February 2008 Archives
There was this show called “Scrubs.” It was a comedy about wacky doctors and oddball patients and an extremely peculiar janitor. People liked it just fine. They shot it in an abandoned hospital in the Valley, where they offered cast and crew members money to spend a half-hour on a body tray down in the morgue.
It did OK. But NBC threw it around the schedule a lot and then it did less OK. But still, 6 or 7 or 8 million people were watching it and ABC, who has comedies like “According to Jim” which is watched by about 5 million people and “Carpoolers” which gets about 4 million people to tune in, looked at it and thought to itself, “Hey, 7 or 8 million viewers is pretty good, in our book” and so they asked “Scrubs” if they wanted to do a season for ABC, which produces the show in the first place.
And then NBC, who was pretty much going to cancel the thing, said, “Whu---? Waitasecond, buddy, that’s our show!”
Yes: NBC, which has waited until the last second before renewing the show and has used it as a midseason replacement and was dragging its feet about whether or not they’d even allow “Scrubs” to produce a series-finale episode, is suddenly is all about their “Scrubs.”
I have a dog. He’ll be like totally ignoring a cow’s hoof and then I’ll pick it up and then he wants that cow’s hoof more than anything on the planet. NBC’s like my dog: They’re both house-trained.
It turns out that the reason reporters write about NBC's woes is not because after years of complete and utter dominance thanks to a schedule boasting a lot of smart, urbane shows, the network is in a disturbingly spectacular freefall and is trying to turn itself around with breathtakingly stupid reality shows and stuff they found while trolling around on the Internets! No, the reason reporters write about NBC's woes is because it relieves them, if only momentarily, from the heartbreak that is their own industry crashing and burning.
And how do I know this? Because NBC CEO Jeff Zucker said so himself, that's how.
Zucker said: "The thing [reporters] want is for the [TV-news] business to die faster [than the newspaper business], because that's what makes them feel better."
[Envision a hilariously wacky, overly broad double-take, maybe even a spit take if that's the way you roll, along with a whimsical "boooiiiinnnnngg" sound effect.] Whu-----?
Gee, that's so impressively boneheaded and mean-spirited I'm surprised someone in the White House didn't say it. As newsrooms across the country are emasculated on a daily basis (and many are already geldings to begin with), stories about diminishing news coverage aren't some sort of Schadenfreude but a kind of where-will-this-all-end plea for sanity to be restored.
People need and even sometimes want to know what's going on in the world, and as journalists are increasingly offered buyouts of one Starbucks gift card for every year of service (maximum eight gift cards) and a cyanide capsule, the losers in all of this aren't just highly trained professionals forced to head hat in hand to the nearby Wal-Mart for a greeter's job but everyone, anyone who won't learn something that directly affects them until too late.
And Zucker instead posits it as a your-industry's-dying-faster-than-my-industry p!ssing match. Ouch and more ouch.
“On Tuesday, the NBC premiere of ‘quarterlife’ marked the network's worst time-period performance in the 10 p.m. hour in at least 17 years, averaging a 1.3 rating/4 share among adults 18 to 49 and 3.1 million viewers. The premiere numbers prompted the show's co-creator Marshall Herskovitz to question the show's transition from online phenomenon to broadcast series.
“‘It never should have been a network show,’ Herskovitz told a group at a Harvard Business School conference Wednesday. ‘It's too specific ... from the first three minutes, I knew it wasn't right.’”
If that’s the case, why did he sell it to them in the first place?
This weekend on:
* “Torchwood:” The gang investigates a series of murders in which the victims have had their blood systems “erased.” This leads them to Pharm, a cutting-edge biotechnology firm dabbling in curing incurable diseases with lethal alien parasites who enter their patients’ blood streams. “Doctor Who’s” Miss Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman) helps the team out on this one. As usual, a single episode of “Torchwood” boasts enough crazy inventiveness to fuel a season of most shows.
* “Dirt:” Season Two begins after a kind of rocky season one got bogged down in an overly serious, apocalyptic tone that didn’t really hew to what the show’s about. (Courteney Cox’s Lucy Spiller, the editor of the gossip rag Dirt Now, was the FX anti-hero who had the least fun even though her life was by far the easiest.)
They’ve changed the show quite a bit, lightening the tone (though it could still stand to have a few more really funny lines) and reimagining it as “Law & Order” meets TMZ.com, with storylines ripped from the tabs. If this had been what the show was all along, it probably would’ve fared better last year.
Sunday’s premiere offers a mashup between Anna Nicole Smith and Alexander Litvenenko (the Russian spy killed with Polonium-210), a cocktail so curious as to be inspired, and a rather inevitable character who’s equal parts Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears. The March 9 episode, demurely entitled “Dirty Slutty Whores,” riffs endlessly on Paris Hilton (here dubbed “Milan Carlton” and played by an actress who fairly resembles the star of the box-office megabomb “The Hottie and the Nottie”), giving her a comeuppance we can only dream about.
Yet it also tries to couch her in a sociological context: “She’s all of us,” says Lucy’s favorite photographer Don (Ian Hart). “We’re a nation of spoiled rich people. Milan is so extreme that it makes us feel better by comparison. But really she’s just the part of ourselves that we loathe. That’s why we need her, to make ourselves feel better.”
The subplot involves Alec Baldwin and David Hasselhoff’s love child. Even moreso than “Law & Order,” “Dirt” makes absolutely certain you get the references, faithfully aping the original viral videos that rained such mortification down upon the celebrities referenced. They probably don’t have to be so on-point.
And good news for Don: His meds have finally been worked out so he’s no longer talking to his cat or hallucinating dead starlets in love with him. He speaks for us all in this exchange:
Lucy: Are you feeling good?
Don: No, but I’m feeling normal.
* “Breaking Bad:” Walt (Bryan Cranston) goes all bad-ass on us, even with his incapacitating cancer. Though he instructs his meth-slinging colleage Jesse (Aaron Paul), “No violence” in his business dealings, he pretty spectacularly breaks his own rule by episode’s end. Fulminate of mercury gets some pretty righteous product placement: By episode’s end, everyone with a score to settle is going to want some.
Chemo’s taking its toll, and Walt’s DEA-agent brother-in-law finds a clue linking a crime scene to chemistry equipment at Walt’s school, resulting in blowback that leaves Walt rueful for a few minutes.
Walt and Jesse take a rather perilous journey toward locating a new distributor for their wares. Snorting a little of Walt’s meth, the unhinged operator sputters, “This kicks like a mule with its balls wrapped in duct tape!” Which means, in case you’re wondering, that it’s really good.
That would also be a really good pull-quote for this show. So, here you go, AMC: “This kicks like a mule with its balls wrapped in duct tape!” – David Kronke, Mayor of Television.
* “Aliens in America:” We’ve previously discussed the likely fate of The CW, and this modest sitcom’s likely going to be residual damage. The show, about a Muslim foreign exchange student in a small Wisconsin town, returns with new episodes on Sunday. Oddly enough, the main characters cede center stage to Dylan Taylor, whose recurring character, Trey, gets the episode’s best laughs. Taylor transforms him in this installment into the most polite and empathetic bully ever.
On the downside: The other storylines aren’t particularly inspired, Scott Patterson’s role has essentially been reduced to that of a bystander, Amy Pietz’s character has gotten a little one-note and the following week’s “Rent”-inspired episode should trigger a moratorium on “Rent” jokes. In a nicer world, “Aliens in America” might’ve won itself a bigger audience. But there is no nicer world.
- “Torchwood:” 9 p.m. Saturday, BBC America.
- “Dirt:” 10 p.m. Sunday, FX.
- “Breaking Bad:” 10 p.m. Sunday, AMC.
- “Aliens in America:” 8:30 p.m., The CW Channel 5.
(A review of “Oprah’s Big Give” will appear in Sunday’s paper.)
Fox, apparently having noticed how much hot dogs look like phalluses, will be promoting its upcoming sitcom about disastrous dating misadventures, “Unhitched,” this weekend by giving away free hot dogs at Pink’s, 709 N. La Brea in Hollywood, on Friday and Saturday beginning at 9:30 a.m. The first 500 people to show up will be treated to a Pink’s dog on both days, and while I’ve never considered hot dogs to be breakfast fare, the earlier you get there the better your chances of scoring free grub. Pink’s offers such delicacies as the “Martha Stewart Dog” (including sauerkraut and sour cream) and the “Rosie O’Donnell Long Island Dog” (also with sauerkraut) – make of that what you will.
“Unhitched” is executive-produced by the Farrelly Brothers (who directed the pilot), so you can rest assured that the characters will be routinely humiliated. In fact, the first bad date ends in an act of monkey sodomy (or something uncomfortably close to that neighborhood), so that gives you an idea of what you’ll be getting yourself into.
Herewith, outtakes from an upcoming story in Sunday’s paper on the show:
Bobby Farrelly: “Everyone’s willing to be the brunt of a joke. It’s just our style. Everyone’s got to be willing to take a bit of a beating.”
The Farrellys didn’t create the show, but signed on after reading the pilot script: “The monkey sodomy on page three is what won us over. Right from the opening bell, these guys were going for it and that’s what we like to do, too, go for broke. These guys were real aggressive with it and we thought it worked.”
Craig Bierko, who plays Gator, who’s on the receiving end of that monkey attack: “That was the one day my girlfriend visited the set – that was humiliating. That happens five minutes into the pilot, and you realize, ‘Oh, that’s the Farrellys planting their flag.’ You’re playing by their rules now.
“You know, I miss the little bugger, Archie. He doesn’t write. When he left the set, he was signing something to me, and his trainer suggested that I get a security guard.”
Rashida Jones, who plays Kate, the nominally level-headed character of the bunch: “The entire writing staff and the Farrellys would really get into trying to make it as humiliating as possible. There’s a scene where I’m covered in food and the writers kept saying, ‘More food! More food! More food! Cover her! Make her stink like garlic!’ I stank like garlic for two days.”
On coming between Jim and Pam in “The Office:” “I don’t think I knew what I was stepping into. And it kind of occurred to me a couple of weeks before the first episode aired, and I started to have anxiety about it because I figured people would hate me. They would hate me no matter what because Jim and Pam are so beloved and their relationship is so beloved that it didn’t matter how much people tried to like me, the fact was they don’t want to like me. So the fact that I broke through at all, that there were some people who liked my character at all, was a huge point of pride for me. And was a huge credit to the writers.
“I was only supposed to be on for six episodes, so it was a compliment they kept me around for an entire season. But I always knew it was finite. I was never officially written out. Karen still officially works for Dunder Mifflin, so I’d love to be back on that show.”
Chris Pappas, co-creator: “I would say that 90% of the stuff we came up with (in the show) is off personal experiences. There hasn’t really been a show out there that has embraced bad dating.”
Alas, Pappas declined to say which member of his writing staff has been sodomized by a simian.
Of course ABC refused to comment. Most people accused of heinous crimes don’t talk to the press until they lawyer up.
According to the Book of Revelations, the next step is the rapture.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go scream a lot of obscene words.
While NBC’s travails in recent years suggest that the network’s name stands for Never Been Competent, the network is watching yet another potential disaster rolling its way in slow-motion: Jay Leno’s handing the “Tonight Show” baton over to Conan O’Brien in 2009.
NBC, in order to keep O’Brien from defecting to another network, signed him to a deal a few years ago that promised him the “Tonight Show” in 2009, and if the network reneged on the offer, it’d have to pay Conan a penalty of some $45 million. May have seemed like a good bet at the time, or at least deferring one more headache for another day. But despite delivering somewhat hackneyed product, the avuncular Leno has been dominating late-night ratings – he even managed to beat David Letterman during the writers strike, despite the fact that Letterman’s show had its full contingent of writers and Leno (ostensibly) had to write all of his material on the fly. Meanwhile, just at the time when he should be gaining momentum, Conan’s begun to face some stiff competition from Craig Ferguson over at CBS. And there’s the question of how comfortably Conan can ease into the new timeslot: He may be too quirky to appeal to as many viewers as Jay does seemingly effortlessly, but if he rounds some of his edges off, his current fans may not be appeased. On the other hand, NBC’s in no condition to p!ss away $45 million these days, so not handing the job over to Conan is extremely unlikely.
NBC has already begun building O’Brien’s “Tonight Show” set in Universal City and sweet-talking Leno about continuing at the network in some other capacity. But Leno has insisted that his current late-night slot is the only one he’s interested in, and that he doesn’t want to move from his Burbank studio (NBC is in the process of selling its Burbank lot and leasing it back).
Which brings us to this New York Times report that even though no one is officially supposed to be approaching Leno about his post-2009 plans at this point, in fact plenty of people already are. ABC is so anxious to become a bigger player in late-night that it’s willing to jettison “Nightline,” Fox wants to finally establish a late-night beachhead and Sony Pictures Television wouldn’t mind cozying up to Jay, either, and their deal would likely be the juiciest and most lucrative.
But: Is Jay in it for the money, or to stick it to NBC and prove just how stupid they were for forcing him to walk the plank just to hold on to Conan? One executive told the Times, “I expect money will play a secondary role to revenge and Jay will look to prove to everybody that NBC was wrong.”
So: Let’s mull Jay’s options for him, shall we?
* ABC: The Times puts its chips here. This would be the only deal that would guarantee that Leno would go directly head-to-head against and pulverize O’Brien into a puddle of pale pulp, if that really is his overriding motivation. And ABC’s sensibility is more in keeping with Jay’s than Fox’s. The downside, however, is that there would be some negative ink regarding Jay’s killing off the respected “Nightline,” a consideration that had a hand in Letterman opting to say thanks but no thanks to ABC and stay with CBS a few years ago.
* Fox: The network is desperate to establish a late-night presence, if only to wash away the bad taste left in its mouth from previous abject failures featuring Joan Rivers and Chevy Chase. Jay’s mainstream, Main-Street-Middle-America persona would be less of a fit with Fox’s edgier fare. And, again, the timeslot consideration – Fox’s show would begin at 11 p.m. – might conflict with Leno’s bloodlust for O’Brien’s head. “Another performer would find getting a jump at 11 an advantage,” a Fox executive told the Times. “But probably not Jay, who will want to be head to head against NBC.”
* Sony: Syndication made Oprah Winfrey an extremely wealthy woman, and could easily make Leno the uber-Oprah of late-night. On the face of it, this would seem a no-brainer: Leno’d get to own not only his show but a prospective series following his (just as Letterman also owns “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson”). The Times says Sony would also offer Leno $40 million annually (he currently makes $25 million), making him far and away the highest-paid late-night performer (Letterman makes $30 million). They’d also put Jay’s name on a new theater on the Sony lot and even throw some more coin his way when Sony music artists would appear on his show.
Essentially, Sony’s offering Jay the ability to add every car on the planet to his already sizable auto collection. And with the networks’ market share shrinking on a second-by-second basis, Leno’s syndicated show would be able to cater to the strongest channels in every local market. The lone downside would be that they probably wouldn’t be able to guarantee that Jay gets that NBC-bludgeoning 11:30 p.m. timeslot in every market. And, again, if revenge is the chief motivator, there wouldn’t be a daily overnight ratings report comparing/contrasting Jay v. Conan: Syndicated numbers are issued on a weekly basis.
* Sticking with NBC: Conceivably, Leno might stick around at the network that stuck the shiv in his back and do occasional primetime specials or an opening monologue in lieu of a news update on the “Today” show. The network insists it wants to keep him around, but probably only so he won’t turn up somewhere else and underscore what a mistake showing him the door in favor of Conan was. But that seems about as likely as NBC offering me the job to replace Conan in the 12:30 a.m. timeslot.
So: You’d want to be Jay in this little skirmish. You wouldn’t want to be Conan, and you certainly wouldn’t want to be an executive at NBC.
NBC’s repurposing of the online series “quarterlife” tanked last night. It lost nearly 60 percent of its lead-in, and a full quarter of its already dinky viewership bailed after the first half hour. Which means it averaged about 3.86 million viewers.
So: It’s supposed to settle into its permanent timeslot on Sunday. Will it last that long?
Otherwise: “American Idol:” 28.5 million, “Back To You” returned with 12.3 million (which would be great had “American Idol” not been its lead-in, but it was, so it’s only so-so), and an ABC newsmagazine (7.64m) beat “Jericho” (6.9m). MSNBC's coverage of the debate between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton outscored most network fare on Tuesday, with 7.8 million viewers, an all-time high for the cable news network.
In sum: A paltry 18.4 million people – or, 6% of the population – tuned into the broadcast networks last night at 10 p.m. Why are they still called broadcast networks?
OK, now I’m pretty sure people are just yanking me: There’s an effort to save “Las Vegas,” for chrissakes. NBC cancelled the show after the writers strike ended, but still about three seasons too late. I saw an episode recently and am pretty sure no one lifted a finger to ensure that the thing made sense.
Here’s a good measure of NBC’s enthusiasm for the show: It was cancelled even though the last episode shot was the first part of a two-part cliffhanger. Clearly, NBC thought anyone who was actually watching this show would’ve forgotten all about it by the time the writers strike ended. (It’s not exactly going to help sales of the season 5 DVD, everyone knowing there’s no closure whatsoever.)
Nonetheless, according to an Email, “a fan-based campaign has begun to save the series,” which is pretty funny, given that the Email came from a PR firm.
“I just looked at the numbers and I looked at where we were in the season and I know how much it would've cost to start us back up. I told my writers ahead of time, ‘If there's a strike, it's going to be shows like ours that get hurt the most.’ … It's going to take us six to eight weeks to strike that casino [set]. It's already happening. The body wasn't even cold.”
If Thompson saw the writing on the wall, then why didn’t he work harder to prevent the final produced episode from ending in a cliffhanger?
We’ve discussed in the past the folly of these resurrect-a-show campaigns particularly in light of “Jericho’s” disappointing ratings after CBS succumbed to fan hysteria, but Gawker goes absolutely apoplectic over the notion of zealous fan bases lobbying to save a low-rated show rather than finding something else to watch or, better still, getting a life:
“I officially hate these campaigns. They're boring and useless and almost always are focused on some bad show that deserves to be canceled no matter what. Their clamoring never represents any actual viewer appetite for a particular program, just a few crazies with too much time on their hands. Whether it's an effort to be young and with-it or if it's just some perverted altruism, the networks simply need to stop paying attention to the Internet.”
Tonight, NBC debuts “quarterlife,” the online series from “thirtysomething” creators Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, who apparently have still not learned that the SHIFT bar on their keyboards capitalizes letters. The show was initially developed for ABC, who rejected it; they then produced it as a series of eight-minute episodes for the Internet and, in the middle of the writers strike, NBC picked it up as stopgap programming, despite the fact that the New York Times reported that within its first month, “quarterlife” went from getting a million viewers to somewhere around 100,000. NBC’s no doubt preparing makegoods for advertisers as we speak.
“quarterlife” concerns a clutch of twentysomethings revolving around Dylan (Bitsie Tulloch), who has her own blog (named “quarterlife”) and uses it to transmit urgent dispatches to the outside world on the current state of her navel. Of course, plenty of people have blogs like this, but Dylan’s, against all odds, becomes something of a phenomenon, thanks largely to her blithe willingness to humiliate her friends.
And so, to commemorate NBC’s launch of “quarterlife,” we herewith offer our own “quarterlife”-style blog entry.
Hi! It’s me! I think I’m an interesting person and am sure everyone else will think so, too, so I’m sharing all the intimate details of my life, like how deep I am and all the quirky things that I do! Like, none of my favorite music that I get from iTunes is from a major label and when I go to the grocery store, I only buy organic stuff that’s not in recyclable packaging!
Almost as important as me are my friends! They’re crazy, too! Except for Charlie, who’s kind of quiet and keeps to himself and when you go to his house you hear this buzzing grinding sound but when you knock on the door he’s all “Oh, I’m not doing anything,” but the place has plastic wrap everywhere and he bought these medical props from the movie “Dead Ringers” off of eBay and there’s this weird tincture smell and all the doors are locked and there are a lot of open holes in his backyard. Charlie’s kind of boring, really.
Also, there’s Trish, who even though she has all these icky pockmarks on her blotchy skin somehow manages to keep getting pregnant. I tell her if she’d take one or two of those to term, Angelina Jolie wouldn’t have to go all the way to Africa to adopt all those babies, but she blames it all on her dad. I don’t get it, though – he seems kind of dull. He’s a government contractor and he’s totally like the kind of contractor my parents hired to build their deck – he always disappears for months at a time just at a crucial point in the job. He says he has all these overseas assignments and when he comes back, he has all these cool human skull thingys, but if you ask him where he got them, all he says is, “Clients.”
