In about the last two minutes of this 60 Minutes episode that aired last night, Andy Rooney does his favorite thing, which is to tell you for two minutes that you are doing everything wrong.
Thanksgiving, he explains, is about family and togetherness and the things that we're grateful for. Therefore, you must not use canned pumpkin. Or canned cranberry sauce. Because, he says, "we should" fix Thanksgiving dinner exactly the way the Pilgrims did.
This makes absolutely no sense, and the story of the year I made Thanksgiving dinner, after the jump.
Love him or hate him, one thing Adam Lambert never was on American Idol was off-pitch. His singing style may not have been everyone's thing, but he tended to be technically on target. Not so last night at the American Music Awards, which is why it's a fortunate thing for Lambert that all the talk today is about the kissing and simulated you-know-what that took place on stage. If there weren't that to talk about, what you'd be reading about is that this was a pretty inauspicious beginning, musically speaking, for a guy who's been so highly praised.
Let's suppose you are an actor. You can do comedy; you can do drama. You have been talked up for an Oscar, though not nominated for one. In the next year, you intend to play Allen Ginsberg, as well as show up in a comedy with Tina Fey and Steve Carell. Oh, and you are talented and funny, and you are, um, hot.
In short, let's suppose you are James Franco, and the world is your oyster.
What can you do that nobody will understand at all, and therefore everyone will talk about? What can you do that qualifies as legitimately weird? You can't just act weird on a late-night talk show anymore; Joaquin Phoenix pretty much killed that bit. You can't just say strange things in interviews.
We've seen it all, right? Every goofball maneuver that a famous actor might take on, every publicity stunt, every experiment that leads to "He's doing WHAT?"
Lost is coming back, and then it will be time to say goodbye. (ABC)
by Linda Holmes
ABC announced yesterday that Lost will begin its final season on February 2, and will air weekly at 9:00 on Tuesdays. Many expect that V will eventually get the 10 p.m. slot on that same night, and ABC will try to create a sci-fi mystery night of sorts.
Of course, this presumably requires the Dancing With The Stars results show to bump back to 8:00, which forces that to air against The Godzilla Of Spring Television, American Idol. In fact, during the not-uncommon weeks when Idol runs for two hours, Lost will be up against it, too. Given, however, that this is the last season in any event, ratings are presumably not a huge worry, since few fans of Lost are likely to suddenly stop watching it, even if if means they have to record it for later.
For now, though, the clock is officially ticking on one of the most intriguing and inventive shows television has created in quite some time, and while it's been inconsistent and no ending will stand the slightest chance of pleasing everyone, it's exciting, but a little sad.
I can't tell you whether she'll be taking any of her experts with her, or whether Ellen DeGeneres will benefit the way some people expect, or whether those who have made money from Oprah -- or The Oprah, or whatever we are calling her now -- will ever find a replacement for all that good-feeling, soul-nourishing dough.
Here's what I can tell you: the next two years are going to be so insufferable that they will make you forget all about the multiple, tearful, overwrought, tooth-gnashing farewells to Brett Favre.
What this will be like, and early and ominous video of Oprah's announcement, after the jump.
Project Runway's sixth season has been one big snooze. (Lifetime)
by Linda Holmes
Fans of reality-competition shows tend to disagree a lot about which seasons are good and which are bad. This season of Project Runway is an exception: I don't know a single person who's enjoyed it, or who is particularly interested in tonight's finale.
Remember, this has been a show that was likable even for many people who hate other reality shows. It was so popular and so beloved on Bravo that there was a protracted court battle over its move to Lifetime. And at the moment, my sense is that nobody cares.
We talked a while ago about some of this, particularly the fact that judges Nina Garcia and Michael Kors were gone for much of the season. And that's certainly been part of the problem. Apart from the always hard-to-define matter of "chemistry," Kors and Garcia were also replaced by guest judges who weren't as good-humored, as balanced, or as authoritative as they were.
But nothing else has really worked, either. The show changed production companies, from Magical Elves (they also make Top Chef) to Bunim-Murray (they also make The Real World, not to mention even lower-rent fare like Keeping Up With The Kardashians and Love Cruise. While this hasn't meant the show is suddenly about drinking binges, there does seem to be more of designers whining about each other in a sort of detached, generic way and less of designers bonding, talking, or becoming friends (in ways other than hating the same person).
In short, the contestants have seemed like ... brats, far more than usual.
When Andy Barker, P.I. premiered two and a half years ago, I leapt on every one of its six episodes and walked away disappointed each time. With two of its stars coming off of greatly beloved (by me) shows -- Andy Richter from the delightfully crackpot Andy Richter Controls The Universe and Tony Hale from the impossibly great Arrested Development -- it was probably inevitable that the short-lived reluctant-but-unexpectedly-skilled-detective series would seem like a letdown by comparison.
But that was my problem, not Andy Barker's, and the passage of time recalibrated my expectations so that when I sat down with the full-series DVD (out today), I was shocked at just how funny it really was. No, it's not Controls The Universe, but -- unlike Controls The Universe creator Victor Fresco's recent repackaging of the same concept, the almost-as-sharp Better Off Ted on ABC -- it wasn't trying to be.
Despite Richter's involvement in both (behind the scenes as well as on camera) and their shared cheerful surrealism, the sensibilities and velocities were entirely different. Not just different, in fact, but opposite: the wound-up Controls The Universe took the everyday routines of office-drone life and squeezed them until they warped, whereas the ambling Andy Barker strip-mined the seedy underbelly of society to find the hilariously mundane that lies beneath.
You don't have to take my word for it that Andy Barker is a neat little gem that merits a fresh look, though.
Clay Aiken fans show their love. (Scott Gries / Getty Images)
by Linda Holmes
Once again, I have visited the NPR Music decade-end coverage, where NPR Music Editor (and my personal Music Stylist) Stephen Thompson and I took an hour and a half out of our lives recently to dissect the significance and insignificance that is American Idol.
In the resulting conversation, we touched on old favorites like Constantine Maroulis, Justin Guarini, Kristy Lee Cook, Jason Castro, and even some people who actually won. An excerpt from the part where we touched on fandom:
LINDA: I think every discussion about being the future of music, of course, has to start with the fact that the kind of people who REALLY become the future of music would never go on American Idol in the first place. They have very specific aspirations involving popularity, not involving changing the game. Carrie Underwood didn't go on American Idol to reinvent country. She went on American Idol to exploit what was already working. The kinds of people who push boundaries are not really interested in doing "Conga" on Gloria Estefan Night.
