards of Movies Based on Toys.” – EricDSnider.com
And did we mention Oscar winner Jon Voight is in it? Because he totally is!
Viacom cable networks are trying to figure out how to sucker more viewers into sticking around to watch its commercials. (Yes, this isn’t a terribly compelling topic, but if you stick around to the end, you’ll get a prurient little bonus.)
Here’s Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman:
"One is to reduce the length of commercial pods and increase the number of them to increase viewer retention. … (Another is) "to introduce programming elements inside the commercial pods. That also increases viewer retention. We are also going to focus very much on the ordering of -- what order our commercials appear within the pods."
So, more commercial breaks but they don’t last for what seems like five minutes, sticking itty-bitty bits of the show within the commercial breaks (key plot points would be best, except MTV’s “The Hills” doesn’t seem to have any key plot points), and then having commercials for Michael Bay movies logically and narratively segue into spots for Head On (rub directly on the forehead, in case you’ve forgotten).
What about jettisoning the commercials for debt relief, assistance for tax evaders and “Girls Gone Wild” altogether, as those just serve to inform viewers that the programmer considers them to be financially irresponsible louts who like to drool over flashes of women’s breasts?
From the story:
“MTV has long been an early adopter of new ad formats. Some commercials during its Video Music Awards, for example, took place against the backdrop of the event itself, without breaking to a filmed spot.”
Well, there’s your answer. Those giant screens behind Jon Stewart needn’t be enhancing whatever comedy bit he’s doing. They can carry ads for the GoldKit, which invites dupes to mail their gold jewelry into people who think people are stupid enough to mail gold to complete strangers. It’s not like Viacom seems to care much about the integrity of their programming.
And now, for your troubles:
“(A)ds for transvestite hookers and Asian massage parlors are gone!
“‘As of this week, we are not going to accept any explicit advertising,’ [Manhattan Media CEO Tom] Allon said. ‘We’re probably kissing away about a million dollars a year in revenue. We’re not making a moral or puritanical decision. We just believe in the long-term, it’s not best for the publication.’”
On the other hand, it’s not too good for beleaguered New Yorkers who otherwise would have no access to trannie hookers (ABC’s favorite new plot point come the fall season, BTW), either.
On Sunday, AMC will offer a bold new programming initiative entitled “Please don’t watch us” with a Chevy Chase movie marathon, hosted by Chase himself, who, per the press release, will “offer insight into some of his most memorable roles that have entertained audiences for over three decades.” Said insight will include pulse-pounding remembrances of playing Scrabble on the set of “Three Amigos.” (No, seriously.)
Actually, a couple of the movies don’t suck – the original “Fletch” and the first “Vacation” movie – and AMC is sparing us the bottom of the barrel from Chase’s oeuvre: There’s no “Cops and Robbersons” or “Nothing But Trouble” or “Funny Farm” on the schedule. But, still: A Chevy Chase marathon? Yeesh.
To wash that bad taste from our mouths, we’ll segue into a story on AMC’s development. AMC, as you may have noted that we have noted ad nauseum, has this good show called “Mad Men” on (tonight at 10!).
The network is looking to add to that, with a miniseries about Vietnam based on the book “The Things They Carried;” “Cutman,” a boxing serial based on the short stories of F.X. Toole (one of his stories inspired “Million Dollar Baby”); a political thriller from writer/executive producer Jason Horwitch (“The Pentagon Papers”) and executive producer Joshua Maurer (“Introducing Dorothy Dandridge”) and a basketball show from former Laker Rick Fox (last seen getting a sex toy inserted into an orifice on FX’s “Dirt,” I’m sure he’d want you to know).
Merry Miller, the viral-video hostess whose train-wreck interview with Holly Hunter transformed her into an overnight laughingstock, is, as she puts it, trying to make lemonade from that lemon of a TV appearance.
It must be a first – a 10-minute interview about a four-minute interview, with the onscreen graphic asking, “TV Disaster or Marketing Genius?” – but Miller sits gamely through it all, even as her interrogator somewhat sadistically forces her to watch clips from the debacle, then shares with her comments from viewers, such as this one:
“HAHAHA Pick up your stuff at the end of the week lady. Don’t make a scene when security escorts you out. Worst Host EVER!”
Somewhat defensively, Merry insists that the most comment reaction she has received has been queries as to what shade of lipstick she was wearing during the interview.
Miller calls the phenomenon “a living case study” of the power of YouTube, notes, “I don’t think I belong on camera,” but admits, “I can see why people want to watch it.”
Sadly, in her mea culpa, Merry doesn’t come off seeming much more intelligent than she did in the original interview. Before the Hunter episode, “I interviewed hundreds and countless people,” she declares.
“It’s hurtful, the outcome,” she adds. “It’s extremely embarrassing. … The power of the Internet is so great. My gut had told me that it was the future of the world. … I’m going to take this phenomenon that I created and drive it somewhere.” (What, now she’s going all Al Gore and claiming she invented the Internets?)