Anyhoo, the other night a bunch of us went to this cool club and there was this bitchen DJ who was kind of cute and I was feeling it until she segued from Lupe Fiasco into Buckcherry – I mean, who does that? I practically did a spit-take with my Absinthe Drip Frappé!
My friend Josh always tells me that there’s a whole big world out there, but I’ve never seen any evidence of it.
- “quarterlife:” 10 tonight; thereafter, 9 p.m. Sundays; NBC Channel 4. (Alas, the review’s not up on the website or else I’d link to it; but I get it – who online would want to read about a TV show about a blogger?)
The Internets have been like that monster in “Cloverfield,” destroying old media like newspapers, radio and the music industry casually and remorselessly. And now, according to the Wall Street Journal, Google and YouTube are preparing to do the same thing to Television:
“Americans watched more than 300 million videos on Google's YouTube in December alone, and the amount of time spent watching video online grew 34% last year.
“While that's not been entirely at the expense of television viewing, the growth sends shivers down network executives' backs. Worse, Google's new plans to wring advertising revenue out of online video could eventually cause broadcasters a lot of pain. …
“If Google succeeds in marrying advertising to online video, broadcasters could find themselves in a bind similar to newspaper publishers. The latter suffer from declining circulation, higher production costs than their digital brethren and advertisers that are switching to cheaper, more effective online distribution.
“Broadcasters already face variants of the first two problems. Google's initiative might complete the trifecta. The cost of reaching a thousand viewers online is about one-fifth the average cost of doing so via a major broadcaster. And the fact that users click on ads that interest them means a campaign's efficacy can be measured more accurately.
“The roughly $80 billion annual market for television advertising has held up remarkably well over the past several years. It might now be in for a big challenge.”
This might be a little hyperbolic: After all, I don’t think anyone’s really figured out how to marry advertising and content when it comes to short films. A five-second spot before a parody news item on the Onion News Network scarcely makes an impression, while sitting through a 30-second spot before a 90-second or two-minute news story at ABC.com or CNN.com is worse than watching regular TV and is just irritating enough to make you think twice about watching anything else on their sites.
ABC has been successfully testing this new service in Orange County, where it found that 93% of those using fast-forwarding disabled VOD considered the advertising acceptable in exchange for gaining free access to the shows. 20% of the users went with On Demand rather than their DVRs, and ABC also found that 27% of those surveyed said they wouldn’t have watched the shows at all without the convenience and ubiquitous availability of On Demand programming.
So ABC’s not only reaching out to casual viewers but getting them to sit through commercials, to boot. So maybe they don’t have as much to fear from YouTube – well, yet – as the Wall Street Journal seems to suggest.
As spectacles go, ratings for the 80th Annual Academy Awards were less than spectacular. The ceremony averaged 29.16 million viewers Sunday evening, down distressingly from the 40.17 million who watched last year. And the show lost nearly 7 million viewers over the course of the 2.5 hours it was on the air in prime time on the East Coast.
By contrast, “American Idol” averaged 28.84 million viewers last Tuesday, and without having the likes of George Clooney, Jack Nicholson, Cate Blanchett and Nicole Kidman on hand.
The prior low: 2003’s 33 million viewers.
What accounted for the severe dropoff? Let’s take a look:
5:30 p.m.: Show begins with Jon Stewart’s opening monologue: 32.27 million viewers.
6 p.m.: Sigh … another montage, of past Best Supporting Actor winners. Down to 30.7 million.
6:30 p.m.: They’re handing out the Oscars for Live-Action and Animated Short Films. 630,000 more viewers bail out, leaving ABC with 30.07 million.
7 p.m.: Kristin Chenoweth’s overstuffed production number, “That’s How You Know,” sends nearly 3 million more audience members fleeing. Also, everyone on the East Coast switches over to CBS to watch the diluted version of an 18-month-old episode of “Dexter.” Down to 27.34 million.
7:30 p.m.: Some old guy gets an honorary Oscar, causing more viewers to wander off: 25.42 million are still hanging in there.
Numbers for the rest of the evening weren’t available, but it seems likely that the only people watching by the time “No Country For Old Men” won Best Picture were those live-blogging the show.
We discussed last week that New York Times article intimating that John McCain may or may not have been dallying with a lobbyist; we’re not sure but maybe and if so – well, hey, right?
Naturally, the piece came under intense fire from many sides – readers, both pro- and not-so-pro-McCain, the liberal-media-hating-right, even other journalists and, yesterday, from the Times’ own public editor, Clark Hoyt. He wrote:
“But in the absence of a smoking gun, I asked (Times editor) Keller why he decided to run what he had.
“‘If the point of the story was to allege that McCain had an affair with a lobbyist, we’d have owed readers more compelling evidence than the conviction of senior staff members,’ he replied. ‘But that was not the point of the story. The point of the story was that he behaved in such a way that his close aides felt the relationship constituted reckless behavior and feared it would ruin his career.’
“I think that ignores the scarlet elephant in the room. A newspaper cannot begin a story about the all-but-certain Republican presidential nominee with the suggestion of an extramarital affair with an attractive lobbyist 31 years his junior and expect readers to focus on anything other than what most of them did. And if a newspaper is going to suggest an improper sexual affair, whether editors think that is the central point or not, it owes readers more proof than The Times was able to provide.”
It’s hard to believe that a paper like the New York Times did not learn anything from CBS News, who got thumped and hard thanks to its story about George W. Bush’s time (or lack thereof) in the National Guard. Locating a single mistake in Dan Rather’s story, a falsified document, Bush’s champions managed to discredit the whole shebang, even though there seemed to be compelling evidence that the President didn’t actually serve his full tour of duty.
And so, with the Times and McCain: Though the bigger issue is whether the Republican Presidential candidate’s relationship with lobbyists compromises his reputation as a reformer, dropping that titillating bombshell in the second paragraph utterly clouded the point they were trying to make.
The offending line in the Times story read, “Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself…” The same point could have been made, and less salaciously, had the line simply been rewritten: “Concerned by perceptions that might arise over the lobbyist’s ubiquity around McCain during his campaign…”
As Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz points out, “The hardest thing in journalism is to spend months on a story and then admit you haven't got the goods. There is, instead, a tendency to dress the thing up with fine writing and larger themes in an effort to demonstrate that it's not just about sex, when of course that is the only element most readers -- and the rest of the media -- will focus on.”
Not like the media needs any more lousy news or bad press at this point. Newspapers are hurting, in case you hadn’t heard, and investigative journalism is one of the costliest things a paper can invest in: Assigning reporters to weeks and even months on one story isn’t exactly cost-effective, particularly when an expose on corporate malfeasance may not even get as many hits on your website as photos from Oscar’s red carpet. So if your best efforts blow up in your face, well, your trigger finger’s going to get a little hesitant (has CBS News broken a big story since its bloody nose from the National Guard story?). And if people in positions of power understand that there are fewer watchdogs out there, they’re going to make people like Enron’s Ken Lay and Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski and Blackwater’s Erik Prince look like pillars of ethical resoluteness.
And then, of course, we’re all doomed. But you knew that already.
“Late Night with Conan O’Brien” is taking NBC’s Green Initiative seriously: They’re recycling their jokes from night to night.
Consider these punchlines from last week:
* “Yesterday the U.S. Department of Agriculture recalled 143 million pounds of beef. Experts say this is the largest recall of beef since Star Jones had liposuction.”
- and –
“The Pentagon says it successfully shot down an old satellite over the Pacific Ocean. According to the Pentagon, this is the largest object to be shot down since Star Jones was fired by ‘The View.’”
* “The founders of Ben & Jerry's ice cream are endorsing Barack Obama instead of
Hillary Clinton. Which makes sense - because ‘Ba-rocky Road’ is a catchier name
for an ice cream than ‘Pantsuits 'N Cream.’”
- and -
“Yesterday the founders of Ben and Jerry's announced that they are endorsing Barack Obama instead of Hillary. Apparently Ben and Jerry decided not to endorse Hillary after they realized that nobody would buy a flavor called ‘Nutbuster Crunch.’”
* “The Spice Girls say they want to play at Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday party. When he heard this Mandela said, ‘Thanks, but I'd rather go back to prison.’”
- and -
“The Spice Girls have offered to perform at Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday party. When he heard this, Mandela said, Thanks, but I've already made plans to enjoy myself.’”
* “Kirstie Alley has left Jenny Craig and announced that she is starting her own weight-loss program. Apparently, under the program, every time you feel like eating something, Kirstie Alley comes to your house and eats it for you.”
- and –
“Kirstie Alley said her split with the Jenny Craig diet company was amicable and they both decided to go in ‘a different direction.’ The direction Kirstie went was towards the cookie aisle.”
Good thing to see the writers earning their paychecks with such fresh material.
8:41 p.m.: Martin Scorsese, presenting the Best Director Oscar, which he calls “an award that will – trust me – mean so much to the recipient.” Joel and Ethan Coen shock the world by predictably winning the trophy for “No Country for Old Men.”
“I don’t have a lot to add to what I said earlier,” Ethan says, referring to his nearly non-acceptance acceptance speech for Best Adapted Screenplay, and kind of glibly belying what Scorsese said about the award meaning so much to the winner. Joel, on the other hand, recalls shooting a movie when they were kids called “Henry Kissinger: Man on the Go” and adds, “What we do now doesn’t feel all that different from what we did back then.” I’d kind of like to see “Henry Kissinger: Man on the Go.”
8:45 p.m.: Denzel Washington shocks the world by predictably giving the Best Picture trophy to “No Country for Old Men.” Producer Scott Rudin smiles, something he’s not known for doing around his assistants, and thanks his partner: “Without you, honey, this (Oscar) is just hardware.” What is it with him?
8:51 p.m.: And now, the evening’s final montage: A collection of the best closing-credits scrolls in Oscar history.
Final thoughts: Nicely done, Jon Stewart; in this "green" production you scarcely left a carbon footprint but still proffered plenty of one-liners. But if I ever see another awards-show montage, there really will be blood. No doubt my own.
8:06 p.m.: You know, even though he’s not nominated for anything, here’s betting Barack Obama wins something tonight. Because, you know, he’s just on such a hot streak.
8:09 p.m.: “Atonement” gets one. For Best Original Score.
8:12 p.m.: Soldiers in Baghdad present the Oscar for Best Documentary Short Subject to “Freeheld.” The soldiers aren’t on hand to present the Best Documentary Feature, probably because so many of the nominees are critical of the war. “Taxi to the Dark Side” wins. Which naturally gives us our first political acceptance speech of the night: Who’d’ve ever thought that it’d be considered provocative to speak out against torture?
8:23 p.m.: "Movies are made of ideas and pictures and words,” Harrison Ford informs us.
8:25 p.m.: It’s now official: Diablo Cody will be the first person in history whose obit will include the phrase “former stripper/Academy Award winner.” She’s been gabbing it up all over the place, and has become something of a divisive character splitting those who find her a charming free-spirit and those who find her a manufactured irritant, but how many screenwriters manage a cult of personality? And winning the Oscar seems to have silenced her a little bit and elicited a genuine emotional moment. Each of the Best Picture nominees has won at least one Oscar at this point.
8:33 p.m.: Daniel Day-Lewis shocks the world by predictably winning the Best Actor Oscar for “There Will Be Blood.” He thanks the Academy for "whacking me with the handsomest bludgeon in town."
7:29 p.m. It’s a “Bourne Ultimatum” sweep! The film just picked up its third Oscar, for Best Editing. It would’ve won, too, had the award been for Most Editing.
7:31 p.m.: Nicole Kidman is giving out some Lifetime Achievement Award to editor Robert Boyle. She laughs at the idea that someone could actually be 98 years old. Though I’ll wager a good three-quarters of those in the Kodak have never heard of the guy, they give it up to him with a standing O.
7:41 p.m.: Jon Stewart introduces Penelope Cruz as a woman who speaks four languages, “and she taught me the phrase ‘I’m calling security’ in all of them.” Austria’s “The Counterfeiters” wins Best Foreign Language Film.
7:44 p.m.: “The versatile and handsome” Patrick Dempsey introduces “So Close” – the final Best Song nominee from “Enchanted.”
7:50 p.m. As we surmised, “Falling Slowly” takes the Best Song Oscar. “Make art, make art,” co-winner Glen Hansard implores the crowd, apparently forgetting who he’s speaking to.
7:57 p.m.: Jon Stewart automatically ensures he’s going to get rave reviews for his hosting duties tomorrow when he brings back Best Song co-winner Marketa Irglova to give the acceptance speech the orchestra had previously denied her. How many people do you figure bought their song off iTunes immediately after their performance?
8 p.m.: Cinematography trophy goes to Robert Elswit for “There Will Be Blood.” Elswit promises to slice the thing up and give 80% of it to production designer Jack Fisk, leaving him with the head and the base.
8:02 p.m.: CelebrityDeathwatch 2008© montage, or, as it’s better known, “The pool from which Daniel Day-Lewis is picking whom to dedicate his next award to.” Heath Ledger wins the coveted “most applause” award.
7:02 p.m.: Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill get into a debate over which of them is more like Halle Berry and which is more like Dame Judy Dench. That’ll no doubt become a topic of debate for weeks to come in dorm rooms pungent with the smell of marijuana.
7:03 p.m.: Best Sound Editing goes to “The Bourne Ultimatum.” The winners blank out and just start sputtering out names at random. Mercifully, the orchestra play them off. “Bourne Ultimatum” wins Best Sound Mixing, too. These guys actually have their stuff together, even making a joke: “Is it all right to kiss Halle Berry, now?”
7:09 p.m.: What does it say that the most emotional moment in this year’s show is the clip of Halle Berry accepting her Oscar at the 2002 ceremony? And yes, that came during yet another tiresome montage. Couldn’t they’ve hired a few more writers to cook up some more material or just gone for a short ceremony? As Samuel Johnson said of "Paradise Lost:" "No one wished it any longer."
7:12 p.m.: Hey, another upset: Marion Cotillard is Best Actress for “La Vie en Rose,” and we get a live, not canned, emotional moment. Cotillard's acceptance speech (apparently, her life is officially rocked) is in broken English, but it says volumes more than any of those prior. She exults, “It is true: There (are) some angels in this city!” Nah, but you haven’t been in town long enough, so we’ll give you a pass on your endearing naïveté.
7:19 p.m.: Just based on the response “Once” gets at its mere mention, it’s safe to say Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova will win the Best Song Oscar for “Falling Slowly.”
7:22 p.m.: Bulletin: Jack Nicholson confesses that he loves the movies. He says the word “humanity,” then cackles ominously. Oh, Jack – they’ve pimped you out for yet another montage?
6:25 p.m.: Eleven-year-old Jamia Simone Nash steals the show from an entire choir during the performance of the gospel-tinged Best Song nominee “Raise it Up” from “August Rush.”
6:29 p.m.: Owen Wilson gives the Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film to “Le Mozart Des Pickpockets.” More acceptance speeches have been given in broken English during this ceremony than not.
6:31 p.m.: If you hadn’t gotten sick of Jerry Seinfeld’s ubiquity while promoting “Bee Movie,” this pretty much sealed the deal. “Peter & the Wolf” is named Best Animated Short Film.” Winner Hugh Welchman brings his date – his little Peter puppet – onstage with him.
6:37 p.m.: Dark-horse nominee Tilda Swinton wins an Oscar for “Michael Clayton.” She thanks George Clooney for wearing his Batsuit with the nipples every day on the film’s set. No, really – I wouldn’t’ve thought to make that up.
6:44 p.m.: Jessica Alba, who, it’s safe to say, will pretty much never win an Academy Award, gets some face time with the camera. Now we know what starlets like her are good for: Hosting the technical awards and pretending to care.
6:46 p.m.: How is it that Josh Brolin and James McAvoy’s banter introducing the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay is so badly written?
6:48 p.m.: Is the sweep beginning? The Coen brothers grab the Best Adapted Screenplay trophy for “No Country for Old Men.” But they better have better acceptance speeches should they win for editing, directing and/or Best Picture.
6:50 p.m.: Geez, the Academy is hellbent to bore us silly: They’re offering a short film explaining the voting process. Did you know Academy voters actually go to theaters to see the films? And then they vote on ballots? That might’ve been a little too inside-baseball for the rest of the country.
6:52 p.m.: Again, Stewart’s just as underwhelmed as we are: “Wow. That was amazing.”
6:55 p.m.: That’s more like it: An over-produced and –choreographed production number! Kristin Chenoweth and a cast of hundreds perform “That’s How You Know,” also from “Enchanted,” and also phoned-in.
6:14 p.m.: Boyoboy, they’re wasting a lot of time on these montages from Oscar ceremonies past. I guess they went to the trouble of cooking all these things up before the writers strike was resolved, and they’re gonna use ’em, dammit, no matter how little the rest of us care. The latest: A bunch of shots of Best Supporting Actor winners, including Cuba Gooding, Jr.’s ecstatic acceptance speech, that magical moment that propelled him to those underwear commercials he’s doing today.
6:18 p.m.: Javier Bardem shocks the world by predictably winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for “No Country for Old Men.” He thanks his mother in Spanish, saying, translating roughly, “Mama, I promise I’ll never wear that haircut again.”
6:22 p.m.: Jon Stewart corrects my translation: “I believe he told his mother where the library is.”
6:23 p.m.: At least Stewart is dumping on the montages, as well: He introduces “Oscar’s salute to binoculars and periscopes” and “Bad Dreams: An Oscar salute.”
5:54 p.m.: “Ratatouille” shocks the world by predictably winning the Best Animated Feature Oscar. Brad Bird accepts by slagging high-school guidance counselors everywhere.
5:56 p.m.: Ladies and Gentlemen, we have avoided the ignominy of forever having to refer to “the Oscar-winning motion picture ‘Norbit:’” Best Makeup Oscar went to “La Vie en Rose.” The orchestra plays the winners off almost as soon as they hear the words “I have a lot of people to thank.”
5:59 p.m.: “Enchanted’s” Amy Adams performs “Happy Working Song,” one of the Oscar-nominated tunes. I didn’t even know there was a category for Most Phoned-In Ditty.
6:09 p.m.: “The Golden Compass,” that movie that allegedly dissed God, wins an Oscar for disseminating its blasphemous message throughout the world, preventing us, for the moment at least, from having to refer to “the Oscar-winning motion picture ‘Transformers.’”
6:11 p.m.: “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” wins Best Art Direction without having to threaten anyone with a straight razor.
Host Jon Stewart did much better this time around, keeping it short, sweet and pretty much on-topic for the crowd he’s playing to:
“What an exciting night. These past three and a half months have been very tough … but the fight is over, so tonight, welcome to the make-up sex.”
Noting that Vanity Fair had cancelled its Oscar party “out of respect to the writers:” “You know how they could show respect to the writers? How about inviting them to the Vanity Fair Oscar party?”
Championing “all the Oscar-nominated psychopathic-killer movies – does this town need a hug? “No Country for Old Men,’ ‘There Will Be Blood:’ All I can say is thank god for teen pregnancy.”
On “Away from Her:” “A woman who forgets her own husband. Hillary Clinton called it the feel-good movie of the year.”
“Even ‘Norbit’ got a nomination, which I think is great. Too often the Academy ignores films that aren’t good.”
“Diablo Cody used to be an exotic dancer and now she’s an Oscar-nominated screenwriter. I hope you’re enjoying the pay cut.”
On Barack Obama vs. Hillary Clinton: “Normally when you see a black man or a woman President in a movie, an asteroid is about to hit the Statue of Liberty.”
5:42 p.m. Best Costume Design: “Elizabeth: The Golden Age.” A less-than-rousing way to open the ceremony, handing a trophy to a movie no one saw. Oh, wait: Hardly anyone saw any of the nominees.
5:43 p.m. A stroll down memory lane: Barbra Streisand winning her Oscar. Followed by the first montage of the evening: Another stroll down Oscar’s memory lane. Uh, how about ditching the nostalgia and get to this year’s trophies?
Regis Philbin, hosting the network version of the red carpet show, noted he first (and last) covered the red carpet back in 1979. “To show you how good I was, every 30 years they invite me back,” he says. Apparently he wasn’t that keen on the joke: He then asked, “Are the writers back?”
Then Philbin spoke to George Clooney, telling him, “Once upon a time, everyone wanted to be Cary Grant. Now they want to be George Clooney.” Clooney, not missing a beat: “That’s because he’s dead and nobody wants to be dead.” Well, I guess it depends on how much red-carpet coverage one watches. Clooney then gobbles up valuable network time chatting up Notre Dame basketball with Reege.
Of her dress, Helen Mirren tells Reege, “I’m (currently) playing the madam in a whorehouse in Nevada and the character is rubbing off on me.” You and the whole town. Queen, madam - this late in her career, Mirren's finally been typecast.