STEPHEN: Aaaaaaaaaand now "Conga" is going through my head. Thanks loads, Holmes. But I think you're exactly right. So what do you think American Idol says about fandom? To me, it seems to have really brought out a rivalry among pop fans that's fascinating to witness. It's not like, "Which New Kid On The Block is your favorite?" It involves David Archuleta fans collapsing in tears when David Cook wins.
LINDA: To me, that started with the Clay Aiken people. I don't know what it was, but that was the season when it became insane. I have told you before about hearing stories of people who claimed later that they were burning his CDs and handing them out on the subway, which is kind of ... unbalanced. After that, it seemed like fans were competing to be the most weird, the most inappropriate, the most overinvested. It's very competitive, and the Internet has been a huge contributor to that. People sign on to tell stories of their own reactions -- "You were crying? Well I was crying and shaking." These discussions happen every single week. Not among the bulk of the viewers, but among a small subset of people who are so devoted to that show that, while it's on, fandom related to that show is their job.
STEPHEN: Yeah. I mean, whatever floats your boat and all, but the intensity of it is incredible. I grew up around comic-book and science-fiction fandom, and it's fascinating to see that same sort of geeky hyper-competitiveness -- "No, I am the No. 1 Doctor Who fan! You call that a scarf?!" -- writ unbelievably large, and broadcast worldwide.
Read, and possibly take great offense at, the whole thing here.
When I read last night that ABC was ditching plans for the performance-competition show Let's Dance, in which celebrities would compete with each other performing famous dance routines, I was a little surprised.
This always seemed like a profoundly crackpot idea to me, simply because there aren't enough famous dance routines for that to be much of a hook. And if the people involved are bad dancers, then they're not going to be able to do the actual famous dance routine, meaning it would be sort of "inspired by" the famous dance routine — and now you've come untethered from even the flimsy concept you started with. Still: Even profoundly crackpot ideas, once they get as far as being actually scheduled for a slot on the TV season, don't suddenly get yanked back in a fit of good sense. What could have gone wrong?
Then I saw the reason, which is reportedly that they couldn't find the celebrities to cast the show. The problem was -- and I am not kidding -- "luring talent."
What it all means, and the future of Celebrity Clogging, after the jump ...
On the morning of November 11, 1989, a crowd watched border guards demolish part of the Berlin Wall. Two days earlier, Peter Jennings was on and off the air in less than three-and-a-half minutes. (AFP / Getty Images)
by Marc Hirsh
Yesterday marked the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall (as a concept, anyway). To honor the occasion, YouTube featured a number of videos about the event on its homepage, one of which was the original ABC News report.
It's fascinating to watch this clip two decades later. Not just because the geopolitical situation has dramatically changed (quite possibly due, in large part, to this very event) or because Peter Jennings isn't alive to watch his younger self deliver news of one of the defining moments of the last century. It has everything to do with the way that this event was reported.
Take a look at the number near the bottom right of the video. Three minutes and nineteen seconds, and then ABC News was out. It's all but certain that the newsroom was in overdrive by this time, but you don't see it. Jennings simply reported what ABC knew, called on a journalist close to the action to provide details and promised updates as they became available. And then, most shockingly from the modern-day standpoint, he shut up.
On last night's finale, among other things, Roger (John Slattery), Don (Jon Hamm) and Bert (Robert Morse) were three guys with a problem. (AMC)
by Linda Holmes
Good shows can mix funny and sad. But great shows can turn on a dime between devastation and whimsy. And that was the heart and soul of last night's Mad Men magnificent season finale, called "Shut The Door. Have A Seat."
Needless to say, if you didn't watch it and don't want to know what happened, this post is not for you. "Spoilers" follow, after the jump.
This week, the veil of silence was finally lifted, now that the cast members of The Real World DC have wrapped up their three-months-plus stay in the nation's capital and gone home. (The DC season will premiere on MTV December 30.)
This marks The Real World's 23rd (yes: 23rd) season of showing what happens when seven strangers (except that it's now eight strangers) are picked to live in a house, stop being polite and start ... bickering about who didn't do the dishes.
As someone who's been a fan of The Real World since the days of Puck and Pedro, with the show right here in DC, I decided to go on a mission to figure out how it is that simply filming people living together makes for compelling television. How can you stay on the air for 23 seasons without even making anyone eat worms for money?
To find some answers, I interviewed the show's executive producer, Jim Johnston. He gave me some great insight, but I wanted more of course, so I paid a little visit to the actual house and talked to the cast members themselves. All these discussions revealed five dynamics that make the show tick.
1. Guys versus girls. Until a few seasons ago, there were only seven cast members, but now there's an even gender split, of which Executive Producer Jim Johnston says, "You will inevitably have a conflict of guys versus girls. It will happen every time." Has it happened in this house? You bet. It appears that at least one plot line from this season will be the always awkward moment when one of the guys brings home another woman after he's been involved with a housemate. As cast member Callie, 21, explains it, "Anytime anyone brings someone home, it's everyone's business."
Getting bored, living close, and more, after the jump.
There are very few commercials I consider worthy of watching on purpose, but Discovery has updated its multiple-award-winning "The World Is Just Awesome" spot, which is a perfect Friday lift.
According to Discovery, the kid on the ship is Zac Sunderland, the youngest person to circumnavigate the world; the kids singing are from a Michigan elementary school, and yes, that is the Hadron Collider. (And Mythbusters Jamie preparing to set Adam on fire.)
Advertising can be so unpleasant, disruptive, and often tin-eared as to what it is that people actually like about things that spots like this deserve some credit, I think, for capturing this well what it is that people actually like about the brand. It's still incredibly manipulative in its way, but there's something about the bluntness of "The World Is Just Awesome" that's kind of irresistible.
We all have our weaknesses. One of mine is TV courtroom shows.
Not the really loud, gross, out of control ones where it's people screaming at each other and paternity testing and everybody's accusing each other of horrible debauchery.
I'm talking about the ones that generally feature calmer, more mundane issues. The cases about borrowed cell phones and agreements with auto-repair places and people who are stupid enough to loan money to their Internet boyfriends after two weeks and people who skip out and leave their roommates holding the bag. The ones where the judges run a really, really tight ship. Specifically, The People's Court and Judge Judy.
(I will wait here while my respectability hits the floor with a resounding crash.)
[CRASH.]
I realized recently that the addictive component of these shows is that, in general, a bad person who is lying will lose. (Which is not always the case on, for instance, Survivor.) Eventually, the jerk, or the scammer, or the breacher of the contract, will be told something along the lines of, "Madam, you're an idiot." It's not polite, but it is very, very satisfying for daytime television, in a completely guilty-pleasure kind of way. (Most pleasures I do not consider "guilty." This, I consider at least moderately guilty, in keeping with its legal theme.)