To fully capitalize on this thing, ABC News Now is holding an online contest seeking a more competent guest host to anchor its trivial “What’s the Buzz” segment. Weakly, Miller suggests she might enter the contest.
“I clearly need a lot of training,” she says.
“That goes without saying,” her interviewer – who gets crueler by the moment! – replies.
After the pseudo-performance-art that was the YouTube Democratic Presidential debate, Republican Presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani aren’t gung-ho about their own upcoming YouTube-sponsored debate, as the idea of getting some hard and nasty chin music thrown at them by exasperated voters – you know, the people they ostensibly want to serve – is a lot less desirable than the softball lobs they get from so-called reporters. (Also they probably don’t want the reminder that their constituency consists of snowmen and wingnuts who call their assault rifle their “baby.”)
Nonetheless, hours of fun can be had by going to YouTube and clicking at random on the questions being posed.
Like this perky query from a frustrated cheerleader.
And there’re scads like this one bemoaning Bush fatigue.
Guess I’m beginning to see the candidates’ point.
Now she’s the subject of an unauthorized biography, due out Aug. 28, to coincide with all the “Katie: One Year Later” stories.
From the press release:
“For the past twenty-five years—first as the blithe spirit of the Today show, then as the only woman ever to anchor a network news program solo—Katie Couric has been a familiar visitor in the homes of millions. Yet, despite all her public exposure, no one—until now—has been able to penetrate the secrets behind her closely guarded personal life and her struggles in the cutthroat world of television news.
“In this probing portrait of America’s news queen, bestselling author Edward Klein rips away the mask that has hidden the many faces of Katie Couric: the strong, independent woman and the needy wife and lover; the grieving widow famed for her kindness to others and the fiercely competitive diva; the consummate television interviewer and the stumbling network anchor.
“Drawing on scores of interviews with people who have never spoken openly about Couric before, Katie: The Real Story absorbingly chronicles Katie’s rise to the top—from her early days at CNN and local television stations (where she was told she’d never succeed) to her phenomenal fifteen-year run on Today. For the first time, Klein reveals the critical role Katie’s father played in her risky decision to leave Today for the hallowed anchor chair once occupied by Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather.
“As Klein makes clear, Katie’s road to stardom has been paved with rocky personal relationships: a turbulent marriage to Jay Monahan, who died of colon cancer; testy associations with Today cohosts Bryant Gumbel and Matt Lauer; and several star-crossed love affairs, including one with a man seventeen years her junior.
“‘Katie: The Real Story’ is a candid portrait of a folksy charmer, loving single mother, cunning businesswoman, feminist icon, and notorious diva. Neither a whitewash nor a hatchet job, it’s a truthful, unflinching look at a remarkable woman and the media kingdom she’s sought to rule.”
I’ve heard that if you’re a woman who wants to get on her bad side, just wear a nicer pair of pumps around her. Wonder if that’ll be in the book.
Extraordinary amounts of hand-wringing today about the Latest Death of Journalism, this time because Rupert Murdoch got his mitts on the Wall Street Journal. Summing up:
Reading the tea leaves of Murdoch quotes on the Journal: “When The Journal gets its Page 3 girls, we’ll make sure they have M.B.A.’s.” And this: “I’m quite ashamed. I enjoy popular journalism. I must say I enjoy it more than what you would call quality journalism.”
Murdoch won’t destroy the paper, but he may be too old-school to help it move forward.
The union representing Dow Jones employees is "disappointed with the apparent decision by key Bancroft family members to support the sale of Dow Jones & Company to News Corp.” And we all know how much you don’t want to disappoint a union.
Not to worry, says the paper’s publisher: “The same standards of accuracy, fairness and authority will apply to this publication, regardless of ownership.” That’s so precious.
Remember when those who owned newspapers had a sense of civic duty and integrity? You do? That’s so sweet.
The Journal’s ipso facto association with Fox News Channel will hurt its reputation.
Your Mayor was chatting recently with Dita Von Teese – what? You don’t think I’m cool enough to spend my days hanging with burlesque queens? – and was kind of wondering how Marilyn Manson, AKA Brian Hugh Warner, manages to pull such babes.
Let’s face it, he’s not a stud. He’s a rock star, sure, but he doesn’t even have as good a pickup line as his former collaborator Trent Reznor, who managed such a piquant line as “I want to f@#% you like an animal” in his ditty “Closer.” Yet Marilyn Manson has dated Rose McGowan in the past and is humping Evan Rachel Wood today, and he actually managed to marry Von Teese, who's now filing for divorce.
So what accounts for his magic, anyway?
“It’s kind of hard for me to answer that question at this point, since I’m asking myself what was I thinking, too,” Von Teese told me. “It’s hard to say why (he’s so magnetic); I’m trying to forget.”
About this blog
David Kronke was appointed Mayor of Television after a bloodless coup in 2000. Since then, he has improved infrastructure, championed greater educational opportunities and fought for reforms that have utterly erased corruption and incompetence from the television industry. Since Mr. Kronke has ascended to power, Television is a far better place.
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