Apparently, the red carpet is lacking for celebrity firepower, because Reege has been consigned to interviewing fans who have lined up along the red carpet. “I didn’t sign up to talk to plebes,” he then announces (or something), storming into the Kodak Theatre, where he’s assured to speak to real stars like Jack Nicholson.
It was with some reluctance that I tuned into the Oscar pre-game show, as I had already watched a couple of hours of NBC’s upcoming “quarterlife” and had pretty much had my fill of self-important boobery. But no sooner was the set on than Channel 7’s George Pennacchio was achieving his trademark brand of fawning fatuity, telling “The Savages”’ Laura Linney, “As always, I think that you’re fearless, and you show every emotion on your face, which I would think is difficult to do, especially in a film.” Actually, George, that’s pretty much the job description.
Pennacchio’s co-hort, Richard (“I’m not a movie critic but I play one on TV”) Roeper, asked “Atonement’s” Saoirse Ronan the question on everyone’s mind: “Did you get a good night’s sleep?”
Pennacchio did not disappoint. He asked Marion Cotillard, “This dress is really beautiful; I imagine it took a lot of time to make.” As if she had a hand in making it. He had a follow-up: “Are they going to hire you for a lot of roles now where you make us cry?” Which is pretty much what any serious actor dreams about – getting typecast.
Tommy Lee Jones told Pennacchio of “No Country for Old Men,” “It’s a good representation of the work of our best living prose stylist.” Apparently unaware that Cormac McCarthy wrote the book upon which the film is based, or perhaps not sure what a “prose stylist” is, Pennacchio merely nodded mutely for a couple of seconds, and Jones escaped.
Near the end, he was resigned to generic queries, asking “Michael Clayton’s” Tilda Swinton, “If you could only thank one person tonight after you win, who would it be and why?” She couldn’t bother to come up with an answer. Rubbing it into “Eastern Promises”’ Viggo Mortenson’s face that he had virtually no chance of winning any hardware, he asked, “What is your grand plan for tonight? What is your big hope?”
Despite dire forecasts, the rain went away. Boy, does that Gil Cates has some muscle or what?
Like a police officer assigned with the tragic task of informing family members of the death of a loved one, the sad duty of live-blogging the Academy Awards© ceremony has come to this site. We will keep you apprised of Jon Stewart’s monologue, the inevitably execrable song-and-dance numbers, the memorable acceptance speeches (provided there are any) and, of course, how swiftly Earth tilts off its axis and plunges toward the sun should “Juno” pull off an upset Best Picture win.
Depending on how bored we are ahead of time, we might venture into some of the blithering red carpet coverage in what should be a fairly fruitful search to locate particularly idiotic questions. After all, in attendance will be the black hole of stupidity: George Pennacchio, still star-struck after all these years.
As always, all this pageantry only if the blog server can keep its wits about it. And only a fool would count on that. So if you have nothing else going on at the time, we’ll be setting up shop no later than 5 p.m. Sunday. And if you do have something else going on at the time, you really need to realign your priorities.
With only three episodes of “The Wire” left, it’s not too late to jump in and catch up.
Well, actually, it is. That train left the station a couple of seasons ago. But for those keeping track, the show pays off handsomely.
Sunday’s episode was written by crime novelist Dennis Lehane (who developed the story with series creator David Simon): Thanks to McNulty’s (Dominic West) fictitious serial killer, Baltimore’s finest are being carte blanche – the city has even arranged for rental cars to replace those stranded in the city garage awaiting repairs. The downside: One cop jokes, “Bad news, gentlemen: We’re actually going to have to catch this motherf@(&er.”
The Feds create a psychological profile for McNulty’s killer, and it describes McNulty to a T: His job frustrations; his dissatisfaction in general; his being a functioning alcoholic and how it fuels his actions. After hearing it, Greggs (Sonja Sohn) asks him, “So, what do you think?” He deadpans, “They’re in the ballpark.”
Meanwhile, McNulty’s relationship with Beadie (Amy Ryan, Oscar nominee for “Gone Baby Gone”) inches closer to dissolution, inspiring this exchange:
McNulty: Bunk once told me I’m no good for people. Everyone around me, he said.
Greggs: Was he drunk?
McNulty: Yeah, but still.
And Freamon (Clarke Peters) is closing in on Stanfield (Jamie Hector), as the mystery behind the images of the clocks sent to his lieutenants’ cell phones is unlocked.
Meanwhile, over at the Baltimore Sun, Gus (Clark Johnson) remains wary of Templeton’s (Tom McCarthy) “reporting.” Templeton, however, is being groomed for a Pulitzer thanks to his fiction about the homeless, and is growing more defiant and defensive.
McNulty grows a belated conscience and starts confessing his fake crime spree despite the fact that it could bury him even deeper. As Bunk will soon tell him, his zealous actions have resulted in something “like a war – easy to get in, hell to get out.”
Next week (George Pelecanos wrote the teleplay), Baltimore police arrest half the city. A few things blow up in a few faces. And the final episode (written by Simon) wraps things up about as tidily as “The Wire” can ever find resolution.
Kind of pointless at this late date to go on and on about the show’s stringent, plangent intelligence, layered and absorbing plotting, nuanced characterizations, lived-in performances and other nouns that are preceded by laudatory adjectives. Fans have been doing that for five years now, without an appreciable uptick in viewership. But if ever a cop show deserved to be sent off with a good, old-fashioned Irish wake, it’s “The Wire.”
- “The Wire:” 9 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. Sunday, 11 p.m. Wednesday, 10 p.m. Thursday and 8 p.m. Feb. 29, HBO.
It was the sort of story that TV political pundits would sacrifice a welfare mother’s child and/or Cadillac for: Yesterday, the New York Times dropped a story about John McCain’s cozy relationships with lobbyists. I know: Snooze, right?
But no! Pretty much all of that stuff got lost in the shuffle, mainly because this was the story’s second paragraph:
Vicki Iseman, “(a) female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.”
McCain’s a bona fide American hero, but I don’t really want images of him firing up the Barry White records and pouring glasses of Reunite burned into my retinas. Nonetheless, so began hours of bloviating on the cable news channels (This is so big, Keith Olbermann has jettisoned “Oddball” two nights running!): Might they have done the nasty? Isn’t it creepy that Iseman looks a whole lot like a younger version of McCain’s wife?
Oh, and somewhat more substantial questions: What did it mean for McCain’s Presidential campaign? What did the timing of the story – it dropped now, though the Times had much of it back in December, before the primaries even began – mean? How might Mitt Romney’s campaign have fared had this come out sooner? Could mutual disdain for the Times be the impetus to bring McCain into the far-right conservative fold? What is the august New York Times doing, running a front-page story merely hinting at a politician’s affair and citing only two blind sources?
Not really on the table, as far as the pundits were concerned: How much does McCain’s relationship with lobbyists compromise his policy-making? ABC News’ The Note today declared:
“This is not (as the Times headline might have you believe) about ‘self-confidence on ethics.’ It’s about sex. It’s a storyline that at this time is filled with innuendo – and suggestions that the Times was bullied into running the story on only what MIGHT have been an eight-year-old affair by the controversy that it wasn’t being published.”
McCain’s huffily offended senior aide Mark Salter echoed that theme, declaring to Time Magazine:
"They did this because the The New Republic was going to run a story that looked back at the infighting there, the Judy Miller-type power struggles – they decided that they would rather smear McCain than suffer a story that made the New York Times newsroom look bad.”
“John Weaver, who was McCain's closest confidant until leaving his current campaign last year, said he met with Vicki Iseman at the Center Cafe at Union Station and urged her to stay away from McCain. Association with a lobbyist would undermine his image as an opponent of special interests, aides had concluded. …
“The aide said the message to Iseman that day at Union Station in 1999 was clear: ‘She should get lost.’ The aide said Iseman stood up and left angrily.”
“The publication of the article capped three months of intense internal deliberations at the Times over whether to publish the negative piece and its most explosive charge about the affair. It pitted the reporters investigating the story, who believed they had nailed it, against executive editor Bill Keller, who believed they hadn't. It likely cost the paper one investigative reporter, who decided to leave in frustration. And the Times ended up publishing a piece in which the institutional tensions about just what the story should be are palpable.”
Keller spoke to NPR today, trying to dismantle that New Republic story a smidgen. On the paper’s policy in using anonymous sources:
“Obviously, you would like to have not just on-the-record sources, but documentary evidence for everything you put in the newspaper, but if you refused to publish stories that included anonymously sourced information, most of the most important things we know about how our country is run would not published – there are things you just cannot find without being willing to protect your sources.”
On why McCain’s relationship to Iseman was relevant and newsworthy for a story:
“He [McCain] came back from Vietnam a hero, entered into public life and then was felled by the Keating five scandal, if you read his books, it was clearly a humiliating event for him. And he subsequently built his political life on themes of redemption, reform, you know, rectitude, if you will – and became the scourge of lobbyists, the champion of campaign finance reform, and so on, in Washington. Yet, according to some people who knew him best, he can be surprisingly careless about his reputation, and that’s what I think this, his relationship with this particular lobbyist illustrates, although I think there’s a lot of other illustrations as well in the piece.”
Still, no justification for playing up the sex angle. But then, all the pundits can explain that to you.
The right, of course, are questioning the timing of the piece. But when would they have preferred it to have run? Before the primaries began, thereby effectively kicking McCain out of the running? Closer to the general election, thereby inflicting a potentially mortal wound to the Republicans’ White House hopes? Wait, I know: Never. Depending on what you think about McCain, the Times story is either meticulously researched or thin and baseless innuendo.
And we still have nine more months of this circus until election day, plenty of time for an Obama bombshell or Hillary hair-raiser. Those with delicate stomachs might be encouraged to sit this one out.
CBS is going all Fox on us: It has greenlit a reality pilot titled “Splitsville,” a game show of sorts pitting couples going through a divorce against one another to see who will get which belongings as they divvy up their estate. That soft, poignant sigh you just heard was the final death rattle of civility on Television.
Too bad this show wasn't on back when CBS CEO Les Moonves was leaving his wife for Julie Chen. That could've made for a very special episode.
Edie Falco hasn’t been lazing about since “The Sopranos” went to black: She appeared in three episodes of “30 Rock” and now will star in a pilot for HBO’s competition, Showtime.
In the series – billed as a “no-holds-barred, darkly comedic view of a health care system gone awry” – Falco will “an indomitable nurse with a special calling who doesn’t hesitate to challenge her superiors – and the often untenable status quo – by taking matters into her own hands in order to save lives. While brilliantly in control on the job, her personal life is precarious, unpredictable, and demanding in ways that she is surprisingly not always prepared for.”
No title as of yet, so that’s where you come in: I’ll offer “Heal Thyself” with the hopes that certainly, you can do better.
It really is the end of the world for “Jericho:” Only 6 million watched last night, more than “Big Bother” (as we’ve rechristened it) which preceded it but less than a “Law & Order: SVU” repeat and “Boston Legal.”
CBS Entertainment chief Nina Tassler renewed the show due to its faithful online audience, and this season aired other provocations she hoped would get the chatterazzi buzzing in blogs and message boards: “Kid Nation” (which inspired no cyber-revolution) and “Viva Laughlin” (dead after a mere two episodes). Boy, if you can’t trust the Internets to drum up support for your shows, who can you trust?
Back to the drawing board.
So Jon Stewart's preparing for his second tour as Oscar host with even less time for his writers to prepare, and, apropos of something, he wore Army boots while discussing his assignment with the New York Times.
"I think there's a way to do it where either you're a guy hosting a party for your friends, or a guy watching a party you were invited to," Stewart told the Times. "I'm much more in that category. I embrace that."
Adding, that for many in the audience, this isn't a joke: "This is the pinnacle of their careers. ... Their lives could change, and they're very on edge. So you've got to give respect to the fact that this is the most important night in film. But for the audience at home, you also have to let them in on the fact that it's still film. It's not war; it's not cancer. No one's going to come out of it and say, 'My God, I can walk!' "
Stewart actually did OK the last time he hosted, warming to the gig as he went along, but all most people remember were those tight shots on his face betraying a smidgen of flop sweat as the room refused to laugh at his first few jokes. With less time to fret over every detail, here's guessing Stewart will be looser and do much better this time around.
But what do you think? Will the writers have not had enough time to prepare some really killer material? Or will not having enough time to worry whether to include a crowd-pleasing punchline in favor of a genuinely funny joke work in his favor?
Another season, another campaign to save a beloved if abysmally rated show: People are sending light bulbs to NBC in an effort to revive the comatose “Friday Night Lights.”
Wouldn’t get my hopes up, though: Radar chatted up NBC’s Ben Silverman and he wasn’t exactly bullish on the show, preferring to talk up “30 Rock” instead. Of “FNL,” he said, “I love it. You love it. Unfortunately, no one watches it. That's the thing with shows. People have to watch them. We're NBC, we have a reputation to uphold.”
Don’t know what kind of reputation the network behind “My Dad is Less Embarrassing Than Your Dad” or whatever it's called has to uphold, and “30 Rock’s” ratings aren’t much better than “FNL’s.” But also: CBS may be regretting that decision to bring back “Jericho” after receiving that avalanche of peanuts last spring, as the show returned last week to some pretty underwhelming numbers. That’s the thing about these save-our-favorite-show campaigns: The people who participate may be awfully passionate, but they don’t represent a large enough group to bring the shows in question decent ratings. “Jericho’s” fate may dampen networks’ enthusiasm for sating hardcore fans.
But, given the financial straits and belt-tightening afflicting NBC, I’m sure they appreciate all those light bulbs pouring in: Saves them some money on the bottom line. Maybe they should threaten to cancel other shows in hopes of inspiring similar campaigns: Just think of all the electronics equipment they’d get from “Chuck” fans, or paper supplies they’d get from “Office” die-hards.
And kudos to the folks at New York Magazine who’ve transformed the save-our-show routine into performance art with a campaign to resurrect, yes, “Cavemen.”
If you can campaign in favor of your favorite shows, though, why not bug the networks to cancel their worst programs?
Inundate VH1 with wind-up alarm clocks to convince them to end the atrocity that is “Flavor of Love!” Fire off a barrage of bellman’s uniforms to persuade CBS to cancel “Welcome to the Captain!” Send The CW crusty thongs to get them to axe “Pussycat Dolls Present: Girlicious!” C’mon, people it’s time to be pro-active!
It's official: Though Fox and CBS are still planning the booze-drenched parties known as May upfronts in New York, NBC has abandoned the practice, preferring to put their money into one-on-one dog-and-pony shows for advertisers. Well, sort of: They're still planning a May 12 "spotlight event," but that'll be more about selling bells and whistles (mobile and other platforms, interactive, their green initiative, the Olympics, cable, etc.) than the network's upcoming season.
Plus: They're announcing a year-round schedule of original programming in April, well ahead of the traditional May upfronts. That's a necessarily aggressive tactic for a network that's long been mired in last place among the Big Four and actually doesn't reek of the usual flop sweat that seems to have inspired so many network decisions of late.
"A business-as-usual approach no longer applies in today's multi-platform media environment," NBC-U CEO Jeff Zucker said for the 38th time in the past year. "The traditional primetime presentation shines a light on only one piece of what our company has to offer. This new approach gives our clients an early look at NBC's scheduling strategy and allows us to showcase the full suite of creative advertising solutions and customized services that NBC Universal is uniquely positioned to provide to the marketplace."
As a rule, I tend not to trust anyone who can smoothly drop the phrase "full suite of creative advertising solutions" into polite conversation.
As for the year-round schedule, NBC Entertainment co-chairman Ben Silverman said, "There is an insatiable desire for new content year round, and we want to satisfy that need and be efficient at the same time." He tag-teamed the statement over to his co-chair Marc Graboff, who added, "By getting a jump start on the season we can start the dialogue now and continue it throughout the year, ensuring a productive process with our clients that allows for more robust, integrated campaigns."
As a rule, I tend not to trust anyone who can smoothly drop the phrase "robust, integrated campaigns" into polite conversation.
Obviously, this is pretty ambitious: Fox tried the same thing a few years back; it crashed and burned. But for the broadcast networks to remain relevant, year-round original programming is necessary and actually has been so for several years; the networks just haven't figured out how to convince viewers that what they put on in the summer isn't dreck they're burning off.
And that task won't get any easier, since NBC's year-round schedule - partially by dint of the writers strike putting the kibosh on development of new scripted series - will no doubt include a lot more pulse-pounding reality programming of the "My Dad Is Better Than Your Dad" ilk, so it's hard to say how excited anyone should be getting about it.
Oh, and another NBC executive issued a quote employing the phrases, "a more powerful connection between our clients and consumers," "innovative, targeted and custom marketing solutions," and "define more effective metrics," but I'll spare you that one.
Update: Through no fault (or virtue) of my own, my STARmeter, measured on my newly christened imdb.com page, has skyrocketed an astonishing, practically unprecedented 3,369% since last week. By contrast, George Clooney’s STARmeter is down 52% from last week, and he’s nominated for an Oscar. And also, he’s handsome.
And yet, shockingly, offers for more screen work refuse to pour in.
Perhaps someone with access to imdb.com should go in and flesh out my filmography: My moving three-episode story arc as Henri the snooty French sock-hop DJ on “Saved By the Bell,” that Very Special Episode of “Full House,” that Incredibly Special Episode of “Family Matters,” that Special-Doesn’t-Even-Begin-To-Describe-It episode of “Homeboys From Outer Space” and, of course, that cameo as Guy In Audience Laughing So Hard He Starts Projectile Vomiting in “Larry the Cable Guy: Git-R-Done.”
Here’s a conundrum: When “Dancing With the Stars” upgrades its roster from perennial B- and C-listers and People Who Were Famous Long Ago to former A-listers and People Who Were Successful Not So Long Ago, does that make the show more exciting or more depressingly pathetic?
The show returns March 17. ABC announced the participants today on “Good Morning America.” Chances are good you’ve not only heard of some of them but have seen them in action and perhaps even remember them fondly.
Among the participants:
* Marlee Matlin, who won a frickin’ Oscar for “Children of a Lesser God” in the ’80s and has since appeared in recurring roles in NBC’s “The West Wing” and “My Name Is Earl.” Matlin, of course, is deaf: How can she dance to music she can’t hear?
* Monica Seles, who was once the top-ranked women’s tennis player in the world.
* Steve Gutenberg, who starred in a dozen movie blockbusters including “Three Men and a Baby” and the “Police Academy” series and was once considered by some to be pretty funny.
* Penn Jillette, the once-edgy comic/magician who heretofore had devoted his life to, on Showtime, calling out “Bullsh!t” in others.
* Marissa Jaret Winokur, who won a Tony for her role in the Broadway production of “Hairspray.”
* Jason Taylor, Miami Dolphins defensive end, who was this year’s NFL Man of the Year and last year’s Defensive Player of the Year. (Didn’t he see what flouncy costumes they made Emmitt Smith wear when he was competing?)
* Priscilla Presley, who was married to Elvis, for chrissake, and starred in those “Naked Gun” movies.
* Shannon Elizabeth, who starred in “American Pie” and has inspired vast numbers of young men of a certain skill set to download provocative images of her from a vast online database.
* Mario, a platinum-selling artist who just two years ago won Billboard magazine’s award for Top R&B/hip-hop single of the year.
* Kristi Yamaguchi, an Olympic Gold Medalist in figure skating.
* Adam Carolla, pal of Jimmy Kimmel/co-creator of “The Man Show,” host of random cable shows and a uniquely crude syndicated morning radio program, and the first guy who actually makes a lot of sense being on this list.
* Cristian de la Fuente, telenovela star named by People magazine as one of its “50 Most Beautiful,” and the second guy who actually makes a lot of sense being on this list.
Maybe it’s just me, but when people who appeared on these “celebrity” “reality” shows were those who populated the fringes of celebrity arcana, the trend was good for a laugh in that Schadenfreude kind of way. But when people who actually had real careers (or, in one way or another, still do) turn up on these shows, it’s kind of disquieting: It suggests that this current economic downturn is worse than we ever imagined.
NBC’s “Knight Rider” TV movie on Sunday paved the way for – ulp – a series next fall. It averaged 12.7 million viewers and built in viewership each half hour. (NBC didn’t send me a screener, or, perhaps, it got lost in the mail - insert muted tone of disappointment that's actually relief here.) Of course, we know how well revamping “Bionic Woman” fared as a new show.
NBC probably wasted its “American Gladiators” finale by airing it earlier on Sunday. It posted its lowest ratings of the season, though NBC would prefer to focus on the fact that it posted the highest ratings in that timeslot since the end of the football season.
And CBS’s “Dexter” redux did OK-ish, for what was essentially a repeat: 8.2m, though it was beaten by “Knight Rider” and a new episode of “Brothers and Sisters.” There’s a crossover I wouldn’t mind seeing: Dexter taking on the upscale whiners of “B&S.”