Anyway, it turns out that on November 13, no less a figure than Judge Wapner -- JUDGE WAPNER! -- will return to The People's Court to celebrate his 90th birthday and his star on the Walk Of Fame. He will work the cases. He will be your 90-year-old television judge. Bless your heart, Judge Wapner.
See a clip above from the old show, in which the words "they're accused of failing to control their tree-trimmers" are used.
After the jump, a clip of current People's Court judge Marilyn Milian, taking the head off a young litigant who made the mistake of bragging that he was a student at the University of Miami Law School ... where it turns out she used to teach. It gets pretty good.
We talked last week about how good the ESPN series 30 For 30 is, so I wanted to issue a reminder ahead of time that tonight's new episode, "Without Bias," premieres at 8:00 p.m.
The documentary tells the story of Len Bias' death in 1986 from a cocaine overdose at the age of 22, days after he was drafted by the Boston Celtics as an All-American basketball player out of the University of Maryland. As you can see from the clip above, it includes interviews with the people who were actually with Bias when he died, some of whom faced legal trouble after the fact. I haven't seen this installment, but if the previous four are any indication, it will be well worth your time.
See another clip, in which Bias' mother talks about losing him and getting flowers from Michael Jordan, after the jump.
Look at that pretty lady (Morena Baccarin) behind the podium! She looks harmless enough, right? (David Gray / ABC)
by Linda Holmes
V, ABC's remake of the NBC '80s lizard-alien show of the same name, is an interestingly out-of-time spectacle. I don't think it spoils too much to say that the entire premise involves aliens arriving on Earth and integrating with those of us who were born on this planet. They become just another group of people who are different but welcome, like contortionists or vegans.
Aaaaand that's the problem, because of course, it is destined to become a battle, because everything is Not As It Seems. [Cue dangerous music.]
Why it matters that the people of Earth embrace the lizard aliens, after the jump.
TNT has made a deal to buy Southland, the cop drama NBC jettisoned prior to its second-season premiere. But Southland fans will need to exercise some caution in reacting to the news.
So far, all that TNT has agreed to do is buy the seven episodes that aired in the spring, and then the six episodes that had already been shot for the never-aired second season before NBC pulled the plug. At this point, all they're doing is showing what would otherwise sit on the shelf.
TNT will have an opportunity to see how viewers respond to Southland -- which will air Tuesday nights at 10:00 PM, beginning in January -- before deciding whether to order any more episodes. So at this point, it's not so much that TNT is agreeing to keep making the show, or to make it into a TNT show; they're just showing what was shot to air on NBC. The deal is a treat for fans, in that they find it incredibly frustrating when episodes that have already been made are simply never shown (or, perhaps more likely, only available for purchase on DVD). But it looks like we won't know for quite a while whether the show is going to continue as a going concern, or whether this is just going to give it a less frustrating send-off.
The Mentalist is one of many crime-oriented shows that's become popular in recent years, but are women more likely than they used to be to show up as victims? (Richard Foreman / Warner Brothers)
by Linda Holmes
The Parents Television Council has been around a long time, and generally they put out press releases a couple of times a week in which they express displeasure with various things about television -- the language, the explicit content in a roast of Joan Rivers, that kind of thing. They tend to favor more regulation by Congress and the FCC, and they're big advocates of fining networks heavily for dropped swear words and so on.
Their new report yesterday caught my eye, though: it's a look at the change in televised violence against women between 2004 and 2009, and the headline is that the incidents they counted increased dramatically in that period.
At first, I wasn't the least bit surprised, given the boom in crime procedurals, but interestingly, they report that violence overall is only up two percent, while violence against women is up 120 percent. (You can read the PDF version of the study here.) So it's not just more shows with violence, it's more against women specifically.
ESPN's series 30 For 30 is a fascinating look at sports stories. The most recent installment, "Muhammad And Larry," looks at the 1980 fight between Muhammad Ali and Larry Holmes. (ESPN Films)
by Linda Holmes
I think of sports as having a lot in common with comics. Both have fans who behave in ways that turn off more casual consumers. Both invite overinvestment. And both suffer from a high percentage of people who unfortunately miss out because they have long ago flipped the "I Don't Care" switch. As in, "I don't care what you say about comics: I don't care about comics." "I don't care what you say about football: I don't care about football."
This is what makes it such a pleasure to heartily recommend ESPN's gripping, well-made series of documentary sports films, 30 For 30, which the network is producing in honor of its 30th anniversary. Whether you care about sports or not, they are excellent, insightful television.
Each of the 30 films in the series, which will run through 2010, studies a particular event or story in sports. Not necessarily the most famous things that have ever happened in sports, but instead the most interesting. Last night's offering, Muhammad And Larry, covered the 1980 fight in which Muhammad Ali, at 38 years old, was pummeled by a 30-year-old Larry Holmes. While I'm not an "I don't care about sports" person, it is hard to get me interested in boxing, but this film is fantastic, because it does what all four episodes I've seen so far have done: it approaches stories about sports as stories about people.
Seriously, this is a fantastic series. More about why you should really, really see it, after the jump.
Neil Patrick Harris as a singing villain as a red-headed Elvis. We think we've had this exact dream. (Cartoon Network)
By Glen Weldon
We might have, once or twice, sung Neil Patrick Harris' praises on this blog.
Once or twice. Or fifty-three times, whatever, who's counting, lots of those are duplicates, shut up. [Hey, it's not my fault the guy hosted the Tonys and the Emmys in the same year. YOU shut up. -- Ed.]
Fifty-fourth time's the charm:
Last Friday, NPH guest-starred on an episode of the Cartoon Network animated series, Batman: The Brave and the Bold.
At this writing, the full ep is available for streaming on the B:TBATB mini-site. (After a cereal commercial that's a good deal more disquieting than your average.)
Betty Draper (January Jones) may look like she's got it all together, but that's a very angry lady who's being very carefully written and performed. (Carin Baer / AMC)
by Linda Holmes
Mad Men, like The Sopranos and The Wire before it, inspires an admirable amount of careful and thoughtful criticism that's frequently and unfortunately denied to television. Take, for instance, this piece in The Atlantic in which Benjamin Schwarz -- a literary editor, no less -- dissects the show's strengths and weaknesses.
A combination of factual nitpicks (nice people didn't really litter), restatements of entirely fair criticisms of the show that have been offered many times before (for a show set in the early '60s, it takes little interest thus far in issues of race), and interesting speculation about the motives of viewers (people only like the show because it flatters them and makes them feel superior to un-PC people of 1963), the piece is thoughtful, smart, and committed to the idea that Mad Men deserves to be taken seriously.