“America’s Next Top Model” returns for its 10th cycle on Wednesday, and the premiere boasts a silly conceit – the aspirants are dressed in schoolgirl costumes and attend “Top Model Prep School.” As usual, they squeal endlessly, and beyond all rational proportion, every time one of the judges appears on scene.
And amidst its catfights and teary meltdowns, the show attempts to shoehorn in a serious subject: One of the contestants was born in Somalia, and was forced to succumb to female circumcision at an early age. While this is certainly a topic worthy of discussion, I’m not sure the deliriously frivolous “ANTM” is the proper forum to analyze it fully.
But you be the judge: Here’s a random collection of lines from the show’s contestants. See if you think sober discussions of genital mutilation rest comfortably around this other dialogue.
“I like to create beauty because I am beautiful.”
“A lot of my friends think that I’m very weird, but in a positive way.”
“I am ready to annihilate the competition. I’m a silent predator – they won’t know what hit them.”
“I had to take an hour just to breathe – not an hour, but you know what I mean.”
“I have fire – my eyes; I am driven toward the camera.”
(Speaking of herself in the third person:) “Shaya is goofy. Shaya is sexy. Shaya is everybody’s fantasy.”
“Hey, you guys want to check out my pubic hair?”
(Speaking of another contestant:) “If I didn’t know (better), I’d think that she might be a transvestite.”
“I look at modeling and I see it as a platform to inspire somebody else and possibly save a life.”
“I am the wrong person to mess with! … You will not call me ‘(bleeped) bitch’ to my (bleeped) face! Shut up, bitch! You’re dead in my book!”
“I love ugly beautiful!”
“I want to know what it’s like to give a lapdance!”
“Bitch, if you touch me, you’re gonna die.”
“I have so much more purpose than anyone else.”
“Most of the girls are cool, but I don’t think they understand how stupid they are sometimes.”
- "America's Next Top Model:" 8 p.m. Wednesday, The CW Channel 5.
“Baby Borrowers” is the show that dares to ask the provocative question: Are today’s teenagers psychologically capable of the demands of parenthood? Really, NBC? Really? This is your idea of primetime broadcast entertainment?
NBC must have asked itself that same question: The show was originally scheduled to premiere today; instead, the even less-promising-sounding “My Dad is Better than Your Dad” will debut instead.
“Baby Borrowers” follows five teenage couples (all over 18, so they’re legal, lest you cavil over underage booty calls; some couples in the British version were under 18, however) as they experience, utterly unprepared, the rigors of parenthood. So basically, the show will expose to America the only people who might be worse parents than Britney Spears.
The show begins with the requisite hyperbolic narration: “On this quiet cul de sac in a small American town, a groundbreaking experiment is about to take place, one that will change the lives of its participants – forever.”
That “small American town” was in Idaho, which has lax child-labor laws. (Like the New Mexico legislature, which got duped by “Kid Nation,” Idaho is considering making their laws more stringent.) Additionally, NBC didn’t pay anyone, so, hence, no “labor.” So they can keep children on camera for longer than ordinary labor laws for TV productions. What kind of idiot would allow NBC to make money off of their efforts (or their putting their child in harm’s way) for free?
First, the couples deal with infants 6 months old or so, then toddlers, then pre-teens and their siblings, then teenagers just like themselves. None of it seems particularly well-conceived in terms of being a “groundbreaking experiment,” but having teens try to parent teens is particularly idiotic: By the times a parent is dealing with a teen, s/he’ll simply by aging have a lot more wisdom and understanding and won’t be mistaken for a peer to bully.
“And,” the narration continues, “just when they think their experiment is at an end, they’ll have to take care of the elderly.” Is America ready to accept the changing of adult diapers as entertainment?
Of course, most of the couples selected have at least one drama queen in place to make it all about themselves and not the kids. Kelly, who’s dating Austin, melts down before the kids even arrive – the women are asked to wear devices that simulate pregnancy, and Austin laughs as she puts it on. “How can you laugh at me?” she demands petulantly. “Don’t touch me!” Uh, Kelly, did it occur to you that maybe he was just laughing at the contraption, or the idea of the contraption, or laughing in a more meta sense at the nature of what this show considers drama or verisimilitude?
Run, Austin! Run! As far as you can get!
Alicea, of the beloved duo Cory and Alicea, gets all p!ssy when the mother of the baby she’s caring for comes to explain to her that you don’t just try to feed a baby for a few minutes then give up when it doesn’t cooperate. “I’m not going to take care of it anymore, because of the mom,” she kvetches. “I don’t want to have anything to do with it.” “It.”
Run, Cory! Run! As far as your feet can take you!
Then there’s Sean of Sean and Kelsey; she wants children but he’s not so sure. But he demonstrates a working knowledge of the Machiavellian machinations of reality TV when he reveals that he’s only doing the show because he thinks it’ll convince his g.f. that babies are a blight upon society.
Run, Kelsey! Run! As far as your fertile womb can go! But then, Kelsey is bewildered when the baby responds to bad-dad Sean more than to her.
The rest of the first episode is given over to the usual reality-show tedium: That big shopping-for-baby-food expedition, the crying-baby montage, the generic conflicts.
NBC hasn’t determined an alternative premiere date for “Baby Borrowers” yet, but when they do: Run, Viewer! Run! There must be a “Law & Order” rerun on somewhere!
“Breaking Bad’s” Walt White (Bryan Cranston) may be the Zeitgeist’s poster boy for 2008: Bedeviled by mistakes that didn’t seem like mistakes at the time and an epic bad-luck streak, he’s weary, beleaguered and left for dead by American society at large. A once-brilliant chemist who in his halcyon days contributed to research that won a Nobel Prize, he’s now stranded in a crushing job in Albuquerque teaching high-school chemistry to bored, uninterested students who don’t respect him, and now he learns he’s dying of lung cancer. He doesn’t want to be a burden to his family – in fact, he wants to leave them in good financial shape when he’s gone – but how?
“Breaking Bad” offers solace in the form of cold comfort to the downtrodden, to those who have given up, to those resigned to lives of quiet desperation and misery: It’s not too late, the show tells us. You can still turn your life around. Of course, you’ll have to commit a major felony to do so, but …
Walt’s putting his mad chemistry skills to work, cooking up the purest, finest crystal meth New Mexico has ever seen. The series’ first three episodes were filled with manic action and awful violence, as other drug dealers encroached upon Walt’s turf, resulting in a spectacularly gross sequence in which his inept partner-in-crime Jesse (Aaron Paul) experienced complications while trying to dispose of one body, and Walt endured a protracted attempt to murder the other in an astonishing scene that recalled Paul Newman’s exhausting efforts to knock off that Commie in “Torn Curtain.”
So now, it’s time for the show to take a breather and reflect upon what has happened, which it does in the next couple of episodes, beginning Sunday.
Inconveniently, Walt’s brother-in-law Hank (Dean Norris) is a DEA agent (shades of the “Weeds” storyline in which Mary-Louise Parker’s Nancy dated, then married, Martin Donovan’s DEA agent) who informs his colleagues that he thinks a new drug kingpin is in the area. Walt’s not a bad guy, just an inappropriately blustery one whose high levels of self-confidence probably aren’t justified. At a family barbecue, Walt’s wife Skyler (“Deadwood’s” Anna Gunn) blurts out their little secret: Walt has cancer. Hank’s wife Marie (Betsy Brandt) lands Walt a consultation with a respected specialist – treatment, thanks to Hank’s lousy HMO, will set his family back $90K that they don’t have, and with no guarantees.
So this week and next, the family embarks upon a great debate as to what Walt should do: He imagines his weakened, diminished self, bedridden and hacking his way to the finish line, and says, “That’s how you would remember me. That’s the worst part.” His son (RJ Mitte) is appalled that the fight has left his father: “Just give up and die, already.”
And here’s where “Breaking Bad,” created by Vince Gilligan, lives: In eviscerating our nation’s health-care crisis and contemplating the controversial quality-of-life debate. Conservatives want to make sure you’re born, but then they don’t have a whole lot of use for you afterwards (the recent Draconian bankruptcy law doesn’t even forgive those with catastrophic illnesses, and don’t even mention universal health care), while some progressives support assisted suicide for the terminally ill.
Aside: So I hereby offer a plan that’ll please both sides: The “THX-1138” Health-Care Initiative. “THX-1138” was George Lucas’s first film, set in a dystopian future where each law-enforcement mission was given a strict budget; the second the mission had spent its allocated funds, it was aborted. Under my plan, the government examines how much money the sick person has to devote to medical attention, and once s/he has frittered it away on trying to stay alive, they’re immediately disconnected from their IV, taken off their meds and driven out to the desert where they can die in peace. No muss, no fuss, no post-mortem debt for the family – what’s not to love? Since universal health care is a pipe dream, at least this program’s virtue is that it offers an honest reckoning of the high esteem in which the government holds its citizens.
Back to business: Sunday’s episode also offers some poignant backstory on Jesse, Walt’s sidekick. At a low moment in his life (well, an even lower moment; they’re all pretty low where Jesse’s concerned), he returns to the not-so-loving embrace of his family, a stolid bunch who has tried again and again to help him, only to have their hearts broken. Jesse makes an effort – he even helps set the table for dinner – and a journey to his childhood bedroom forces reflection on the promise he once may have had but has since squandered.
Next week, however, introduces some prickly complications, so here’s a spoiler alert – read no further if you don’t want a revelation or two exposed.
Walt and Skyler attend a birthday part for one of Walt’s former colleagues, a man whose career trajectory has soared just as decidedly as Walt’s has plummeted. They relive some good times and the guy offers him a job, pointing out, “We have excellent health benefits, the best.” Walt, realizing that Skyler told his old friend about his cancer, is suddenly imbued with some bizarre sense of honor, is offended, and turns him down. He tries to justify his decision when kvetching, “My whole life, I’ve never had a real say about any of it.”
The end of the episode indicates that there’s more than meets the eye here, some sort of messy glitch in the relationship, but still: Does Walt really consider having “a real say” in cooking up crystal meth more honorable than accepting a borderline-charity position from a friend? Isn’t that what friends do for one another? I know that if a friend were to offer me a cushy gig, I wouldn’t let pride get in the way, but then, I don’t have any friends, so that’s a moot point.
Walt’s decision to embrace his inner criminal was provocative when the series began, but giving him an out like this only for him to (at least at this point) decline it undercuts “Breaking Bad’s” “desperate times call for desperate measures” aspect. Here’s hoping they can clarify this in future episodes, but here’s also not getting my hopes up too much – they only have two episodes left, and apparently two went unproduced due to the writers strike. Gee, I hope this show doesn’t let me down.
- “Breaking Bad:” AMC, 10 p.m. Sunday.
We’ve previously discussed how the USA Network piddled over Westminster Dog Show viewers on Monday by forcing them to figure out where CNBC was halfway through the competition. Turns out that gambit worked out really well for them: Forcing fans to switch channels resulted in losing half their viewership.
3.4 million watched on USA, a 23% increase over last year. But once coverage switched to CNBC, only 1.75 million went along for the ride. Way to alienate your audience, USA. Apparently, you've found a new use for the word "Psyche."
The CW announced its returning series today:
(Series/Anticipated Return/Expected Number of New Episodes)
“Smallville”/April 17/5
“Gossip Girl”/April 21/5
“Supernatural”/April 24/4
“Reaper”/April 22/5
“One Tree Hill”/April 14/6
“The Game”/March 23/9
“Everybody Hates Chris” had already completed its production of 22 episodes. The final 12 originals begin airing March 3.
“Aliens in America” finished 18 episodes; the final eight will air March 2-March 23 and April 27-May 18.
They’re determined to prove they haven’t thrown in the towel, but what else can be said about a network that’ll air a show entitled “Girlicious?”
CBS has announced it is renewing the following series for the 2008-09 season:
“Cold Case”
“Criminal Minds”
“CSI: Crime Scene Investigation”
“CSI: Miami”
“CSI: New York”
“Ghost Whisperer”
“NCIS”
“Numb3rs”
“The Big Bang Theory”
“Two and a Half Men”
“Without a Trace”
Renewals for “Survivor” and “The Amazing Race” had previously been announced.
Notably missing from the list:
“Shark”
“How I Met Your Mother”
“Rules of Engagement”
“The New Adventures of Old Christine”
“Welcome to the Captain”
“The Unit”
“Cane”
“Jericho”
“Moonlight”
*
Correction: We earlier discussed an upcoming computer-animated series, “Star Wars: The Clone Wars.” Seems the date I listed, Aug. 15, is for a movie that’ll strafe theaters on that day. The TV show’ll appear at an unspecified date in the fall.
Speaking of star wars, that’s the opening date only if this doesn’t kill us all first.
All those years with Ted “Mouth of the South” Turner finally paid off for Jane Fonda this morning, as she appeared on the “Today” show this morning and said a word that I’m pretty sure most sentient adults know you don’t say within restraining-order distance of a live television camera. (probably NSFW)
Can you guess what it was? Hint: She was discussing, with Meredith Vieira and playwright (not “playwrite,” you NBC News nitwits who can't spell and are way too slow with the mute button) Eve Ensler, Ensler's notorious play “The Vagina Monologues.” Vieira appeared to grit her teeth after Fonda dropped her c-bomb, and later, attempted some damage control: “It was a slip and obviously she apologizes and so do we. We would do nothing to offend the audience, so please accept that apology.” West Coasters were spared this cruel spectacle.
PTC outcry in 3 … 2 …
Ensler actually had a more evocative line, crucially omitting the phrase “the word” from her sentence, describing how, when she was first performing the play, she had trouble “getting vagina out of my mouth.” (Decorum prevents me from further rumination, but that’s what the comments section is for.)
This past Monday, The CW’s sitcom “Girlfriends” quietly passed into that good night, airing two barely-seen episodes that, given that the network isn’t bringing the show back even though the writers strike is over, served as the show’s swan song. This received scant attention, though Mediaweek’s ratings guru Marc Berman noted, “Considering Girlfriends aired for eight seasons, an official final episode would have been appropriate.”
Well, someone must’ve been paying attention and complained, because today, Mara Brock Akil, the show’s creator, issued this statement:
"Although it's always difficult to say goodbye, I choose to focus my energy on the history that Girlfriends has made, the human stories that we told, the beautifully complex images that we projected and the blessings 172 episodes bestowed on us, both personally and professionally.”
OK, that may be going a little overboard, but then she adds, “I am immensely thankful to the amazingly talented cast, writers, directors, staff and crew for their endless dedication and hard work for eight seasons, to the network that always wanted us and the studio that always supported us, but mostly to the audience, especially African-American women, who took the time to tune into us every Monday night at nine to have a dialogue with us and who have been our partner in this journey.”
OK, that may be going a lot overboard, but then she adds, “I am currently in talks with the studio and network on putting together a retrospective show which will honor and celebrate this landmark series, so please stay tuned.”
It seems that once a show has eased past its prime and no longer puts up the numbers it once did, networks are no longer as kindly disposed to them and can pay them short shrift when it comes to giving them an appropriate send-off. It’s happened a few times over the years – to “Gilmore Girls,” to “Quantum Leap,” to “Arrested Development,” to “Angel,” to “Everwood,” to “Married With Children,” to “The Secret Diaries of Desmond Pfeiffer” (just kidding) and it almost happened this year to “Scrubs.”
So what these showrunners should do is, when they’re in the middle of their halcyon days, when they’re able to throw their weight around at the network, shoot a far-sighted episode that can serve as their series finale or nail down an iron-clad agreement with the network to shoot such an episode. And then fans won’t be denied a sense of closure when their favorite shows flatline. Because, you know, attention must be paid.
When "Dexter" migrates from premium cable to CBS on Sunday, you'll still see Dexter (Michael C. Hall) menace his victims, killers who have slipped through the cracks of the justice system, their nude bodies bound to tables by Saran Wrap (discreet lighting obscuring their privates). You'll still see the sadistically dismembered bodies of prostitutes, the work of a serial killer playing a cat-and-mouse game with Dex. Tonight's episode concludes with a woman's decapitated head bouncing off his car windshield.
So, what won't you see? The opening title sequence, which won an Emmy - that's been excised.
"Dexter's" title sequence is up there with "The Sopranos," "Six Feet Under" "nip/tuck" and "Mad Men" in beautifully and thoroughly evoking the show's sensibility. As Rolfe Kent's droll theme plays, incredibly tight close-ups follow Dexter through his morning routine: smashing a mosquito that alights upon his arm; cutting himself while scraping his razor across his rough whiskers; slicing and frying up a bright pink cut of ham; cracking open an egg, cooking it sunny side up, then slicing into the oozing yolk; grinding coffee beans; pulping an orange, its juice spraying; binding floss tightly around his fingers as he cleans his teeth. The images are taut miniatures of symbolic bloodletting; sadism, sunny side up. (Although the final shot of Dexter leaving his apartment, stylish stubble covering his face, belies the fact that he, uh, just shaved.)
The title sequence was probably lopped off to save time - episodes on Showtime ran longer than they can on CBS, where 15 minutes of the hour must be devoted to commercials. Otherwise, the trims and image manipulations aren't too terribly obvious. The language has been more obviously altered, with stronger epithets getting watered down to mere "damns" and "hells;" the silliest bit of dialogue-tidying comes when Dexter's nemesis Doakes (Erik King) warns him, "I'm watching you, mother-lover!" Isn't loving one's mother supposed to be a good thing?
"NCIS" and the "CSI's" also revel in trucking in gory imagery, so what you see in "Dexter" is only maybe a smidgen more extreme. The difference comes in the show's tone, and no amount of editing could change that: "Dexter" is nihilistic, if whimsically so, depicting an amoral, off-kilter world where a serial killer preying on the wicked qualifies as a just cause.
Will "Dexter" work on CBS? Hard to say, as these episodes were first seen on Showtime in 2006 and the DVD has been available since last August; one might presume that most people who'd be interested in this has already heard about and investigated it. (NBC will transport USA cable hits "Monk" and "Psycho" to its airwaves, but those are both more network-friendly series presenting more recent episodes.) If it doesn't click, its twisted nature won't necessarily be to blame.
- "Dexter" (season one): 10 p.m. Sunday, CBS Channel 2.
Once the writers strike became general knowledge, viewers learned pretty quickly to tune out. The networks vowed to keep the lights on, but viewers already knew no one was home.
So should the networks have just bitten the bullet and held on to their original scripted episodes once the sharp level of viewer attrition was clear?
Consider the ratings for original episodes in the past week. “Brothers & Sisters” and “Boston Legal,” which are still dribbling out original episodes, aired to ratings that were near series lows. “October Road” returned during the strike to great chasms of yawns. (Of course, nothing really could’ve helped “October Road.”)
Part of the problem, of course, is that viewers aren’t interested in wading through the schedule to figure out what is and isn’t in reruns. And 10 p.m. shows – like “B&S” and “BL” – are hurt by weak lead-ins like repeats.
Launches of new series during the strike have been pretty abysmal, as well. “Cashmere Mafia” and “Lipstick Jungle” are on the fast track to pink slips. Response to “Welcome to the Captain” has been lackluster. “Eli Stone’s” lone saving grace is that it follows “Lost.” “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” may be the biggest disappointment: Enjoying decent sampling in its debut, it now hovers somewhere around 8 or 9 million viewers, which is not nearly enough for a show that expensive. Worse, it’s routinely pummeled by “Deal or No Deal,” a show that probably costs per episode about a sixth of what an episode of “T:TSCC” costs.
The only successful launches during the strike were of “Lost,” which was already a hit and further benefited from the lack of competition; “American Gladiators,” a property that was well-known and –hyped enough to engender some excitement; and “Moment of Truth,” which came on after “American Idol” and reveled in its ostensibly lurid nature.
Did viewers somehow equate launches during the strike with launches of shows during the summer – that is, just assume that this was material that was just being burned off, that wasn’t really all that good in the first place?
If so, in most cases, who’s to say that they were wrong?
Fast on the heels of CBS, NBC officially announced what’s happening with its scripted series for the rest of the 2007-08 season. NBC didn’t offer any guesstimates as to how many new episodes would be produced.
Here’s what’s returning and when:
“My Name Is Earl:” Thursday, April 3 (with an hour-long episode)
“30 Rock:” Thursday, April 10
“The Office:” Thursday, April 10
“Scrubs:” Thursday, April 10 (that sigh of relief you just heard emanated from Riverside Drive in Valley Village, home of the former hospital where they shoot “Scrubs,” as the cast/crew/writers now can plan for their series finale episode)
“ER:” Thursday, April 10 (wording in the press release – “new episodes following the complete run of ‘Lipstick Jungle’” – suggest that show’s already toast)
“Law & Order: Special Victims Unit:” Tuesday, April 15
“Law & Order:” Wednesday, April 23
Meanwhile, midseason series “Medium” will continue with original episodes; NBC didn’t mention that the show would produce any more, however.
Also: NBC announced it would bring back “Heroes,” “Chuck” and “Life” in the fall, promising, “All three series will have major re-launch campaigns next year.”
Not mentioned: “Friday Night Lights,” “Las Vegas,” “Bionic Woman” and “Journeyman.” Do the math. Only “Las Vegas” has a fighting chance of returning. The others are being fitted for toe tags.
Since its inception, “Monk” has been driven by Adrian Monk’s (Emmy winner Tony Shalhoub) obsession with finding the person responsible for the death of his beloved wife Trudy, which transformed him in the jittery genius added with OCD that he is today.
As the first of a two-part season finale begins Friday, we discover that the plot behind her death has wheels within wheels – and, really, is probably way too complex to justify the murder of the spouse of a police detective, even one as brilliant as Monk.
The show’s writers a) have really overthought this thing, or b) realizing they lose the show’s emotional spine once he finds resolution in his wife’s murder, keep dragging the mystery out, “Lost”-like, to the point where, in the season’s final two episodes, it seems to be a conspiracy as convoluted and politically far-reaching as that in the first season of “Prison Break.”
Tonight, we finally meet the Six-Fingered Man, the guy who ordered Trudy’s murder. He’s around just long enough to get murdered himself, with Monk the only suspect. He’s booked (adjusting his crooked ID card for his mug shot) and fingerprinted (a bit of an ordeal, given how he hates getting smudged in any manner).
On the way to jail, Monk escapes and goes on the lam, and the jurisdictional Sheriff Rollins (Scott Glenn) has a pretty dubious bloodlust when it comes to Monk. It all circles back to Dale “The Whale” Beiderbecke, the guy who almost makes Monty Python’s Mr. Creosote look petite, who’s currently in lockup, whom Monk hates because The Whale won’t tell him what he knows about Trudy’s murder. (Thelonious Monk and Bix Beiderbecke, the jazz-world inspirations for the characters’ monikers, had no such feud, FYI.)
“Monk” fans have long learned to overlook the sloppy and non-existent logic that goes into the plotting. In next week’s episode, there’s a doozy that allows Rollins to menace again another day. And, given that the story centers around Monk’s beloved, the laughs are essentially consigned to the fringes of the episodes. But these episodes nudge Adrian a little out of his comfort zone, which is probably necessary for the evolution of the series.
Finally, “Monk’s” too breezy an entertainment for the writers to get mired in a conspiracy mythology. Fans like “Lost” and “Heroes” because it allows them to hypothesize and over-analyze; “Monk” viewers appreciate the fact that the show doesn’t force them to think. So placing Trudy’s murder inside a sprawling, sinister conspiracy may not prove to be the wisest gambit: Those who prefer “Monk’s” simpler pleasures may choose to wash their hands of the whole mess.
- “Monk” season finale: 9 p.m. Friday and Feb. 22, USA Network.
CBS was first out of the gate in officially announcing the return of its scripted shows, and I thoughtfully typed it all up for you:
(Show, anticipated return date, expected number of new episodes)
“How I Met Your Mother:” March 17, 9
“The Big Bang Theory:” March 17, 9
“Two and a Half Men:” March 17, 9
“CSI: Miami:” March 24, 8
“Cold Case:” March 30, 5
“Criminal Minds:” April 2, 7
“CSI: New York:” April 2, 7
“CSI:” April 3, 6
“Without a Trace:” April 3, 6
“Ghost Whisperer:” April 4, 6
“Numb3rs:” April 4, 6
“NCIS:” April 8, 7
“Moonlight:” April 11, 4
“Rules of Engagement:” April 14, 6
“Shark:” TBA, 4
CBS’s midseason series “Swingtown” has resumed production, but has yet to be scheduled. “Dexter’s” currently in “Shark’s” timeslot. “Big Brother’s” in “The Unit’s” timeslot. CBS thoughtfully points out that “Cane” remains on hiatus due to “Jericho” being in its timeslot, but no one really expects it to return.
As for “Big Bother” (as ratings guru Marc Berman inadvertently referred to it, though it's a more honest title) and “Jericho,” they returned with a bit of a shrug. Up against “American Idol,” “Big Bother” had 7.3 million viewers and was No. 3 in the hour in viewers 18-49. 7.1 million watch “Jericho’s” return; it was No. 2 in the 18-49 demo, but more people watched both a repeat of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and “Boston Legal,” so that can’t be good. CBS got more peanuts last summer from “Jericho” fans hoping to get the show renewed than it did viewers last night.
LOS ANGELES (AP) – An unprecedented explosion of creative energy erupted in Hollywood on the first day after the end of the writers strike, with 77 completed scripts for upcoming television episodes coming within hours after writers returned to work, with dozens more expected by the end of the day. Showrunners were careful to attribute the burst of creativity to screenwriters returning refreshed, inspired and anxious to work and almost certainly not due to scribes toiling clandestinely during the period in which “Pencils Down” was the official Writers Guild of America edict.
In the writers room on the CBS sitcom “Two and a Half Men,” for example, no fewer than 13 half-hour scripts had been churned out before noon, with no fewer than eight featuring plotlines that had posited either Charlie (Charlie Sheen) or Alan (Jon Cryer) secretly jealous of the girl the other was currently dating. “It’s just a coincidence,” insisted series creator Chuck Lorre. “Our guys just hit the ground running. It was like magic. We’ll be able to tweak those similar episodes into making other characters envious of someone else.”
Similarly, David E. Kelley, creator and principal writer on ABC’s legal drama “Boston Legal,” had put the finishing touches on five separate scripts before his first morning coffee break. “I began writing at 11 o’clock last night,” Kelley explained. “I think it’s pretty well documented throughout the industry that I’m a prolific writer.”
Still, that didn’t explain the mysterious appearance of three fresh “Cavemen” scripts, even though ABC had not ordered any further work on the series. In each of the scripts, the main characters took offense at finding themselves mildly misunderstood by more evolved characters, and exchanged banter amongst one another expressing their irritation.
“Gee, I don’t know how that happened,” shrugged Will Speck, one of the show’s executive producers. “Maybe word didn’t get out to all our staff, all of whom are just so passionate about this project and really hoped that it would succeed given how fresh and original it was. But maybe with a little tweaking the guys over at ‘Samantha Who?’ could use them.”
“Nope – we’re good here,” replied “Samantha Who?” creator Donald Todd, who said his staff had “miraculously and energetically” knocked out scripts for five future episodes by lunchtime.
CBS, in particular, had an embarrassment of riches, with no fewer than 17 scripts completed for its sundry “CSI” series.
“It’s easier than it looks,” admitted franchise creator Anthony Zuiker. “See, what you do is, you take each main character’s droll sensibility and a sampling of his one-liners, along with the sexual perversion you want to focus on this week, the sort of graphic mutilation you want to show on the victims and a certain type of technology that will be implemented to solve the crime. Then you input all this into a computer program we’ve created, and – oh, I’ve said too much already, haven’t I?”
In semi-related news, David Axelrod, strategist for Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign, hinted that from here on out, supporters should expect incrementally less inspirational speeches from the candidate, but stressed that the impending change had nothing to do with the fact that Oscar-nominated screenwriters Gary Ross and Aaron Sorkin today had resumed work on spec scripts focusing on bristling dialogue and uplifting themes outside the political arena.
So it’s over. The writers’ strike, that is – WGA members actually have yet to vote on the new contract they’ve been offered, but they likely will ratify it soon, and anyway they – and the rest of Hollywood, and the rest of the L.A. economy affected by the strike – can get back to work.
In case you missed it, here’s my story on what happens now with your favorite shows when the writers return and the subsequent effects of the strike on both writers and the networks.
And though a number of stories – like mine linked above and a Variety story I linked to earlier – have analyzed the fallout and what the writers achieved, the New York Times’ David Carr added its thoughts today:
“(T)he strike was bad for writers in the short term. The delays caused by the strike prompted the studios to ask themselves a fundamental question about the need to finance all manner of pilots for a traditional upfront extravaganza followed by a traditional introduction in the fall. That system, fairly unchanged through the years, has historically been lucrative for writers.
“Emboldened by the strike, the studios severed existing contracts with writers, successfully turned over more of their prime-time schedules to reality programming and vowed to hold the line on filming new shows for next season.
“Some 70 development deals in which writers were essentially paid lucrative stipends to come up with shows that might not ever be broadcast are now gone, and they will not be coming back any time soon.
“The events are likely to bring at least a few lean years to the workaday writers. With less spending on pilots, established writers will be in the hunt because they lost their cushy deals on the lot. With increased incursion from all forms of reality programs, finding work that pays the bills, never mind the residuals, is going to be a slog.”
It pointed out that AMPTP pretty much forced their hands.
And Variety further considers which shows will and won’t be immediately returning.
And now, everyone gets back to work. Let’s wake up tomorrow refreshed and ready to rumble and pretend all of this was just a bad dream.
Last night on the USA Network, those tuned in to see the Westminster Dog Show were in for a rude surprise: One of my editors (and therefore, an unimpeachable source) reports that about two-thirds of the way in, in order to make room for wrestling, viewers were sent off to CNBC to watch the conclusion of the evening’s judging.
“Do they ask you to switch networks in the sixth inning of a baseball game?” she asks. “Do they ask you to switch networks after 30 minutes of ‘Lost’? … I didn't like it and neither did my dog.”
Indeed, that’s fairly insulting; going from watching Chinese Cresteds elegantly strutting their showmanship élan to steroidal behemoths smashing chairs over one another’s heads can make for a jarring viewing experience. USA did it backwards – during the NBA playoffs, when one game runs long and another is starting, viewers who want to watch the one just beginning are advised to switch to sister stations, from ESPN to ESPN2 or from TNT to TBS. But USA apparently figured that Dog Show fans had a better chance of knowing how to find CNBC than wrestling fans.
As for moving "Lost" to another network halfway through the show – don't give ABC any ideas; "Lost" is confusing enough as it is.
As a general rule, one should be wary of a creator who, having purportedly concluded a series of films/books/TV episodes, returns a little later proclaiming, “I felt there were more stories left to tell.” In this case, however, that particular caveat will no doubt be ignored, given that George Lucas is resurrecting “Star Wars” with a new computer-animated series, “Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” which will debut on Cartoon Network in August and be repeated on TNT.
I hope you won’t be sitting near any hard-core fans when they hear this news, because watching people wet themselves is so unseemly. And if you are a hardcore fan, we’ll wait for you while you go clean up.
“I felt there were a lot more Star Wars stories left to tell,” says George Lucas. “I was eager to start telling some of them through animation and, at the same time, push the art of animation forward.”
More from the press release:
“‘STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS’ showcases an entirely new look and feel to the galaxy far, far away, combining the expansive scope of the ‘Star Wars’ saga with state-of-the-art computer-generated animation. Each week, viewers will see a thrilling, 30-minute ‘mini-movie’ created by the talented artists at Lucasfilm Animation.
“On the front lines of an intergalactic struggle between good and evil, fans young and old will join such favorite characters as Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Padmé Amidala, along with brand-new heroes like Anakin’s padawan learner, Ahsoka. Sinister villains—led by Palpatine, Count Dooku and General Grievous—are poised to rule the galaxy. Stakes are high, and the fate of the Star Wars universe rests in the hands of the daring Jedi Knights. Their exploits lead to the action-packed battles and astonishing new revelations that fill ‘STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS.’
“With a new story each week, ‘STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS’ continues the tradition of thrilling stories, astonishing visuals and extraordinary music that have always been the hallmarks of the Star Wars saga.”
I must confess that I am a fan of television that takes on that radical challenge of telling “a new story each week,” so this should prove to be an exciting contribution to the genre. And StarWars.com is providing a sneak peak introducing a new character starting today (with more to come) to help tide fans over until August 15. Cool graphics, but I was a little lost when Dave Filoni, the show’s supervising director, said, “We’ve had to make the clones unique.” Unique? Isn’t that exactly what a clone is not?
Oh, and they’ve already thoughtfully started taking orders for T-shirts of the new character.
I can’t shake the sense that “10 Items or Less” might be a little funnier were it on somewhere besides TBS. The show seems to have some good ideas, but they generally wind up playing kind of soft and squishy.
Take tonight’s episode: Leslie (series co-creator John Lehr) has hit upon the idea of selling “the freshest meat in town” after Greens & Grains butcher Todd (Chris Payne Gilbert) wins some cows in a poker game. Cribbing an idea from seafood and sushi restaurants, he envisions slaughtering the cows on-site for his customers’ edification and quality-assurance. (His proposed slaughtering technique: “Keep hacking ’till she stops moving.”) But they first have to get clearance through a USDA official (Allison Dunbar) who has other things on her mind. It’s thisclose to being funny, but the show isn’t quite edgy to get away with it, resulting in a fairly predictable denouement.
Meanwhile, Richard (Christopher Liam Moore) auditions for “Lord of the Rings on Ice.” “(Pop Culture Phenomenon That Would Be Ruined By Skating) on Ice” is an evergreen gag, but it’s probably time to call a moratorium on the jokes for now.
On Wednesday, Starz comedies “Head Case” and “Hollywood Residential” return with new episodes. When Starz sent out screeners at the beginning of these shows’ seasons, they seemed intentionally vague about what episodes they were offering up, suggesting that what was proffered were the best they could do and that the series overall were kind of spotty.
Well, no and yes: While Wednesday’s episode of “Head Case” is pretty resolutely unfunny (Andy Dick parodying his bad behavior is, what? about a decade-old gag?), next week’s installment has a few pretty inspired moments: Dr. Goode (the reliably amusing Alexandra Wentworth) gives a remarkably inappropriate presentation at a local high school’s career day, and Good Charlotte’s Joel Madden has some funny scenes as one of Goode’s patients, pining for a white-bread, suburban lifestyle. Goode encourages the new Joel: “Lay off the rock & roll, rent a Toyota Corolla, watch a little ‘Dancing with the Stars.’ … Don’t underestimate mediocrity.” Joel, in a bland beige suit and tie, embraces his new life, though he does allow, “It’s harder to meet women now, I don’t know why.”
As for “Hollywood Residential,” starring series creator Adam Paul as Tony King, an incompetent co-host on a celebrity home-makeover show, it’s not a bad idea but, as executed, it’s a lost cause. In Wednesday’s episode, Tony farts a lot and drops his cell phone in dog sh!t. Guest star Carmen Electra can’t even portray a spoiled celebrity convincingly, and one imagines she’s had plenty of practice in the role.
- “10 Items or Less:” 11 tonight, TBS.
- “Head Case:” 10 p.m. Wednesday, Starz.
- “Hollywood Residential:” 10:30 p.m. Wednesday, Starz.
Ladies and Gentlemen: I have finally arrived.
Somehow, I have been graced with my own imdb.com page.
Apparently, I appear in a Spanish production entitled “Reinventando Hollywood” (“Reinventing Hollywood”), alongside George Clooney, Helen Mirren, Glenn Close, Steven Spielberg, Jennifer Aniston, James Gandolfini, David Duchovny, Sally Field, Teri Hatcher, Felicity Huffman, Eva Longoria Parker, Holly Hunter, Mary-Louise Parker, James Woods, Peter Krause, Ellen Pompeo, Jeremy Piven and a host of others. Can’t wait to stroll the red carpet with my castmates at the premiere.
According to imdb, I play myself. I just hope I’m fairly convincing.
I’m guessing all this has come about due to an interview I did with Canal Plus Spain back in November for a documentary that I thereafter heard nothing about though I was promised a copy and had subsequently forgotten. At least I didn’t end up on the cutting-room floor.
Oh, and imdb reports that my own personal STARmeter has jumped an impressive 45% from last week. I can’t wait to revisit my page in subsequent weeks to chart my long, sorry, inevitable plunge into oblivion, so that I can better understand what it’s like to be Sean Young.
Still trying to sort out what shows will be coming back and when. Here’s a semi-official update, based only upon the finest rumors and conjecture:
Returning as fast as their little feet can fly
ABC
“Lost”
“Grey’s Anatomy”
“Desperate Housewives”
“Brothers & Sisters”
“Ugly Betty”
“Samantha Who?”
CBS
“CSI: Crime Scene Investigation”
“CSI: Miami”
“CSI: New York”
“CSI: NCIS”
“CSI: Two and a Half Men”
“CSI: Big Bang Theory”
“CSI: Criminal Minds”
“CSI: Without a Trace”
“CSI: Cold Case”
“CSI: Ghost Whisperer” (not confirmed, but expected
“CSI: How I Met Your Mother (ditto)
NBC
“Law & Order”
“Law & Order: Special Victims Unit”
(Relax, I’m not going to repeat the joke again)
“The Office”
“30 Rock”
“My Name Is Earl”
“ER”
FOX
“House”
The CW
“Gossip Girl”
Catch you next season
ABC
“Pushing Daisies”
“Private Practice”
“Dirty Sexy Money”
NBC
“Chuck”
“Life”
“Heroes”
FOX
“24”
“Bones” (probably)
Toast
ABC
“Big Shots”
“Carpoolers”
“Cavemen”
CBS
“Cane”
NBC
“Bionic Woman”
“Journeyman”
FOX
“K-Ville”
The CW
“Life is Wild”
Your guess is as good as mine
All of the midseason shows (though don’t hold your breath on “Cashmere Mafia” or “Lipstick Jungle” returning to production), plus:
ABC
“Women’s Murder Club”
“Boston Public” (TV Guide says it’ll resume production on between four and seven episodes in March or April, but as we’ve noted, it hasn’t been picked up for next season yet)
“Men in Trees”
CBS
“Moonlight” (probably back in the fall)
“Rules of Engagement”
“The Unit”
NBC
“Friday Night Lights” (Actually, this one’s likely dead in the water)
“Scrubs” (this is its last season; will it get to shoot that very-special series finale episode?)
FOX
“Back to You”
“Prison Break”
“Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” (if does come back, it may not be until next season)
The CW
“Reaper”
“One Tree Hill”
No, not that show it cancelled last season. ABC today announced that the following shows will be returning in the fall:
“Brothers & Sisters”
“Desperate Housewives”
“Dirty Sexy Money”
“Grey’s Anatomy”
“Lost”
“Private Practice”
“Pushing Daisies”
“Samantha Who?”
“Ugly Betty”
Pointedly not on the list: “Boston Legal,” “Men in Trees,” “Big Shots,” “October Road,” “Cashmere Mafia,” “Carpoolers,” “According to Jim,” "Notes from the Underbelly" and, of course, “Cavemen.”
Don’t despair, “Dancing with the Stars” fans: No reality shows on the list, because those don’t require the sort of time and planning to slap together that scripted shows do.
I troll the Internets so you don’t have to.
Now that the strike is (all but) over, the question is, which shows are coming back and with how many episodes? E! asked around.
Two that won’t be returning are a couple of the better new shows on the broadcast networks, ABC’s “Pushing Daisies” and NBC’s “Chuck,” which could end up being the biggest victims, series-wise, of the strike. On one hand, the networks are smart to recognize that airing a handful of new episodes won’t help those shows regain any momentum they may have had. On the other hand, when they return in the fall, they’ll have been gone for an awfully long time and there’ll be new shows in the mix for critics to champion and fans to embrace. So they could get lost in the shuffle.
Here’re some showrunner comments E! rustled up:
Damon Lindelof, executive producer of ‘Lost:’ "I and the rest of the writers have every intention of making sure you guys get more episodes this season beyond the eight already completed."
David Fury, executive producer of ‘24:’ "’24’ works best 24 hours in a row. I don't think we'll see it until 2009."
Bryan Fuller, executive producer of ‘Pushing Daisies:’ "Many of the shows are getting 'return to work' letters this week from their studios, but we won't be one of them. … I got the call on Friday that they didn't want us to go back to work until March, regardless of the strike outcome."
Josh Schwartz, executive producer of ‘Gossip Girl’ and ‘Chuck:’ "’Gossip Girl’ will most likely be on as soon as possible. ‘Chuck’ may not be back until fall to relaunch with ‘Heroes.’"
Bill Lawrence, executive producer of ‘Scrubs:’ "It doesn't seem like NBC is superpsyched to air the finale, but we're trying to work something out."
Marc Cherry, executive producer of ‘Desperate Housewives:’ "I think maybe I could cram in seven episodes [before the end of the season]. It would take us about two weeks to get back into production. I'm chomping at the bit."