Where it goes wrong, though, is in its discussion of January Jones, whose portrayal of Betty Draper continues to be Mad Men's least appreciated and least understood asset.
No, it really doesn't matter that she used to be a model, after the jump.
Tracy Morgan sat down for a remarkable interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air yesterday. (Clay Patrick McBride)
by Linda Holmes
I find Tracy Morgan hysterically funny on 30 Rock, and I love his tendency to go off in public and say nutsy, hysterically weird things -- as he does on Twitter at times. And as he did in Playboy recently, though I'll have you track that one down for yourself. And as I'm sure he does in his new book, I Am The New Black.
But his interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air is a revelation. I have no idea, really, how to integrate this interview into my understanding of him, because it's so intensely personal and so serious and so thoughtful. I have always taken him to be one of those Robin Williams-y guys who is almost incapable of being "off" for any period of time, but this seems to be a completely straightforward, utterly normal discussion that I, for one, absolutely was not expecting.
So often, you hear famous people go from interview to interview and say the same stuff to everyone, but this is the only interview remotely like this that I have ever heard with this particular guy. Definitely one to check out. You can hear the interview after the jump.
CBS is heavily hyping tonight's Survivor. Can it measure up? (Monty Brinton / CBS)
by Linda Holmes
It's been my firm position that this season of Survivor (the nineteenth!) has been the worst ever. The contestants blend together, the purported "villain" is all talk, and there's not a single person who has emerged as someone to really root for.
But fear not! CBS has been promoting tonight's episode as terrifying and incredibly dramatic, to the point where ... well, watch for yourself.
Can the episode possibly live up to this kind of promotion? Having seen it, I can tell you what I think.
Charlie Hunnam of Sons Of Anarchy and Pauley Perrette of NCIS both play characters with tattoos, but they're very different tattoos on very different shows. (Prashant Gupta/FX (left) / Cliff Lipson/CBS (right))
by Sara Sarasohn
I like to think of myself as a person who knows and likes quality TV. I love The Wire and Arrested Development and Mad Men. But every Tuesday evening when I get to my DVR, I pick the gently brain-numbing over the Quality TV. I watch NCIS and not Sons of Anarchy. (I live in California, so the 10pm shows on the cable channels show up at 7 p.m. for me, setting the two shows against each other.)
Why Sons of Anarchy is great - but not what I want to watch on Tuesdays, after the jump.
Seven episodes in, there has been a fair bit of grumbling that Glee, Fox's crazypants series about a misfit high school vocal ensemble, has gone off the rails. Perhaps that's why it was so delightful last week when the group, mingling again after having been split in two in a faculty power struggle, eased into a casual singalong of Nelly's "Ride Wit Me."
Part of it was that it showed the kids relaxed and having fun, rather than struggling with pregnancy, coming out, crippling self-doubt, crippling self-aggrandizement, etc. But part of it was that, for the first time in a long time, it sounded like they were singing.
Why singing is important on a show about singing, after the jump.
Elizabeth Mitchell stars on ABC's V, which has chosen a very hazardous method of self-promotion. (David Gray / ABC)
by Linda Holmes
ABC is warming up for the premiere of V, its remake of the 1980s sci-fi semi-classic in which mankind battled alien lizards as well as people who, underneath, were secretly alien lizards. (I am simplifying.)
The show will launch November 3, air four times, and then go on hiatus until next year, as part of the plan on the part of all major networks to drive viewers to the brink of insanity with scheduling hijinks. ("Did you like this show? Did you? Too bad; go watch something else for a few months and we'll see whether you still care when it finally comes back.")
But they've now come up with a marketing idea that will be cute and not very effective, providing it isn't terrifying and inappropriate.
Tonight on The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon (Jim Parsons) meets up with his nemesis: Wil Wheaton. (Robert Voets / CBS)
by Linda Holmes
I have managed to get in the Big Bang Theory habit this season in spite of CBS's attempts to make it difficult, and I am atwitter for that reason about tonight's episode.
Tonight, Sheldon meets Wheaton.
Wil Wheaton has managed one of the most remarkable transformations in pop-culture history, from the most hated twerp of the Star Trek fandom (he played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation) to a funny, self-deprecating, tech-savvy writer and Master Of The Social Media Universe. Finding people who don't like Wil Wheaton these days is like finding people who don't like Neil Patrick Harris: they're out there, absolutely, but you really, really have to be looking.
Much of that has to do with Wheaton's witty, relaxed way of both embracing and escaping his Star Trek past, and that's what brings him to The Big Bang Theory. On tonight's episode, Sheldon (Jim Parsons) has a bone to pick with Wheaton, and if you know who's going to come out ahead in that clash of the nerd titans, you're ahead of me. I just want to see it.
The first 75 percent or so of John Ortved's The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History is brisk and engaging and likely to entertain Simpsons die-hards without breaking a sweat. Conan O'Brien talks about the gags he pulled in the writers' room; details emerge about the way the show developed into its current form; gossipy stories about James L. Brooks and Matt Groening (who both come off badly for different reasons) are tossed about. There are great stories about Michael Jackson and Aerosmith, and it's a fine reminder of just how crazy the show's merchandising got back in the day.
Neither Groening nor Brooks cooperated with the book, and neither did writer-producer Sam Simon (whom Ortved fingers as the primary genius at work on the show), so it's an oral history with the central figures missing. Ortved goes to some trouble in a recent Daily Beast piece to argue that the book was so daring that Fox pulled out all the stops to try to stop it from being published and to deny him access, but there's certainly nothing in the book explosive enough to justify quite that much of a dust-up.
Ortved's thesis, essentially, is that lots of people are responsible for the success of The Simpsons, and their creator, Matt Groening, has too often been viewed as the sole source to the detriment of others who also deserve to be praised. That's the nut of the story, so don't go in expecting anything particularly adventurous based on the claim that Fox was terrified of the book.
At any rate, most of Ortved's work provides a solid basic history, even if a lot of it will be familiar to fans. He weaves together interviews with writers and cast members who worked on the show, people who were on the business side, and people who knew the folks involved. There's a good balance between information and gossip; between a story about simmering creativity and a story about flawed human beings who showed their flaws -- as many do -- more and more as the money accumulated.
He works around the absences of Groening, Brooks and Simon by rolling in quotes from interviews they've done in the past and, in some cases, even quotes from DVD commentaries (that one seems like a stretch). It's not unfair, exactly, but it's distracting, and serves as a constant reminder that you are, in fact, experiencing a workaround.
The bigger problem, however, is that the book Ortved seems to really want to write is a book called To Whom Shall I Send My Letter Of Complaint Regarding The Creative Downfall Of The Simpsons? And when he gets to that final section, things go a little off-course.