The New York Times gets into the action on this, noting that ABC’s “Dirty Sexy Money” will also stay off the schedule until the fall, and that ABC’s “Big Shots,” CBS’s “Cane” and NBC’s “Bionic Woman” are done for.
Meanwhile, Variety wipes that smile off the happy face the WGA has put on the strike’s resolution.
“But the cost of achieving that principle through a strike has been considerable - particularly for the busiest and most successful WGA members with the most to lose. Meanwhile, the money to be made through the hard-fought new-media residuals is not exactly eye-popping. …
“Financially, the deepest cut was felt in the TV biz last month, when the majors invoked force majeure provisions on more than 70 overall term deals. The wave of pinkslipping not only affected scribes but the nonwriting producers who have become so ubiquitous on the talent rosters of major studios during the past decade. …
“Beyond the immediate pain, network and studio brass have vowed that they will never load up again on so much overhead in the competitive frenzy to lock up creative talent. Writers who are solid performers but not superstars will be grappling with more one-off deals in the future, rather than the studio housekeeping deals that paid them $1 million or more over a few years to develop pilots and pitch in on series.
“Networks, in varying degrees, are vowing to use the jolt provided by the strike to tame the madness of pilot season by cutting the volume of development -- not just this year but for good. If the nets hold to this promise, it will mean fewer opportunities for scribes and other constituents in scripted TV to draw their highest paydays, as pilot fees have traditionally been higher than regular episodic minimums. And, of course, the shutdown of scripted series production only spurred the broadcast nets to dive deeper into the well of writer-free reality programming.”
Here’s guessing that, for all their rhetoric, the networks welcomed the strike as an opportunity to relieve themselves of all that costly deadwood. Look how quickly the strike was resolved after the networks dumped all those contracts by invoking force majeure.
It's been a pretty placid place, the Grammy press room. That all changed when Herbie Hancock's “River: The Joni Letters” was named Album of the Year. Everyone, clearly expecting Kanye West and Amy Winehouse to duke it out, was shocked, perhaps a little outraged, and broke from their somnolence to express surprise/indignation. I didn't really have a dog in that race, so I received the news stoically.
They tried to play Hancock off, but like West earlier, he wouldn't have it. They should've played off some of the musical numbers.
And I've been here too long, too; they should play me off because my work is done here.
Three and a half hours to hand out a mere pittance of ten trophies? They could've – and should've – cut a few of these performances out to bring it to three hours, particularly the strolls down memory lane. I like John Fogerty just fine, but his medley with Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard was clearly aimed at fogeys who had long gone to bed and hardly belonged down the homestretch.
Also, not to be too p!ssy about it, but we're kind of getting the shaft backstage here in the pressroom. Not too many winners are visiting, so we're getting nominees and performers. So there's not much drama or joy or any of that, though a lot of people are discussing Ms. Winehouse's travails.
Lessons learned from the evening: A wooden folding chair in a cramped sardine tin is nowhere for someone with a herniated disk to sit for eight hours.
And now, the moment CBS told us we were waiting for:
Cuba Gooding, Jr., introduces Amy Winehouse, promising “So much more great music still to come,” as if wishing will make it so. Black flapper-like dress and heels and, naturally, that beehive. She performs “You Know I'm No Good” and, of course, “Rehab.” Sounds in good voice, looks like she might have restless leg syndrome; though she doesn't really play to the camera – is she reading off a teleprompter? There's a nice, wry look on her face as she sings, “Don't make me go to rehab.”
And for her efforts, she's rewarded the Record of the Year Grammy for “Rehab.” She looks shocked, turns and buries her head into a backing performer. She's speechless, or maybe doesn't realize she's supposed to say something. “Uh... thank you to everyone,” she manages, finally, including, “For my Blake, incarcerated.” She keeps it together and ends on an exhilarated note.
Best Country Album: Vince Gill, “These Days.” Gill, handed his trophy by Ringo Starr, gets off the line of the night (so far): “I just got an award handed to me by a Beatle. Have you had that happen to you yet, Kanye?” If Kanye gets back on the stage, no doubt his response will be: “Dude, I own George Harrison's bones.” Gill doesn't thank God, but he does ask God to bless the audience; our judges say it counts, so our exclusive God-shout-out count meter© is at seven.
They're starting to get serious about handing out hardware, finally. Best Rap/Sung Collaboration: Rihanna, featuring Jay-Z, “Umbrella.” Had to deal with yet more system failure (this national broadband connection card swoons more than an ingénue in a costume drama), so missed most of her acceptance speech. No call-out to God in what I heard, though.
Foreboding: According to the schedule they've handed out, the last award they're distributing is Producer of the Year, Non-Classical, just after Album of the Year. They never close on such an unglamorous category. One of the nominees is Mark Ronson, who has a bunch of Amy Winehouse credits. Here's guessing she wins Album of the Year, and he's on hand to assure everyone that she's really OK, really, and to assure Amy that everyone really loves her, really, and it's a high-drama conclusion.
* UPDATE: Maybe I should read the schedule more closely. They just listed that the winner would be mentioned, not announced, and, of course, Ronson had already won. Still, looked like an Amy sweep was in the works until, suddenly, it wasn't.
Still, a fairly lurid teaser: “The performance everyone is waiting for – Amy Winehouse.” Sort of accusing us of all sitting around waiting for her to crash and burn worse than Britney Spears did at the VMAs.
So, thoughts on her visa drama? Just a thought: Did they say she got one at the last second to help her save face (though given the photos of her out there these days, that train has left the station)? Did they think better of placing her in the middle of the debauchery that will be post-ceremony partying? Since she's in London, she'll be performing at about 4 a.m. her time.
George Lopez makes (or actually, recycles) a joke about a Mexican Vice President.
Best Rap Album: Kanye West, “Graduation.” His fourth win of the night, tying him with Amy Winehouse. He rambles on with his usual braggadocio – “If I don't get back up here for Best Album ... I deserve it, too” – music fires up trying to play someone offstage for the first time this evening. Kanye's annoyed; he begins talking about his mother, then says, “It would be in good taste to stop the music then.” They do.
Mild surprise: He doesn't thank God.
Our God-shout-out count© meter just busted, thanks to the spirited gospel medley featuring everyone from Aretha Franklin and BeBe Winans to the Clark Sisters, who incidentally, tied in the Best Gospel Performance category. So we'll rush it into the shop for repairs and put the tally at six, Keys' previous mention and one for each of the songs performed.
They've just kind of been dropping in these Lifetime Achievement Awards along the way – so far, to The Band, Burt Bacharach and, rather belatedly, Cab Calloway. Perhaps recalling that Frank Sinatra embarrassment a while back, they haven't been letting these recipients say anything, though, which seems a little disrespectful (though, of course, Calloway's in no position to say anything anyway).
Best Rock Album: Foo Fighters, "Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace." Dave Grohl doesn't thank God, but he does thank his daughter, which is far more sincere.
Two hours in; six awards. An even longer night than projected when I first predicted a long night.
Kanye West, wearing night-vision goggles with the ever-fashionable black-light accessorizing, performs a medley with Daft Punk, including “Stronger.” Robotic beings with black-light piping noodle along on computer-looking things. Fire shoots out all over the stage. Big, splashy production that leads, incongruously, to “Hey Mama,” his moving song about his recently deceased mother.
Fergie and John Legend perform “Finally” together. But backstage, they're interrupted when Morris Day and the Time – nattily attired, perhaps too nattily attired – arrive. One guy looks like an upholstered Victorian sofa. Morris Day, considering the diminutive height of the mic stand: “Prince must've just left, did he? I have to pull this mic higher.”
Best Compilation Soundtrack Album: “Love,” the Beatles. Veteran Beatles producer George Martin and Ringo Starr take the stage. Ringo doesn't thank God. George Martin credits George Harrison with the idea of working with Cirque du Soleil, but doesn't thank God.
Beyonce and Tina Turner perform a medley of Tina-heavy hits. Tina, the Tin Man called; he wants his outfit back. But Tina doesn't really need Beyonce's help on "Proud Mary."
For an awards show that purportedly celebrates cutting-edge music, they've already had three strolls down music's memory lane.
Most bizarre presenting team (so far): Andy Williams, Nelly Furtado and Roselyn Sanchez (of “Without a Trace”). Who announce Amy Winehouse as the winner of Song of the Year for “Rehab.” That's four for Winehouse, now, including the two she won in the untelevised ceremony earlier this afternoon.
Our exclusive God-shout-out count© begins early, with the first trophy:
Best Female R&B Vocal Performance: Alicia Keys, “No One.” She thanks God.
I've actually been too busy backstage to watch much of this stuff so far, but the reunion performance of The Time hardly feels event-y enough to open so close to the top of the show. Rihanna could've demanded better collaborators.
Hey, you know who hasn't been nearly honored enough? The Beatles, that's who. Well, thank God the Grammy folks are here to right that oversight. The Cirque du Soleil people bounce and float and bicycle around the stage to “A Day in the Life” from their stage show "Love." Y'know, Cirque du Soleil shows are cool and atmospheric and everything, but when they're taken out of context like this, it seems pretty goofy, like the production's suddenly swallowed some magic mushrooms. Then a clip from the movie “Across The Universe,” now available on DVD!
Best New Artist: Amy Winehouse. Who's not in the house, so not in any position to thank God.
Forty minutes in, 2 trophies distributed. Gonna be a long night.
Today is your lucky day: I will be live-blogging the Grammys, from the Grammys. (Well, from the press room at least, which is so unconscionably cramped and tiny that sardines would pine for some elbow room.) So you West Coast folks will know who wins before the broadcast airs, as well as whether you should bother to watch and if so, during which performances you can duck into the kitchen.
All this, with the inevitable caveats: If the blog server doesn’t have another of its routine meltdowns, and if the national broadband access card in my loaner laptop actually bothers to work (last time I checked, it wasn’t). Still, it should be fun to check back here a little after 5 p.m. because even if there isn’t anything going on here, it’ll be fun to imagine my head exploding from all the cyber-incompetence.
Oh, and just the latest sign of just how much trouble the music industry is in: They’re charging reporters to park, blocks away from Staples Center, $12 a pop. I’ve covered dozens of awards shows, and this is the first time anyone charged for parking. I hear there’s a cash bar in the greenroom, too.
Well, no, not really. But a mole sent me a little intel:
The Mayor of Television: So what's going on?
Mole: Standing O's followed by questions that the poor acoustics make hard to hear.
The Mayor of Television: So it's a done deal, essentially? Vote tonight -- or tomorrow?
Mole: I think they said within the next 48 hours. Time to jack off! G'dnight!
One wonders just how long Viacom and Warner Bros. are going to continue to throw away good money after bad on The CW, the network that you can’t really say emerged from the ashes of The WB and UPN, because, really, it never actually emerged. It just kind of sits there.
Critics liked its new scripted shows this season or at least begrudgingly admitted that “Gossip Girl” had a legitimate shot at success. But “Gossip Girl” never managed more than around 2.5 million viewers, and that’s a far cry from success. Even the genial, almost universally acclaimed “Reaper” couldn’t find an audience. The CW is down 50% from last season in the 18-49 demographic and 21% in its 18-34 target demo. Its Sunday-night lineup recently failed to break a million viewers, and got a 0 rating, a first for a “broadcast” network.
And now a new report catalogues the network’s woes, noting that The CW will lose another $50 million this year, and with bottom-basement programming like “Crowned: The Mother of All Pageants,” “CW Now” and whatever new Pussycat Girls atrocity they have in place, it’s astonishing to think that they even spent $50 million in order to lose it.
Oh, and World Wrestling Entertainment just announced it’s severing ties with the network, which means it’s out two hours of some of its highest-rated programming. Due to the particulars of their financial arrangement, The CW didn’t have to pay for “Smackdown!”, so any programming they replace it with will only further contribute to their money pit.
So, let’s recap, shall we? Only one really successful show, “America’s Next Top Model,” that could really give a boost to one of Viacom’s many cable networks. A smattering of OK shows that no one’s watching, and some more lousy shows that look like they were produced by Philippine day laborers. And nothing that looks remotely encouraging for the net on the horizon.
Add all this up, and I’m guessing they’ll pull the plug on this network by season’s end. If the powers that be (i.e., Les Moonves) is hedging on such a decision, I invite him just to hand me $50 and I’ll personally flush it down the toilet for him (well, maybe I’ll pocket a little of it beforehand). The only reason for continuing to try to rescue it? Because you’ll never see another broadcast network launch again in your life. But then, The CW’s sorry story underscores precisely why that’s true.
"(A)n ongoing struggle against seven, multinational media conglomerates, no matter how successful, is exhausting, taking an enormous personal toll on our members and countless others ..."
"Continuing to strike now will not bring sufficient gains to outweigh the potential risks. The time has come to accept this contract and settle the strike."
So next week, most WGA members will be transformed from writers intrepidly striking for an important cause to plain old unemployed writers. And not a minute too soon: Had the strike continued another week, the rest of the season would likely have been scrapped, and the Oscar ceremony would’ve been seriously compromised.
Tomorrow’s Daily News explains what’ll happen next, in terms of when your favorite shows will return as well as what it might mean for writers and also in a broader, whither-television kind of way. Let's just say for now that it's ... complicated.
MSNBC is Media Matters’ bitch.
MediaMatters.org is the liberal media watchdog that calls out the nation’s press (mainly, TV journalists) who present information with an erroneous conservative spin or, even, things that just kind of offend them. When they complain about shenanigans on Fox News Channel, Bill O’Reilly goes on the air and, spittle flying, decries the group as a “far-left hate organization,” and that’s that. Fox News Channel doesn’t issue corrections, because Fox News Channel never makes mistakes.
MSNBC – well, that’s a different story:
* On Don Imus’ radio show, aired mornings on MSNBC, Imus makes his idiotic remark calling the Rutgers’ womens basketball team “nappy headed ho’s.” Media Matters complains. MSNBC axes Imus, and CBS radio soon follows suit. (Eventually, Imus returns to the airwaves, but not to MSNBC.)
MSNBC wants to be colorful and provocative and borderline irresponsible like Fox News, but Media Matters (and MSNBC’s occasional moral compass) won’t let it. Hey, guys: What’s wrong with just covering the campaign and leaving the juvenile jokes to the late-night comics? But, also: Hey, Media Matters: What’s wrong with the First Amendment?
Craig Crawford notes that for all the media tub-thumping and fingers-crossed prognosticating for Barack Obama, he couldn’t win the key states of California, Massachusetts and New Jersey. Even Brit Hume got a little misty-eyed after Obama’s Tuesday-night speech.
This happened back on the evening of the Iowa caucuses, too; all the pundits were already planning Obama’s coronation. A few days later, Hillary Clinton took New Hampshire and they all looked like dopes. Here, however, it occurred on the very same night – many reporters were hopping on the Obama bandwagon, suggesting he was going to have a great night. And he had a really good night, but not as good as reporters had led viewers to believe. That kind of nonsense wreaks havoc with one’s perceived momentum. If in fact they are pulling for him, their efforts are backfiring.
So if they pull this kind of stunt again, you can probably rest assured that his campaign is dead.
Former “Arrested Development” star Will Arnett is not being allowed to provide the voice of KITT, the talking car in NBC’s upcoming TV movie/remake of “Knight Rider.”
Because he already does voice-over spots for GM, and KITT is a Ford Mustang. So if people see both, they’ll be confused as to what kind of car they’re supposed to buy.
(You’d think they would’ve figured this out before hiring the guy in the first place.)
Instead, Val “Bible and sword!” Kilmer will be KITT’s voice.
As I groused last night, the dizzying Super Tuesday graphics from the news networks were unnecessarily complicated, often without actually explaining anything, kind of a mash-up of an Etch-a-Sketch, a giant iPhone and the Cubist movement.
Graciously, these folks have simplified things.
Here’s a pretty good and only somewhat rambling interview with John Cleese at the Onion’s AV site, tied to the rerelease of “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” on DVD. I’ve interviewed Cleese a couple of times, and it’s funny: His handlers invariably warned me that he might be a little curmudgeonly, but he unfailingly went out of his way to be gracious and cooperative.
A couple of highlights:
On “Life of Brian” and contemporary Christianity: “(I)t's not in any way against Christ or Christ's teachings. It's all about criticizing people who make something of Christ's teachings, which I think he himself would not recognize. There's a lovely line that an idea is not responsible for the people who hold it. A lot of people in America who describe themselves without any hesitation at all as Christians are, in my opinion, completely missing the point of most of his teachings. It was like Tom DeLay, who said, with reference to turning the other cheek, that he never understood that bit of theology, which is absolutely the key to everything that Christ says. Here you've got a guy who's made a political career out of being supported by evangelical Christians, and he's totally missed the point of the teaching. So is he a Christian?”
On why he’s sort of given up on screenwriting these days: “(S)tudio executives always treat people like me, and writers in particular, as though we live in some kind of ivory tower. And these executives think they know what audiences really like, despite the fact that I've spent my life in front of audiences. And the executives have never been in front of audiences, apart from sycophantic young junior executives who wouldn't dare not laugh at their jokes. So the whole idea that they have some kind of practical knowledge that I don't have is so ludicrous that it does not bear inspection. But they hang onto it. They hang onto a mystical belief that in the moment they inherited the biggest desk and office in their block, they also inherited an understanding of comedy. And it's absolutely insane, but they really do think that they understand it. And so they start telling you to do things which you know are wrong, and I don't know how you can write something that you know is wrong. I mean, what do you try, do you try to write it badly so it will be better?”
… President Bush famously asked once, and now, he has answered his question: Nope.
Bush is proposing to slash the budget for public television –already only a mere droplet in the bucket in a $3 trillion budget he has proposed – in more than half, from $820 million to $420 million. And he apparently has stricken it from the books in the year 2011 – he’s allocated no money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting then, when traditionally it’s financed three years ahead of time to protect it from political meddling.
From the story:
“CPB President Patricia Harrison called the proposed reductions ‘draconian.’
“The federal funds make up about 16% of a local station's budget, on average. However, some small stations in rural communities depend on the money to operate and could be forced to shut down if the cuts are approved, she said.
"‘What the cuts do is hit those stations least able to continue,’ Harrison said.
This isn’t the first time the Bush Administration has persecuted CPB. In 2005, it was revealed that then-FCC chief Kenneth Tomlinson had authorized and paid for a possibly illegal monitoring of PBS programming for “liberal” content, which led to allegations of some sort of right-wing coup within CPB’s ranks and Tomlinson’s resignation before an investigation determined wrongdoing.
It’s sort of unfathomable that CPB is such a favorite whipping boy in Washington, when PBS is generally respected, if considered in some circles as slightly dotty. Together, they produce and air intelligent, educational and often valuable programming. And the tax dollars keep an awful lot of people employed and contributing to the economy, as opposed to, say, the billions upon billions Bush has flushed down that sinkhole in Iraq to Halliburton and Blackwater.
Bush seems to have an almost pathological belief in – and need to prove – that trope in some conservative circles that government just can’t help people. Witness just a couple of his greatest hits – the botched response to Hurricane Katrina and continued inability or unwillingness to accelerate the rebuilding of New Orleans and his vetoing of the overwhelmingly popular SCHIP bill, which would have provided health insurance to children. And now, here’s CPB, another baby he wants to drown in its shallow puddle of bathwater.
Ah. Still caught up in the fury of all that Super Tuesday blogging, it seems.
Fox News’ Megyn Kelly offered an interesting study in journalism as choreography: Whenever I saw her, she was in near-constant motion as cameras followed her sauntering through the newsroom set, gracefully cascading towards the camera while spreading her arms toward CGI statistical graphics that really weren’t there. Did Walter Cronkite ever manage that?
Fox is also finding it hard to suppress its anger at what Mike Huckabee has done to their guy Mitt Romney.
Big theme tonight is: WTF with conservatives hating McCain? With RNC water carriers like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter vowing they’d vote for a Democrat over McCain, everyone’s wondering, why? And, now that their influence has proven to be somewhat less than influential, why further diminish a base that will already be depleted over most Americans’ being in direct opposition to the war in Iraq?
McCain’s a maverick©, and, until recently, that’s what everyone has liked about him. Except a very recherché conservative base. His “straight talk” almost got him over the hump in 2000 until a most unseemly smear campaign in South Carolina. Matthew Continetti, trying to make sense of this, blogs for the New York Times:
“The ideological critics dislike Senator McCain — who has an 82.3 lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union — because, it is said, he’s no conservative. Senator McCain supported a campaign finance law that banned soft money. He voted against the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. He has championed an immigration reform bill that would provide a pathway to citizenship for illegal aliens. And he supports a “cap-and-trade” bill to limit carbon dioxide emissions. Senator McCain is a deviationist.