Craig Ferguson is probably the least polarizing guy in late-night. He's not as cranky as Letterman, as under-the-gun as Conan, as unlikely as Jimmy Fallon, or as irreverent as Jimmy Kimmel.
He doesn't make a lot of headlines; he's just there, after Letterman, being funny. And now, he's written a very, very good memoir called American On Purpose. (The title comes from his decision to become a citizen, which he did last year.)
The great majority of the book is about Ferguson's life before he was famous: growing up in Scotland, getting into trouble, casting about for what to do, playing in bands (his discussion of punk alone is worth buying the book), getting divorced a couple of times, and -- oh, yes -- doing a lot of drugs and a whole lot of drinking prior to getting sober in 1992.
We know a little more about what happened to Falcon Heene than we knew yesterday ... but not a lot more. (John Moore / Getty Images)
by Linda Holmes
UPDATE:Now the sheriff's department is apparently saying "publicity stunt," so they've presumably uncovered some actual evidence, given a couple of days to check up on it.
Like a whole lot of other people, I watched for a while yesterday as the helium balloon in which a 6-year-old was supposedly flying made its way through the sky, landed softly on the ground, and turned out to have nobody in it. And, like a whole lot of other people, I was relieved when it turned out that he was in the attic of his own house the entire time.
(My favorite part of the news coverage: a CNN commentator using a fancy touch-screen gizmo to zero in on a satellite photo of THE KID'S HOUSE in order to dramatically demonstrate the outcome.)
And finally, like a whole lot of other people, I hoped that perhaps something might be learned from the entire sequence, and that it might be remembered for ... I don't know, perhaps a few hours. The point being: If you don't know what's going on, don't say you know what's going on. Yes, this was fed by 24-hour news channels, and it was fed by Twitter (which, at least for me, performed with a certain uneven twitchiness the entire time this was unfolding).
But it was also fed by the fact that we who live with so much information are no longer used to admitting that we don't really know what's going on. Surely someone knows what's going on; how can it be otherwise? I don't have to be driven crazy anymore about song lyrics, or who played the best friend in a movie from 15 years ago, or what my old neighborhood looks like these days. Thanks, Internet!
So, rather than coverage that says, "We don't know what's going on," you get a series of evolving theories — as one of the CNN anchors actually admitted yesterday. They move from one "working theory" to another; I saw four distinct prevailing theories in a space of a couple of hours yesterday. (1) He's in the balloon. (2) No, wait — he's not in the balloon because he was never in it. (3) No, wait — he's not in the balloon because he was in a "box" that fell off the bottom of it. (4) No, wait — he's in the attic. Better to state what you believe is going on and have to take it back later than to say, "We don't know."
And then came the appearance on CNN last night, during which 6-year-old Falcon said to his father, "You had said that we did this for a show."
Tina Fey and the rest of the 30 Rock cast will return tonight on NBC. (NBC)
by Linda Holmes
There's no arguing with some of the successes of 30 Rock: three consecutive Emmys for Outstanding Comedy Series, for one. Making Alec Baldwin and Tina Fey into the closest thing we have to bulletproof comedy stars, for another.
But as the show returns for its fourth season tonight, it faces the sense some viewers had that last season was uneven -- that the guest stars were too numerous to the point of fatigue, that the dynamics among the characters were stalled, and that some of the actors were underused or, really, hardly used at all. It's still funny, and it's still smart, but there are a few things it can do in the fourth season to avoid some of the unevenness of last year, just to make sure there's not a loss of momentum.
Jenna, Josh and too many guest stars, after the jump.
The problem with last night's much-hyped Jim and Pam wedding on NBC's The Office (the network hasn't abandoned comedy yet the way it's abandoning drama) was that the show has always pulled in two directions, and they demanded different things.
On the one hand, the show is a silly, jokey, often uncomfortable salute to the kind of awkward weirdos you encounter at work, and the focus has remained on the ensemble. For that story, their wedding needed to be crashed by their co-workers who would do something exactly not-right and yet weirdly endearing. On the other hand, this particular romantic story has been handled as a little island of normalcy and very carefully protected from losing its actual emotional heft. (See the proposal, above.) For that story, their wedding needed to be personal and serious.
NBC has canceled one of the few ambitious dramas it still supports; what's the next step when you've already given up? (David McNew / Getty Images)
by Linda Holmes
All ribbing of Jay Leno aside, NBC's decision yesterday to cancel Southland, a police drama that was to return to the schedule later this month, signals an abandonment of a decades-long commitment to drama that's regrettable for the network, its viewers, and the creative people who continue to try to make things that are good and interesting and worthwhile.
Southland came from, among other producers, John Wells, the same guy who gave NBC ER and ran the last several seasons of The West Wing. The network promoted it heavily as the natural heir to its ER legacy when that show ended earlier this year. Of course, it couldn't run in the same time slot, because that slot (along with four other hours) would go to Jay Leno. But NBC's Angela Bromstad told The New York Times in April that while it was "a gritty cop show," it was also "a sophisticated drama." She added that it could "absolutely play at 9 o'clock."
More painfully in retrospect, Bromstad told the Times that NBC's commitment to only seven episodes shouldn't be a worry to Warner Brothers (the studio producing the show), because while the network hadn't officially committed beyond that, it was not going to use the show to fill the ER slot for the rest of the spring and then never use it again. "They were afraid we saw the show as space filler," she recalled. "But I told them, 'I promise you the intention is absolutely for this to return in the fall.'"
So those things turned out to be ... a little misleading.
NBC gives up, the state of drama, and much more, after the jump.
Yes, that's Iron Man. Yes, that's Tim Gunn. We can explain. (Marvel Entertainment)
By Glen Weldon
Oh, sure: On the surface, the comic book conflation of high adventure and high fashion doesn't make a lot of sense, especially if you judge strictly by audience demographics. The readership of superhero comics, far and away the medium's dominant genre, consists largely of straight men.
Close followers of fashion, on the other hand, tend to possess ovaries and/or a killer Heidi Klum (er, Heidi Samuel) impression.
If we're Venn diagramming, any objective assessment of the intersection of those two sets would deem it both teeny and weeny.
Why, then, does fashion figure so largely in many of today's comics, both within and without the superhero genre? Books like Models, Inc., Amazing Spider-Man and Dave Sim's Glamourpuss are lousy with leggy models, imperious fashionistas and quippy sartorial critiques that might as well have been birthed in the Ugly Betty writers' room.
Cheesecake is one obvious answer, even though the kind of women who populate the superhero comic resemble real-world fashion models in much the same way that an overstuffed couch resembles a picnic bench. But it's not the only reason.
The superhero and the supermodel have much in common, after all. Both are cultural icons. Both look good in tights. Both face down tough challenges every day (the hero: natural disasters, fiendish deathtraps; the model: flyaway hair, combination skin). Both can abruptly lose their powers when exposed to certain agents (the hero: kryptonite; the model: Janice Dickinson).
Whatever the reason, the decidedly weird mashup of comics and fashion bears a long and literally colorful history.
After the jump: A brief chronology of superheroes who've proved too sexy for their capes over the years, and done their little turns on the catwalk.
Jane Lynch plays Sue Sylvester on Glee. (Matthias Clamer / Fox)
by Linda Holmes
You probably know Jane Lynch, who plays the brilliantly evil cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester on the so-happy-it-hurts Fox show Glee. She's also appeared in many (many, many) other projects: Best In Show, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Julie & Julia, A Mighty Wind ... we could go on and on. We really could.
Who would win in a knock-down cage match between a cheerleading squad and a show choir? And what fate should befall the losers afterward?
The cheerleaders would squash the show choir by stomping on their windpipes.This would result in a bunch of shallow-breathing singers who would soon form vocal nodes. The Glee Club would be hobbled.
Given Glee's structure, and your hopes to eventually get to sing on the show, we have to ask: What's the best song to use as the soundtrack in a plot to destroy your enemies?
"Rose's Turn" from Gypsy. Key phrases: "Thanks a lot and out with the garbage, they take bows and you're battin' zero." And "Mama's gotta let go!!!"
If all the characters you've played were running for president against each other, which one would you vote for?
I would probably vote for Laurie Bohner of A Mighty Wind. Pornography and good old-fashioned American folk-singin' would walk hand in hand. And then I'd have to leave the country.
In the last year, you've starred on series called Glee and Party Down. What's behind your sudden interest in relentlessly upbeat titles?
We're in a recession, people. "Lighten up" is what that's saying.
Your Internet Movie Database entry shows about 70 credits in the last five years. That's roughly one new credit every three to four weeks. Do you have a clone?
Yes. Glenn Close does roughly three-fifths of my work.
Bonus round: You told Melissa Block that you're happy to "be home" on the Glee set, to have a long-term gig and a trailer to settle into, complete with a pillow and a candle you brought in yourself. Which leads us to wonder: What would Sue Sylvester say about your decorating taste? And who would she hire to pretty up that trailer?
Sue would have Jack LaLanne design a mini-gym around a 75-pound medicine ball. No candles or pillows please -- too damn sissy.
Sadly, the samba was Tom DeLay's final dance. (Adam Larkey / ABC)
by Linda Holmes
Well, the Tom DeLay Dancing With The Stars saga came to an end on Tuesday night as the former House Majority Leader was forced to withdraw from the competition after developing stress fractures in both of his feet. While he stressed that he was no quitter, his determination was unable to heal his bones.
Tom will thus be remembered on the show for his final routine, in which he wore a red-and-white striped shirt for a rousing barbershop version of "Jeepers Creepers." No, not really. In fact, there is a big elephant on the back of his shirt, while there is a big donkey on the blue dress of his partner, Cheryl Burke, and the two of them did the samba to "Why Can't We Be Friends?"
This time, I am not kidding. And at one point, he threw money into the audience. (Really!) But my favorite part was that he was actually counting to himself, "One, two, three, four," so hard that you could watch his mouth moving. Hey, the samba does not come naturally to everyone.
The Mythbusters team -- Grant Imahara, Jamie Hyneman, Kari Byron, Adam Savage, and Tori Belleci -- returns tonight to kick of its seventh season. (Discovery)
by Linda Holmes
Mythbusters returns tonight with new episodes, and if you enjoy explosions, giant messes, dummies made out of ballistics gel, or people laughing hysterically at the amazing things that science can do, it probably can't come soon enough for you.
The show is a fascinating phenomenon: its mainstream buzz tends to be relatively low. It doesn't get that much critical fawning, and you can go a long time without hearing much about it. But it's on the Discovery Channel constantly, and on sites like Digg, videos of Adam Savage (who co-hosts the show with Jamie Hyneman) giving talks about science and about the show will fly up the popularity lists among the other Internet giants like Megan Fox and cat videos.
The basic gist is that they get hold of a myth or a theory or an urban legend -- alcohol warms you up, cannonballs killed more people with splinters than with actual impact, that kind of thing -- and they find ways to test it. Not perfectly, not exactly enough for publication, but enough that you can get a pretty good idea of whether the basics work or not.
Let's take, for instance, a show they once did about booze.
Here, Mr. Ed poses with Wilbur (Alan Young), who put up with his terrible behavior for reasons unknown. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)
by Marc Hirsh
When you blaze through an entire season's worth of television episodes in rapid succession on DVD, certain things stick out a little more plainly than they might have otherwise. For Mister Ed's first season (out today), there's the fact that nobody seems to question the presence of a one-horse stable in the backyard of a middle-class home in suburban Southern California. There's next-door neighbor Kay's continual references to her husband Roger by his (and their) last name of "Addison." There's the charming way that star Alan Young, in both the pilot commentary and the extensive interview in the bonus features, refers to the program as "the Ed show."
For me, though, the biggest revelation was a simple truth that became obvious after several episodes: that horse is a jerk. Popular imagination generally remembers Mister Ed as a wisecracking curmudgeon. In reality, he's an obnoxious pill, a raincloud determined to make Wilbur's life as miserable as possible. If he weren't a talking horse, he'd just be a phenomenal jerk.
We get even more annoyed with that horse, after the jump.
What's above is just the first minute and a half of David Letterman's monologue for tonight's show, which was taped today. In it, you'll see him poke fun at his in-the-doghouse status and acknowledge the rough weekend he had.
According to reports based on interviews with audience members, the show includes more explicit apologies to his staff and his wife than he offered up on Friday night, as well as acknowledgments that he's got ground to make up with everyone.
I feel about this largely the way I felt when he kept redoing his apology about this summer's Sarah Palin joke: the guy is sort of a compulsive pleaser, for someone who seems like a misanthrope. He pokes fun at himself thinking it's obvious that he's acknowledging his own error, he realizes people don't think it was enough, and he does it some more.
CBS has released a partial transcript, in which he says:
Now the other thing is my wife, Regina. She has been horribly hurt by my behavior, and when something happens like that, if you hurt a person and it's your responsibility, you try to fix it. And at that point, there's only two things that can happen: either you're going to make some progress and get it fixed, or you're going to fall short and perhaps not get it fixed, so let me tell you folks, I got my work cut out for me.