“When you look over the list of his deviations, however, one cannot help thinking of … George W. Bush. President Bush, like Senator McCain, has found himself at odds from time to time with the right. It was President Bush who signed his campaign finance reform bill into law. It has been President Bush who has championed immigration reform, including a “path to citizenship” for illegal aliens, throughout his presidency. His version of “Big Government Conservatism” gave us the No Child Left Behind Act, which lavishes federal dollars on a department conservatives once wanted to close. His prescription drug benefit was the largest expansion of the federal welfare state in 40 years. He has backed farm subsidies and imposed steel tariffs. President Bush is a deviationist.”
Personally, I still have no idea why the RNC is so hot for Romney – some guy on CNN just said (while I was folding laundry; yeah, it’s gotten that anticlimactic at this point) “The only way Mitt Romney can spin this after tonight is, ‘I have really nice hair.’”
Mittens just oozes that multimillionaire’s hauteur and sense of entitlement that real people will never cozy to, and the fact that he spends a lot of his own money and whimpers when things don’t go his way is unattractive to apparently more people than me. I daresay it’s a little like President Bush whining when Congress doesn’t give him everything he wants, even when polls show that everything he wants is precisely what most Americans don’t want: He’ll veto the FISA warrantless wiretap bill if Congress won’t protect telecom corporations from prosecution if what they’ve already done is, in fact, illegal – and he’ll veto that bill even if it might possibly save American lives. Romney has that same my-way-or-the-highway mentality, and who cares if his way is pockmarked with potholes.
Anyway, so much for this Super Tuesday analysis bunk. We’ll return tomorrow with the usual imbecilic meanderings about “According to Jim” and whistling-past-the-graveyard writers-strike jokes.
John McCain, in declaring his front-runner status, saluted Mike Huckabee to cheers and also congratulated Mitt Romney, to considerably less applause. That means Barack Obama got to speak last – everyone else was the warm-up act; he got to be headliner. But, then again, no other candidate wants to have to follow one of Obama’s rev-'em-up soliloquies.
Obama – who has won 11 states, compared to Hillary Clinton’s eight, including (as projected) California, with Missouri still up in the air – took the stage before McCain finished his speech.
MSNBC and CNN cut away to Obama, no doubt anticipating yet more verbal pyrotechnics; Fox News, unsurprisingly, stayed with McCain.
Was Obama’s interrupting McCain intentional? That’s going to be parsed pretty intensely, no doubt.
“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Obama declared in his inclusive fashion. “We are the change that we seek.” And then he reprises his “Yes We Can” meme, which puts every motivational speaker on the planet to shame. Not like his South Carolina speech, but, you know, still charisma-heavy.
Fox News’ Brit Hume conceded “his characteristic charisma,” and pointed out a woman in the background reacting nearly ecstatically to his speech, noting that when it comes to politics, “Emotion is critical, too.” Does Brit have a man-crush on Barry (FYI: the name he went by when he attended Occidental College)? Has he ever said anything this remotely positive about a Demo(n)crat on FNC?
But, still: Consensus is still no one knows anything, yet, wait, McCain’s probably a given, now that he’s just been projected to take California. Obama and Clinton have essentially split the difference tonight, though the momentum seems to be with Obama (though Clinton’s spin will be his momentum may have been stalled given that he didn’t come close to clearing the table).
Clinton has said she wants a debate a week! Even MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann groans, noting that there’ve been so many even viewers at home have moderated one at this point.
CNN’s Larry King and Gloria Borger proclaim Romney a big fat loser. “Huckabee’s upstaged him in every way,” Borger says of Romney, which is apparently intended to underscore just how big a loser Romney is. More talk about Huckabee as McCain's running mate on all channels. On MSNBC, Matthews declared Romney’s Mormonism as his problem. Also that he won a couple more states after he had already been written off.
Aside: Only Clinton and Obama referenced the tornados and its victims in their speeches.
(Didn’t check into ABC’s coverage much since, when I did, it seemed they were just trying to get viewers up to speed with the cable news networks’ coverage. Didn’t watch CNN much because I didn’t buy enough wine to put up with Wolf Blitzer; their BREAKING NEWS Emails arrived hours after they were breaking news. And let me just suggest that the networks’ graphics departments overthought this a bit too much.)
As expected, the blog server has gone all Terry Schiavo on us, so you’ll probably never read this.
Earlier tonight, Wolf Blitzer was hacked off that they just can’t make stuff up: “Interesting that we can’t make projections on those states, we’re going to have to wait to get some hard numbers from those ballots coming in.” Gee, must be tough to be, uh, responsible journalists?
*
Chris Matthews is such a witless jerk – he’s already asked a Mitt Romney spokesman whether Romney will ever run for President again if he doesn’t win this year, which is putting the cart before the horse by anywhere from nine months to four years. And the guy hedged, as of course he would, and Matthews still acted like he thought he was going to get an answer out of the guy, like it’s a pertinent question at this point.
To top himself, he’s asking the Democratic chairman, Howard Dean, about the fact that a lot of college-educated people are voting Democratic today. “Is that good news for the Democratic Party, that it’s gotten so gentrified? … I just wonder where the regular people are.” Gee, Tweety, maybe you’re right – if educated people who actually follow the issues vote Democratic, the union is in graver peril than anyone could’ve imagined. Nice lip gloss, though.
*
MSNBC called Utah for Obama with 24 votes in – all, according to their graphic, for John Edwards.
*
Huckabee made his speech at 7:07 p.m. PCT, so he can reach his base before they go to bed: “A lot of people have been saying this is a two-man race, and you know what? They’re right – and we’re in it!” He takes another swipe at Romney and plays to his religious base by referencing Mark 12:41-44 in one fell swoop by declaring, “The widow's mite has more power than all the gold in the world.” Oh, and then he went all icky by referencing the goofy nicknames of colleges in the states he’s competitive in.
“Huckabee’s success tonight is one more manifestation of the fact that the Republican Party has grown multiple personalities,” Tom Brokaw suggested.
Afterwards, CNN’s Campbell Brown asked Huckabee, “It is highly unlikely that you’ll get the nomination … so why stay in the race?” What is it with these reporters wanting to get rid of candidates so quickly? Huckabee reasonably responded, “The only way I know I’ll lose is if I walk off the field.”
*
Fox News’ Brit Hume is despairing over Romney’s showing tonight, but some of his panelists are still not willing to write him off. Bill Kristol came prepared: “There are 15 (Republican) primaries tonight.” He’s corrected – there are 16. But, hey! Romney is given North Dakota. But Kristol concedes the point that Romney is pretty close to toast.
Romney had a smile on his face as he gave his “How much of my own money have I spent?” speech. He noted that the three states he has lived (Michigan, Utah, Massachusetts) have all voted for him. Well, if you can’t win there, Mitt, you pretty much oughta give up. Then he goes all gloomy-Gus and annoyingly call-and-response at the same time, with the chorus being, “And they haven’t!” Hey, guess what, Mitt: Obama’s “Yes we can” is a heck of a lot more inspirational.
*
Hillary Clinton declared, “I won’t let anyone swift-boat this country’s future!” And then my TV shut itself off. Too much hot air from all the candidates and pundits, I guess. Nothing’s going right tonight.
CNN’s Lou Dobbs scolded his panel for being surprised that Obama won Georgia so handily, blaming it on “Northeast prejudice toward the South.” “The reality is, the South is … far more sophisticated” than its stereotype," he insisted. One panelist, David Gergen, a native Southerner, didn't go so far as to differ but noted that change is pretty recent. Later, Dobbs referred to black voters as Obama’s chief constituency, compartmentalizing Obama and dismissing the millions of whites voting for him. Seems no matter how hard these guys try, they just have tin ears when it comes to trying to discuss race.
Then, CNN offered a very confusing graphic in which John King, using a telestrator, scribbled like John Madden all over a map of Georgia. Long story short: Seems the candidates needs votes to do well.
*
MSNBC gives Illinois, New Jersey and Connecticut to John McCain and Massachusetts to Mittens Romney. (Mike Huckabee was ceded West Virginia earlier in the day.) Barack Obama wins Illinois, naturally.
Hilariously petty drama in the making: Romney is kvetching about some sort of conspiracy between the Huckabee and McCain campaigns to give Huckabee West Virginia, and Huckabee called Romney a “whiner.” The New York Times recently did a story on how the other candidates just flat-out don’t like Romney because of his negative ads and grumbling whenever someone picks on him in debates, but this looks like it could have broader implications: Huckabee can be a big spoiler for Romney’s campaign tonight, denying him 168 delegates in five state. It’s shaping up as some sort of internecine political thriller: Though the rank and file members of the GOP are wary of both McCain and Huckabee, the two candidates hate Romney’s guts and may be tag-teaming to stop him, so how will that come into play when it comes time for a show of party unity?
And anyway, Huckabee’s not just a spoiler; he’s competitive in Missouri and Georgia. (Fox News floats the potential buzz that if Huckabee helps McCain bat down Romney, that puts him in a strong position for the VP position. Probably not, but thanks for playing.
Then Fox’s Bill Hemmer did the same sort of bewildering Maddenesque telestrator graphics, but messing up the map of the whole country.)
*
With 0% of the vote in, MSNBC gives Tennessee to Hillary. Who’s running their projection department, the Amazing Kreskin?
*
CNN just ran a commercial for the movie “Vantage Point,” which hinges on an ostensible assassination attempt on the President of the United States. Stay classy, CNN.
MSNBC has called Georgia for Obama, with only about 700 votes counted – still technically 0% of the voter turnout. Not jumping to any conclusions or anything. Tom Brokaw notes that race isn’t as big an issue for younger Americans that it is for the old white men who run the media. So at least parents have gotten something right in raising their kids.
*
A McCain commercial declares that while he was a POW in Vietnam, “John McCain was inspired by Ronald Reagan.” McCain was in the Hanoi Hilton from ’67-’73. Reagan first moved into California’s governor’s mansion in 1967. Not to say that McCain didn’t keep up with Reagan’s political career from a POW prison, but he might have had more pressing things on his mind at the time. Perhaps he was inspired by Reagan’s last movie, “The Killers.”
*
On Fox News, Bill O’Reilly dismisses McCain’s momentum: “The psychology kicks in; everyone wants to be a winner.” He cites the belief of the pollster he’s interviewing that Obama could beat McCain in a general election. Billo’s trying to wish Mitt Romney into first place. And, of course, he can’t get through a segment without some good, old-fashioned Hillary Bashing.™
The Daily News is going to blog the absolute sh!t out of Super Tuesday, which is only appropriate since, you know, it’ll only affect the rest of our lives. For political analysis, check out The Sausage Factory, as well as the ecumenical (conservative, moderate and liberal) Friendly Fire site.
Once polls close on the East Coast (5 p.m. PCT), I’ll be channel-surfing and commenting on coverage by the cable news networks (Karl Rove will be a pundit on the Fox News Channel, so that’ll be fun; MSNBC’s coverage will be anchored by Chris Matthews, who, as we’ve noted, hates hates hates Hillary Clinton, alongside Keith Olbermann, who has been particularly fawning to Bill Clinton, so that should be entertaining as well) and, since the writers strike has imbued them with a renewed sense of civic responsibility, coverage by the broadcast networks (and local stations a bit, too) until midnight or so. That is, if the system running our blogs allows me to (an iffy proposition at best in recent days).
Here’s an advance look at the level of insight you’ll be able to find here later today: Earlier today, CNN’s Candy Crowley declared that what Obama needs to do is to “suck off enough delegates.” Perhaps he should outsource that particular task to Larry Craig.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to vote, see if I can find a doctor to care about my newly inflamed herniated disk and invest in enough wine to get me through the night (which I’m sure I can expense).
Believe it or not, there’s still some Television out there that has yet to be duly honored. Which is where the 25th Annual William S. Paley Television Festival comes in. It has announced its 2008 schedule, and a whole lot of them are worth attending. All shows, featuring a screening along with casts and creators in person to discuss their series, begin at 7 p.m. at the ArcLight.
Friday, March 14: “Elvis ’68 Comeback Special,” 40th Anniversary Celebration. His biggest comeback, of course, came when he died. Priscilla Presley is among the participants.
Saturday, March 15. “Pushing Daisies.” It was the best new show of the season until the season ceased to exist. Just don’t get too close to Lee Pace if you’ve ever been brought back from the dead.
Monday, March 17: The Comedy World of Judd Apatow and Friends. In which Apatow recalls his many abuses at the hands of heartless TV executives (who abruptly cancelled his classic shows “The Ben Stiller Show,” “Freaks and Geeks” and “Undeclared”), which forced him to be content to become film’s reigning comedy genius.
Tuesday, March 18: “Chuck.” The world-saving geek finally gets some love, if not from Yvonne Strahovski.
Wednesday, March 19: “Friday Night Lights.” Honor it now, before it’s cancelled.
Thursday, March 20: “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” reunion. If you’re allergic to genuflecting geeks, you might want to steer clear of Sunset and Vine on this evening.
Friday, March 21: “Dancing with the Stars.” Well, they all can’t be gems. At least they’re not honoring “Mind of Mencia.”
Saturday, March 22: “Gossip Girl.” If something’s a guilty pleasure, doesn’t that mean you don’t want other people to know you watch? In which case, who’s going to show up for this, and out themselves as fans?
Monday, March 24: “Damages.” Glenn Close and Ted Danson explain how they were able to so convincingly play such thoroughly evil characters.
Tuesday, March 25: “Dirty Sexy Money.” “‘Dirty Sexy Money’ is an American television series created by Craig Wright, who also serves as executive producer alongside Greg Berlanti, Bryan Singer, Matthew Gross, Peter Horton and Josh Reims, with Melissa Berman producing. Horton also directed the pilot. Produced by ABC Studios, Bad Hat Harry Productions, Berlanti Television and Gross Entertainment. It aired in the US on Wednesday nights at 10:01PM Eastern/9:01PM Central.” Boy, Wikipedia can make anything sound boring.
Wednesday, March 26: “Tracey Ullman’s State of the Union.” A Paley Fest first: A premiere before the show even airs, of Ullman’s new Showtime sketch series. So you’ll just sort of have to take it on faith that you’ll like it.
Thursday, March 27: “Mad Men.” Did we mention this was the best show of 2007? Well, within the past week, that is?
OK, so now here’s the bad news. They’ve jacked the ticket prices up this year, to $50 and $35 per event for Paley Center members and $60 and $45 per event for non-members (if you pay the higher fee, you don’t have to wear a blindfold). Tickets go on sale for Paley Center members on Thursday and for everyone else on Sunday. Tickets at TicketWeb.com or call (866) 468-3399. More information – well, “more” only if you consider this to resemble information – is available at PaleyCenter.org or (310) 786-1010.
This has been a Public Service Message from the Mayor of Television, who will take a generous tax deduction for his time spent crafting and posting this entry.
Even with a writer's strike, Television is still capable of a gimmick or two. Witness Monday night's special crossover episodes of "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," "The Colbert Report" and "Late Night with Conan O'Brien," all working without their usual writing staffs.
It began last week when O'Brien refuted Colbert's claim that he was responsible for the success of Mike Huckabee's Presidential campaign, insisting that it was he, O'Brien, who gave Huckabee his momentum. Colbert went on Stewart's show to grouse about O'Brien's grandiose assertion. O'Brien then entered, and was ready to throw down, until Stewart said he had to finish his show.
On his show, Colbert continued the theme, showing a montage of pundits declaring, "A vote for Huckabee is a vote for (John) McCain." Since Huckabee has offered Colbert the Vice Presidency if he's elected, Colbert reasoned, a vote for Huckabee is a vote for Colbert, and therefore, due to the transformative powers of Huckabee, Colbert in fact is John McCain. Stewart entered and scolded Colbert for beating this dead horse, followed by O'Brien, and again the three were ready to rumble until Colbert remembered he had to finish his show.
So: Onto O'Brien's show, where O'Brien referred to Colbert as "the temporary host of 'The Colbert Report.'" On cue, Colbert and Stewart, looking as badass as two middle-aged white men in suits can look, entered, snapping their fingers, all "West Side Story" like.
What ensued was much violence (only some of which was blowtorch-induced) that proved that late-night comics don't make for very good stunt men. It ended with Huckabee making a plea for sanity: "Let's forget these three idiots."
Basically, what it made you think was, "Just think how funny putting the three of these guys together would be if their writers were on the job." The winner, of course, was Huckabee, the candidate with a sense of humor who's getting people he probably doesn't approve of (and wouldn't likely vote for him) to make him look like an attractive candidate.
Meanwhile, over on "Late Show with David Letterman," which actually has its writers, Dave was giving Hillary Clinton an oil massage.
The New York Times reports that although writers may be content with their new deal once it’s finally negotiated, a lot fewer of them will likely be enjoying its fruits:
“(E)ven as the sides were moving toward conciliation, many of those best-versed in the writers’ business were fretting that a more complicated, and perhaps less lucrative, future lies ahead. In interviews last week, lawyers and others — some of whom were granted anonymity to avoid derailing talks — cautioned that a post-strike world appeared likely to bring more imports from foreign television, diminished spending on expensive pilot episodes and even more reality programming.”
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal notes that anticipating an impending conclusion of the strike, producers are scrambling to get TV production up and running again:
“Even as the strike dragged on, TV studio and network executives had been making plans to spring back into action. Now they face tough decisions on each series: Whether to race back on the air with as many new episodes as possible before the traditional TV season ends in May; extend the shows into summer; delay them until fall; or cancel them altogether.
“In some instances, TV studios, fearing shortages of space and talent, are already booking directors and reserving studio and office space to shoot new episodes as quickly as possible, according to people familiar with the matter.
“Meanwhile, TV executives are facing a truncated development cycle for next season's new shows that could turn into a mad dash to lock down stars and shoot even a handful of pilots for next season at the same time as completing existing series.”
Feeling a little bored and punchy from the writers strike, New York magazine invited some idled writers (except for “The Simpsons” – they’re still working, aren’t they?) to correct the plottus interuptus suffered by so many shows. We thoughtfully share some highlights:
“The Office,” as imagined by “Simpsons” writers:
“During Michael’s rap song introducing the new phone system, Phyllis’s cold worsens. She vomits black blood and dies. A terrifying battalion of CDC troops in hazmat suits quarantines the office to prevent the spread of Bhutan swine flu variant-661, or “the Boot.” Meanwhile, Jim and Pam inadvertently wear matching sweaters. They ponder—are they becoming ‘that couple’?”
“The Office” returns the favor, wrapping up “Friday Night Lights”’ season:
“It’s the sixth-to-last game of the season and the stakes could not be higher. Unfortunately, three of the best players have gone missing. With four seconds left before the game, they show up, and the Panthers win by a small margin.”
“Grey’s Anatomy” drama from a “Dexter” writer:
“Meredith decides she wants Derek back, but she’s too late—Derek has asked Rose to marry him, even though they’ve never actually had a real date. Meanwhile, Tucker, Miranda’s husband, tries to serve her with divorce papers, but she’s too busy to receive them.”
And “Daily Show” writers on a number of shows:
“Heroes:” “The power to keep track of all the new heroes becomes way rarer than invisibility or time travel. Seeking to scrimp on budgets, NBC rolls out an entirely special-effects-free spinoff called ‘Bystanders.’”
“Pushing Daisies:” “Attempting to revive his strike-threatened show, Ned decides to “touch himself.” Unfortunately, he enjoys it so much he touches himself again, killing the series for good.”
“Rachel Ray: “Rachael wraps a pretzel in a piece of bologna and calls it a “healthy 30-second snack.” TV executives reward her with another multimillion-dollar contract.”
Jesus, Fox, quit terrifying me like that. I opened a plain white envelope this morning and inside was - gasp! - a copy of "Chicken Soup for the 'American Idol' Soul." Anthrax wouldn't've upset me as much.
Men in Hazmat suits have removed the object and sterilized my edifice. But not before I paged through it and found these uplifting bon mots, which I think is pretty tidily representative of the entire book:
* "Through my own career, I have also experienced many ups and downs, but I've never let go of my biggest dream, which is to help bring out the best in others." - Paula Abdul
* "For it was on that night, when the people wouldn't stop clapping and they thought they were clapping for me, I knew the truth - and I will always know the truth - that without God ... I'm tone deaf." - Melinda Doolittle (ellipses hers)
* "Needless to say, my life has changed since 'Idol.' But I'm the same guy, the same Ruben - the same son, the same friend, the same brother." - Ruben Studdard
* "So, if you're going to dream, dream in Technicolor. Don't dream in black and white." - "Idol" EP Nigel Lythgoe
* "No question about it: I had fallen hard. I was in love - in love with music." - Kimberly Caldwell.