In this case, he's going back on something he said on Friday, which was that he wasn't going to say much more about it. I think the better part of valor would have been holding to that decision; I don't think the public expects to see him make apologies to his wife. (I certainly don't.) Explaining the situation before people read about it in the paper made some sense to me; this makes less sense. I think those who were inclined to butt their noses out of it did so on the assumption that he was, indeed, at home trying to make amends to his wife as needed. I'm not sure those people wanted him to do it in front of them.
Turner Classic Movies is running a special on Leslie Caron in October -- every Monday this month features her movies, and tonight are the best-known musicals: An American In Paris, Gigi and Lili.
I don't have much of an opinion about Lili, but An American In Paris and Gigi are both fascinating examples of '50s musicals. An American In Paris features Gene Kelly's long ballet finale, which is either really great or really pretentious, depending on whom you ask, and Gigi is just about the creepiest thing you will ever see passed off as a romantic story.
In watching Gene Kelly (which I've done quite a bit of over the years), I tend to favor the raucous and funny musicals like Singin' In The Rain and On The Town over the artsy An American In Paris, even though Paris is the one that won Best Picture. Still, if you like good movie dancing or Gershwin music, it's worth seeing once.
What I have a harder time recommending is Gigi, which has some nice Lerner & Loewe music (Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold do a lovely "I Remember It Well") but is tough to love, given that it's the love story of a teenage girl in training to be a "courtesan" (read: serial companion for wealthy men in return for being kept in comfort) and the guy who eventually figures out that he doesn't just want to give her jewelry and keep her as his mistress. Isn't that romantic?
I realize I am applying my 2009 sensibility to a different era, but it is the only one I have. And it's always a little squicked out by Gigi.
Guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel is not your ordinary jazz guitarist, in a few different ways. Nevertheless, he made it to Jimmy Fallon's show last night. (Word Of Mouth Music)
by Patrick Jarenwattananon
Note: Patrick Jarenwattananon is the master of ceremonies and poobah nerd over at NPR's charming jazz blog, A Blog Supreme. As part of our continuing efforts to eliminate cultural separations by brow (high, middle, low), we are mixing our jazz into our pop culture today, as we may be mixing some pop culture into the jazz over there in the future -- stay tuned for possible future experiments in which Patrick attempts to make me jazz-literate. -- Linda Holmes
If you were watching NBC's Late Night with Jimmy Fallonlast night, you may have noticed the presence of another guitarist in the house band. Save for an afterthought of a shout-out before Miranda Lambert's performance, he wasn't prominently featured on screen. His name is Kurt Rosenwinkel, and he is good at music.
Many of us jazz folk hold Kurt Rosenwinkel in high esteem. He's something of a people's champion; he's easily the most influential guitarist of his generation. (Which is X, if you're wondering.) His dedicated following is legion -- they're the kind who transcribe his solos and post them on the Internet, the kind who care enough to shout down haters in YouTube comment sections. Put it this way -- he's big-time enough to be pranked, Sacha-Baron-Cohen-style, by a (seemingly cut-rate) French performance artist.
Come on, you know you want to see the video. And also hear more about this "Kurt Rosenwinkel." After the jump.
David Letterman told his audience on Thursday night about an extortion plot that began with a package left in his car. (Associated Press)
by Linda Holmes
Last night after his monologue, David Letterman sat at his desk and told a long story. It started in his car at 6 a.m. three weeks ago, when he discovered a package in the back seat, and it ended with the arrest yesterday of a man who tried to blackmail him for $2 million. The man had information about sexual relationships Letterman had had with women who work on his show -- and he apparently suggested that the blackmail wouldn't necessarily end at $2 million.
It is a profoundly odd bit of television. The members of the audience, unprepared for what's coming, expect another "goofy Dave" story, and they chuckle helpfully at the jokes that he seems to insert almost compulsively. He describes his panic, and they laugh sympathetically. But as he describes calling his lawyer, they seem to realize that it isn't actually funny. He's not making jokes in the way you make jokes when your story is going to end up fine. He's making jokes the way he would make jokes about his heart attack.
There's not a whole lot to this Mad Men parody from the inventive folks at Sesame Street, but never let it be said that they're all about Elmo. Many have seized on the "sycophants" reference, and I cannot deny it is the best thing in the clip, but I think my favorite elegant touch is the silhouetted figure at the close of the credits.
Nina Garcia and Michael Kors have been absent from much of this Project Runway season, and it turns out that ther'es no substitute. (Mike Yarish / Lifetime Networks)
by Linda Holmes
There seemed to be reason for optimism when Project Runway returned from a (very) long hiatus. Despite a move from Bravo to Lifetime, a different production company, and a different setting (Los Angeles instead of New York), the first episode felt mostly like home.
But since then, it's gradually sagged. The challenges seem half-hearted, the contestants don't seem interesting enough, and the show has sorely missed -- perhaps more sorely than anyone would have expected -- regular judges Michael Kors and Nina Garcia, who have been gone for much of the season. (Kors, who has missed all the episodes but the opener, finally returns tonight.)
Kors and Garcia both being gone means that it's just Heidi Klum and a bunch of guest judges, and that's been the case for the last three episodes. Candidly, the biggest problem is Zoe Glassner, who has been sitting in for Garcia. Glassner is an editor at Marie Claire, and she may be an even more obnoxious guest judge than Elle's Anne Slowey, previously the most obnoxious guest judge in history.
I wrote down that you were a bad judge, after the jump.
If you're in the mood for a little nostalgia, here's how Jenna Fischer and John Krasinski looked at the 2005 Television Critics Association press tour. Back then, Jim and Pam were still in their yearning phase. (Frederick M. Brown / Getty Images)
by Linda Holmes
Tonight's episode of The Office is called "The Promotion," but it's next week's episode -- going by the title "Niagara" -- that will be handling, absent a massive promotional fake-out, Jim and Pam's long-awaited wedding. And the hype machine has, accordingly, been cranked up to a billion.
The cranking, and an only slightly spoiler-y picture, after the jump.
Kelsey Grammer's new sitcom, Hank, is an ill-conceived recession tale. (Bob D'Amico / ABC)
by Linda Holmes
Last week's strong premieres of the excellent Modern Family and the pretty decent Cougar Town provided hope that ABC's new Wednesday night comedy experiment might be not only good, but also popular -- a potent possibility.
Tonight, however, with the premiere of Kelsey Grammer's absolutely terrible Hank, it becomes clear that while the entire block may be popular, the entire block will not be good, or even watchable.
A series of painful miscalculations, after the jump.
After writing about the 40th anniversary of The Brady Bunchthe other day, it occurred to me that I had mentioned their variety show followed by the notation "HA HA HA!", and I now realize that those of you who were mercifully not alive at the time may have thus assumed I was kidding.