* "I don't think; I feel." - Ace Young
* "But it was Mommy who taught me the most important lesson. It was she who taught me to believe even when it seemed there was nothing to believe in. She is my superstar." Tamyra Gray
* "You don't have to make a music video to make a difference in someone's life. You can be a bagger at a grocery store or a teller at a bank." - Clay Aiken
* "My lady and I never liked the Denny's in L.A. We'd drive all the way out to the one in Canyon Country because the atmosphere is much better." - Sherman Pore (who apparently is unaware that there are other restaurants in Los Angeles besides Denny's)
* "Tylee lived a few more weeks." - Nikki McKibbin
Oh, sorry: Spoiler alert in the headline there.
The media has obsessively charted the meltdowns of Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse, but no one has talked much about the similarly spectacular and equally entertaining neural collapse that has occurred on “Prison Break” this season. While season one was taut and exciting even when wildly improbable and season two wandered around somewhat aimlessly, this season has been impressively stupefying and yet entertaining in that trainwreck kind of way.
Michael (Wentworth Miller), Bellick (Wade Williams), Mahone (William Fichtner) and T-Bag (Robert Knepper) have spent the season in a demented, through-the-glass Panamanian prison while Lincoln (Dominic Purcell) has been dealing with a psychotic CIA agent who goes by the moniker Susan B. Anthony (Jodi Lyn O’Keefe) and who wants Michael to break this guy Whistler (Chris Vance) out of the place. In stark contrast to season one, where the creative team had a pretty good idea of their prison’s setup, here, it’s anything goes. The architecture is amorphously ambiguous (those secret yet extraordinarily well-structured tunnels extend wherever it’s convenient or inconvenient for the plot), the guards are either menacing or non-existent, Michael has a cell phone that never needs to be recharged (perhaps he got it from Jack Bauer?), the chaos and danger isn’t really all that chaotic or dangerous and anything can happen at any given time if the idea pops up in a writer’s noggin.
Former bad-ass Bellick has been reduced to a whimpering, quivering mound of Jell-O. After a huge buildup in Sara (Sarah Wayne Callies) and Michael’s romance, her head wound up in a box, pretty much an afterthought. T-Bag’s accent has, if anything, gotten more loopy.
And so the first of season three’s final three episodes is uncorked tonight. As Michael’s ragtag band of escapees bicker and form alliances like they’re competing in “Survivor: Sona” (all, it seems, hot to betray Michael), the tunnel is compromised by torrential rain; the hole they’re supposed to climb out of (which seems to be in the middle of the prison grounds itself, which seems something of a tactical error, but anyway) will be revealed. They have days of further digging, they say, but then Michael decides to push up the escape to this very evening to avoid having the hole exposed. And then it quits raining but still they proceed.
Panama is a fun place; “Prison Break’s” geopolitics are as cynical as those in The Onion’s World Atlas. Lincoln can hijack a bus and not worry about the authorities pursuing him afterwards and random public shootouts start and stop and start again on a whim. Trucks come with secret compartments for hiding things at police checkpoints standard. Sucre (Amaury Nolasco) can get a job at the prison without a background check. Oops, wait – with a delayed background check; apparently, Sucre used his real name and whattaya know, someone did a little due diligence and discovered he’s wanted in the States. And still, he hilariously almost gets away with it, and then, at the last second, the schizophrenic roller coaster plotline decides, no, we want him to suffer a little longer.
And a lot is made about “the coordinates,” something technical and exotic sounding, that Whistler has and is supposed to deliver to Susan B. Anthony (O’Keefe is unintentionally hilarious in the role, but really, not even Meryl Streep could make it remotely credible). When the fate of “the coordinates” is exposed in a scene that boasts virtually no motivation, you’ll be wishing you had some of the peyote buttons the writers are gobbling like Pez.
And after kind of dismissively offing Sara, that’s brought back as the motivating force that’ll drive Season Four.
None of it makes a whit of sense if you’re bothering to think just a smidgen. But still, it’s pretty exciting, like two ranting, raving crazy homeless guys engaging a car chase.
- “Prison Break:” 8 tonight, Fox Channel 11.
As formulaic as “House” can be – patient is in bad shape, patient is in worse shape, OMG patient’s in terrible shape and whew!, patient’s OK – they played with the predictability factor pretty well tonight.
There was a smidgen of the increasingly to-be-expected self-satisfied in-joke (House (Hugh Laurie) wants cable-TV at the hospital and is told he’ll have to make do with broadcast TV, to which he replies, Well, I’m good for Tuesdays, the night “House” is usually on). But the writers cooked up a new complication for the usual complications – the patient was stranded at a remote Antarctica outpost and could only communicate with the doctors via webcam. And, House kind of liked her.
Mira Sorvino was our patient du jour, Kate, a shrink suffering from the usual cocktail of bizarre symptoms. Unwilling to waste the outpost’s limited supply of medications, Kate and House traded wisecracking insults – or, as Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard) put it, “House’s version of courtship.” House may have been into her, but she’s into Wilson, and an engineer at the base – initially, a seeming MacGuffin in the storyline – was into her, willing to drink her urine, drill a hole in her skull and refracture her toe (now that’s love), all to help save her life.
So, a nice post-Bowl episode, better than that creep-a-thon episode of “Criminal Minds” last year. But one wonders if it’ll get those huge ratings generally expected of shows that air after the Super Bowl: The game itself (for your edification, here once again is that spectacular Manning-to-Tyree play that saved the game) went way long and the post-game show, for all its lack of insight, went even longer, so “House” didn’t air until after 10:30 p.m. East Coast Time.
And a little oddity during the episode: A “House” promo focusing on House downing Vicodin like they’re M&M’s, backed by Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab.” Given that Winehouse is giving Britney Spears a run for her money in the spectacular meltdown sweepstakes, it’s maybe not the best idea to play that tune for laughs right now.
For some reason, people make a big deal out of the commercials they air during the Super Bowl. This tradition goes back to the 1980s, when the commercials weren’t anything special, but they were invariably more interesting than the games themselves. Then, a couple of games threatened to be mildly exciting, and ad-makers couldn’t be content to phone it in.
Now, the obsession with the commercials has gotten so unhealthy – they’re commercials, for [insert your favorite deity’s name here]’s sake – that there are news stories about what they might be like the week before the Super Bowl and news stories deconstructing them after the Super Bowl (for all the talk of the price of a spot, advertisers get lots of free publicity for their commercial). Then there are stories about the aftermath of the commercials – the toll they exacted in body counts and numbers wounded, in limbs lost and lives shattered.
So: Sounds like a deal I should get in on. Here’re the messages the commercials imparted. Warning: I may or may not actually be watching the game.
3:32: Hip-hop DJs endorse cherry-flavored spackle.
3:43: I don’t think it was a good idea for Campbell’s Soup to rename itself Cannibal’s.
3:57: It appears that attractive women are drawn to men who drink beer. I’ll have to try me some of that stuff.
4:03: A woman’s heart bursts from her chest and quits her job for her. Apparently a pro-unemployment spot.
4:21: They’re imploring people to wear football helmets. No, wait – that’s the game.
4:44: Three-and-outs seem to be all the rage.
4:55: Not true, it turns out, that stuff about women and beer.
5:06: If you buy a Rickenbacker guitar, thousands of people will shriek ecstatically at you. If you don’t like people shrieking at you, pass on the guitar.
5:23: Antacids can make your tummy better; also, they can create little bistros.
5:25: Lilac-scented phlegm is good for the whole family.
5:32: Water has all sorts of magical abilities. Water! Who knew?
5:35: Don’t offer Carmen Electra gum.
5:36: Cars are good for many things, but they can’t seem to kill Richard Simmons for some reason.
5:40: Cute, computer-generated images are hellbent on eating out humanity’s brains and conquering the planet.
5:47: If you log onto NFL.com, you can see highlights from the game, except that there haven’t been any.
5:52: Babies urping on computer keyboards are adorable.
5:56: Purchasing merchandise makes one more attractive to the opposite sex. I’ll have to get me some merchandise.
5:58: The National Banana Council wants you to know that you can do worse than eating bananas in humid environments.
6:06: Cartoon characters love helium balloons shaped like cola bottles, even though – or perhaps because – there’s no actual cola in the balloon.
6:12: Bill Frist and James Carvelle share a love that dare not reveal its name.
6:14: Adam Sandler has a distressingly low opinion of his audience.
6:22: Not true, it turns out, that stuff about purchasing merchandise and the opposite sex.
6:23: Gatorade is akin to dog slobber.
6:26: Hey, I actually laughed at a commercial. Thank you, Will Ferrell.
6:44: Victoria’s Secret wants you to have sex after the game.
6:45: If that Victoria’s Secret spot got you in the mood for some lovin’, the next commercial takes you out of it immediately: A guy uses his nipples like the bolts of a car battery. That should be enough to put you off energy drinks for the rest of your life.
6:56: Eli Manning will be as ubiquitous in commercials next season as his brother was this season.
7:01: Mike Gravel is looking very Presidential.
Variety teases our strike-weary hearts today by reporting that talks between the Writers Guild of America and a couple of members of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers have gone well over the weekend and maybe the strike will finally end soon: “(C)reative solutions to the biggest differences between the AMPTP and the WGA have gotten the tentative and cautious approval of both sides."
High hopes were also on display at the Producers Guild Awards, where “The Sopranos” and “30 Rock” were named best drama and comedy series, respectively, as they pretty much have been by all the awards groups. “The Colbert Report,” Discovery Channel’s “Planet Earth” and HBO’s “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” also picked up prizes, as did the films “No Country for Old Men,” “Ratatouille” and “Sicko.” If “No Country for Old Men” doesn’t win the Best Picture Oscar, demand a recount.
E! is reporting that an “Arrested Development” movie may be in the works.
The former Fox comedy, which won an Outstanding Comedy Series Emmy but never got much traction in the ratings, featured one of TV’s funniest casts – Jason Bateman, Jeffrey Tambor, Will Arnett, Michael Cera, Jessica Walter, David Cross, Tony Hale; I could go on – focused on a monumentally spoiled and dysfunctional family whose lone sane sibling (Bateman) tries to save the family business and reunite the family in general. The series was created by Mitch Hurwitz, a genial and funny guy; after it was cancelled by Fox, Showtime expressed interest in producing additional episodes, but Hurwitz was reportedly too bummed out by how Fox handled the show to rededicate his efforts to another network.
"I can confirm that a round of sniffing has started," Bateman told E! "Any talk is targeting a poststrike situation, of course. I think, as always, that it's a question of whether the people with the money are willing to give our leader, Mitch Hurwitz, what he deserves for his participation. And I can speak for the cast when I say our fingers are crossed."
It’s an interesting and heartening idea. But I don’t remember the show’s plotting featuring the sort of tight coherence that movies generally require. Its randomness and silliness and unpredictability was what made it a good TV show, but might make it an iffy proposition as a film. What made “AD” so much fun was the surreal and inspired character interaction and hilarious dialogue. Movies tend to need something of a plot to keep you sitting there for a couple of hours, but I imagine Hurwitz can hunker down and come up with something.
Movies based on feverishly beloved cult TV shows, alas, don’t tend to result in boffo box office (see “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,” “Serenity”). So don’t expect any big-budget extravaganza.
But what to call it? “Arrested Development: Fire Walk With Me?” “Arrested Development 2: The Quickening?” “Arrested Development: Here’s a Movie We Found on CraigsList?”
It fell to me to review the new “Hannah Montana” 3D concert movie opening today. My luck knows no end.
There are tons of shots in the film of Miley Cyrus bopping up and down a catwalk extending from the stage with hoards of her worshipping fans extending their arms frenziedly, as if striving to touch the hem of her garment, so to speak. The sheer desperation of their efforts to grasp her reminded me of this.
Because journalists are good at nothing if not navel-gazing, there has been a whole lot of hand-wringing over this final season of “The Wire’s” less-than-flattering depiction of the news media – in particular, print journalism; even more particularly, the Baltimore Sun, where series creator David Simon toiled before his editors’ blasé attitudes sent him bolting for the greener pastures of the TV industry.
(Hey, if I had worked at a newspaper that had disillusioned me so thoroughly that I had no alternative than to accept those exponentially higher paychecks from the TV industry, with all those extra zeroes at the end, I don’t think I’d be as bitter as Simon.)
When it comes to trenchant analysis of the entire social strata, “The Wire” makes Tom Wolfe look like a correspondent for the Weekly Reader. Each season, Simon has made a trenchant point that’s utterly depressing but just as utterly unassailable. Season 1: The war on drugs is unwinnable. Season 2: The working-class is screwed. Season 3: Politics on any level bastardizes everything. Season 4: Our educational system is broken.
And now, season 5: The media, buffeted by economic woes and corporate greed, is no longer doing its central, crucial job, which is to inform the public of issues important to them, of harms being done to them, of whatever matters in an increasingly complex social system, but on the other hand, they do keep you up to date on what’s going on with Britney Spears pretty well.
So some critics, who lauded “The Wire” for its verisimilitude when eviscerating other levels of society, tiptoed away from this season’s criticism of their own industry, perhaps fearing their editors would interpret approval as criticism of their own bosses. As if they hadn’t personally sat in on meetings where they had been told, “We’ll have to do more with less.”
Obviously, Simon’s life as a journalist sticks in his craw to this day. He recently wrote an essay stomping all over ostensibly idealistic journalists:
“Isn't the news itself still valuable to anyone? In any format, through any medium -- isn't an understanding of the events of the day still a salable commodity? Or were we kidding ourselves? Was a newspaper a viable entity only so long as it had classifieds, comics and the latest sports scores? …
“Newsprint itself is an anachronism. But was there a moment before the deluge of the Internet when news organizations might have better protected themselves and their product? When … their Web sites would, in fact, charge for providing a rare and worthy service? …
“I did not encounter a sustained period in which anyone endeavored to spend what it would actually cost to make the Baltimore Sun the most essential and deep-thinking and well-written account of life in central Maryland. The people you needed to gather for that kind of storytelling were ushered out the door, buyout after buyout. …
“Soon enough, when technology arrived to test the loyalty of longtime readers and the interest of new ones, the newspaper would be offering to cover not more of the world and its issues, but less of both -- and to do so with younger, cheaper employees, many of them newspaper-chain transplants with no organic sense of the city's history. …
“In place of comprehensive, complex and idiosyncratic coverage, readers of even the most serious newspapers were offered celebrity and scandal, humor and light provocation -- the very currency of the Internet itself. …
“And now, no profits. No advertising. No new readers. Now, the great gray ladies are reduced to throwing what's left of their best stuff out there on the Web, unable to charge enough for online advertising, or anything at all for the journalism itself.”
What hacks Simon off is that all of us suffer when the media is compromised. For example, just think what might have happened if just one or two newspapers in Washington or New York had seriously investigated White House claims that we had to attack Iraq in order to save the world (Knight Ridder reporters did, but since that chain doesn’t have a paper in a giant media center, they were desultorily ignored). If people aren’t well-informed by a fervent watchdog, all those other things the show has discussed – lousy war on drugs, pulverized middle class, corrupt politicians, crummy schools – are allowed to continue unabated. Oh, wait, they have continued unabated. Well, guess that proves Simon’s point, huh?
Nonetheless, Simon gives props to his former employer, the Sun, for allowing his show to shoot in their offices even though they absolutely knew he’d slag them (the season’s most empathetic character is Gus, a Sun city editor (played by Clark Johnson, who’s directed several episodes of the series) who’s intrepid and intelligent but is wryly wrathful toward the direction his paper is taking):
"‘What The Sun did was gracious and brave and typical of the who-gives-a-damn indifference of a good newspaper,’ Simon says. … “(T)here are journalists who are doing very good work at the Baltimore Sun and trying extremely hard to put out a good newspaper every day. And that they should feel no personal connection to the fiction [“The Wire” offers, such as featuring a Jayson Blair-style reporter who makes stuff up as he goes along] as they attempt to do that job. They certainly shouldn't feel any shame.’"
Anyway, that’s a long preface to a short but spoiler-ridden look at Sunday’s episode.
So far this season, McNulty (Dominic West) has, perhaps due to his relapse into alcoholism or perhaps due to his dedication to his job (those two entities being so hard to distinguish these days), opted to create a serial killer that will force the Mayor’s office to funnel more money into the police force, and even wise old Lester (Clarke Peters) has decreed it an OK idea. McNulty, fearing the serial killer thing was losing steam in the local media, declared, “We have to kill again.”
This week, the homeless serial-killer story explodes, and we come to the storyline that’s hacking off journalists the most: Templeton (Thomas McCarthy), who got snubbed at a job interview last week by the Washington Post, blows a reaction story from homeless people (“Where am I going to find homeless people?” he asks cluelessly, as if he’s never seen one wandering the streets; “Not at home,” Gus replies drolly) and then takes matters into his own hands: He fakes a story about a homeless man (hey, who can fact-check it?).
And then, he really crosses the line: He fakes a phone call from the serial killer and of course his editors make a huge deal of the story. (Gus, of course, doesn’t trust the guy.)
Templeton’s fiction makes him a star, and McNulty, bemused, decides to run with it. They’re both making stuff up out of whole cloth, and they both need each other at this point, even if Templeton doesn’t realize what he’s gotten himself into. But the story has the desired effect: Police overtime is reinstated, and Lester gets his desired wiretap in his search for Stanfield – yes, five episodes into the season, the title character finally appears.
Beadie (current Oscar nominee Amy Ryan), McNulty’s exquisitely suffering girlfriend, sick of his alcoholism and philandering, finally considers kicking him to the curb.
Oh, and there’s a big shootout.
While McNulty’s dubious actions were brought on by his being distraught over the dysfunction of the system, Templeton’s are extreme, self-serving and stupid. They’ll quite likely end his career (or, as in the case of Jayson Blair, land him a deal for a book that no one'll want to read). This feels like a bit of a plotting misstep, albeit not a fatal one, since it dovetails so neatly into McNulty’s falsehoods.
And even though “The Wire” is the best thing going on TV, still people refuse to watch. Maybe David Simon is wrong. Maybe people just don’t want to know what the heck is going on. Maybe newspapers should just focus on sports scores and the daily Sudoku.
- “The Wire:” 9 p.m. Sunday (and a whole bunch of other times), HBO.
ABC kicked everyone’s hindquarters last night with the return of “Lost.” 13 million tuned into the recap show, followed by 16 million anxious to see who else might get off the island (Hurley was revealed as one of “the Oceanic six,” leaving the identities of three more (after Jack and Kate) still a mystery). Not bad, given that the show was drawing only about 12 or 13 million viewers at the end of last season, and it did spectacularly well in viewers 18-49.
11.6 million stuck around for “Eli Stone” – or rather, 12.5 million watched at 10 p.m., with a couple million bailing by 10:30.
By contrast, 7.8 million watched the two-hour “Celebrity Apprentice” installment, but only 6.9 million tuned in while “Lost” was on. More people watched reruns of “CSI” and “Without a Trace” than “Celebrity Apprentice,” though Donald Trump’s hair had more younger viewers watching it.
“Access Hollywood” irritant Billy Bush, of whom I’m aware mainly through his shamelessly queasy ogling of starlets on the red carpets of awards shows I’ve been professionally mandated to sit through (and, of course, the trenchant analysis of 2007’s cinematic treasures he delivered in that stillbirth of a Golden Globes broadcast), is shocked, shocked I tell you, to discover that infotainment TeeVee shows are brazen and lurid. Not his, mind you, but his competition.
In his blog (he can write! who knew?), Bush called “Entertainment Tonight” and “The Insider’s” six-figure acquisition of footage purportedly showing the late Heath Ledger snorting cocaine “Gross. Totally gross.” To further display his outrage, he unleashed some invective in preternaturally perky “ET” host Mary Hart’s direction:
"I am shocked that Mary Hart would read this crap. I know her and she is a very nice lady, but its clear to me she's "checked out" of that place, basically taking whatever they put in her hand and reading it with the same excitable veneer you'd expect to hear at a 50's sock hop. Mary gets paid a lot of money. She must have the clout to say 'no.' Their Executive producer used to run “Hard Copy.” She doesn't hit the brakes for anything. But Mary, you are the June Cleaver of entertainment news; this cannot be OK."
And of course, “Access Hollywood” hasn’t been dancing over Britney Spears’ future corpse, and it gave Lindsay Lohan a pass when she was bopping around car-jacking and thoughtfully holding someone else’s cocaine for them. The day Ledger died, “Access Hollywood” cancelled other stories they were working on so they could present an orgy of speculative Ledger coverage.
But it’s interesting: Ledger, who had heretofore offended no one and seemed a genuinely serious and clearly talented artist, so the infotainment folks back off (maybe because the video isn’t really that interesting?), whereas the in-it-for-the-money-fame-and-glamour folks receive serious blowback for their missteps. Seems fair to me.
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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