In case there was any confusion, I have included a clip above from The Brady Bunch Hour in which the Brady clan performs a disco medley, with appearances by Rip Taylor, the cast of What's Happening!, and Fake Jan, who took the place of the prescient Eve Plumb, who apparently fled this project leaving an Eve-Plumb-shaped hole in the wall -- and good for her.
If you've ever had a dream where Alice danced and sang with Rip Taylor while both were dressed like ducks, be advised: that was no dream. That was a distant memory.
LL Cool J stars in NCIS LA, one of the strongest performing new shows of the season. (Cliff Lipson / CBS)
by Linda Holmes
It's not often you see the broadcast networks with anything to smile about these days, but this is the exception: so far, the new shows they're rolling out are doing well, especially considering how weakly new shows have performed overall in recent years. The Hollywood Reporter blog The Live Feed offers this chart, by way of comparison.
If you can manage a large group of ducks, you might be good for a reality show like The Amazing Race. But don't get too excited just yet, even if they cast you. (Monty Brinton / CBS)
by Linda Holmes
Last night's two-hour opener of The Amazing Race hit the most important benchmark for any Race episode by including the coaxing of noisy and unruly animals (see above). In the past, llamas, camels, goats, oxen, sheep, horses, and other creatures have helped out; last night, it was ducks. Any episode with this much quacking and waddling has to be counted as good.
But wow, they came up with a very cruel twist.
Everybody who's going to be on this season, take one step forward! Not so fast, after the jump. (Spoilers, obviously.)
Johnny Galecki and Kaley Cuoco are seen here in last week's season premiere of The Big Bang Theory. If you haven't seen it, don't feel bad: they're keeping it under wraps. (Sonja Flemming / CBS)
by Linda Holmes
When I saw the pilot of The Big Bang Theory in the fall of 2007, it struck me as irritating and corny, and I threw it on the pile with all the other CBS sitcoms I don't watch. (Which is all of them, except How I Met Your Mother.)
But as it stretched into a second season, I kept hearing people I normally agreed with saying that they liked it, and I was eventually able to catch a couple of episodes. And, wonder of wonders, it had improved a lot (particularly in the writing), and it was pretty good.
Normally, the sequence here would be that over the summer, I would catch up with the first two seasons so I could start watching it in the fall. But then I realized that the first season was available on iTunes, but not the second, and the second wouldn't be out on DVD until September 15, about a week before the third-season premiere, and you couldn't (at that time) buy it as a download on Amazon or anywhere else. I'm not much for illegally downloading TV shows for a variety of reasons, so this was the part where I said to myself, "Never mind."
You can now purchase Season 2 as a download on Amazon, just as you can buy it on DVD, but since the current episodes aren't streamed, then unless I record and save those, then by the time I watch the second season, I'll be behind on the third season, and I won't be able to get that one until a year from now.
Given how hard networks are trying right now to retain audiences, and given that The Big Bang Theory has probably seen as much improvement in the quality of its buzz over its first two seasons (culminating in Jim Parsons' Emmy nomination) as any comedy in memory, it boggles the mind that they seem to be going to such lengths to make it difficult to become a fan.
The plaintive cry of the frustrated consumer, after the jump...
Megan Fox proved ill-suited for her hosting duties on the poorly executed, accidentally profanity-laced season premiere of Saturday Night Live. (Dana Edelson / NBC)
by Linda Holmes
Unevenness is such a staple of Saturday Night Live -- and, in fact, always has been, even during the good years -- that it can't possibly be considered news that last night's season premiere had long stretches where the material was painfully unfunny.
But on last night's show, hosted by actress Megan Fox, there was hardly anything that was funny, and what was unfunny was extra-unfunny.
And as if that weren't enough, one of the new cast members accidentally dropped one of George Carlin's seven dirty words.
Mike, Carol, and all the kids looked mighty young in the pilot episode of The Brady Bunch, which aired 40 years ago today. (Paramount Pictures/Hulton Archive / Getty Images)
by Linda Holmes
As an inexplicable flood of Brady Bunch episodes seemed to be washing over all of television this weekend, I found myself wondering: why the onslaught?
The answer, I eventually discovered: It's 40 years old.
That's right: the premiere episode, in which Mike and Carol's wedding is interrupted by the dog, the cat, and Mike falling into the cake, aired 40 years ago today: September 26, 1969.
The show's run was relatively short by today's family-sitcom standards: at five seasons, it comes in three seasons short of Home Improvement and four seasons short of Everybody Loves Raymond. Of course, if you count the movies (honestly, if you have never seen A Very Brady Christmas, I assure you it is a masterpiece of camp), the hour-long comedy-drama (Marcia is an alcoholic!), the variety show (HA HA HA!), and everything else, its influence becomes easier to understand.
But what has lasted, for me, are the things that have never made sense, ever, about this family in which everything could allegedly be resolved in 30 minutes. I will now catalog for you a few of what I consider the more perplexing mysteries.
1. Why doesn't Alice know anyone other than her boyfriend and the people she works for? Was she hatched from a giant egg?
2. Why did they bring the cat and the dog to the wedding in the first place? Fluffy The Cat was never even seen again, so she can't have been that critical to the proceedings. (I am not including "What happened to Fluffy?", lest the answer be unpleasant.)
3. How many kids were in Cindy's class, and how small was the auditorium, if they were all in the play but could only bring one parent each? That makes the audience exactly as large as the cast. I understand "you can't bring your mom, dad, five siblings, and housekeeper," but how big was this cast? Is this the elementary-school staging of Hair? (If so, I have additional questions.)
4. I would understand if Marcia were horrified that someone would find out she had a crush on a boy she actually knew, but her falling to pieces over the possibility that her crush on Desi Arnaz, Jr. would be uncovered seems like an overreaction. Doesn't she have his picture up everywhere anyway? Did she learn nothing from my affair with Andy Gibb? (DON'T TELL ANYONE!)
5. How big of a dweeb do you have to be to get hold of a movie camera and decide to enlist your family in a dramatization of the first Thanksgiving? And Greg was the cool one?
6. If Jan were absolutely determined to get a brunette wig, isn't it likely that she could come up with one that didn't look like it was forcibly removed from the head of a Muppet?
7. If you were Bobby, and you felt like a loser because you never won a trophy, would you really be soothed by a trophy from your brothers and sisters for trying? (A trophy, mind you, that they apparently managed to acquire and have engraved with a lengthy message while you were on the way home from the ice-cream-eating contest that, once again, you lost.)
8. Were there still crazy prospectors wandering around ghost towns in 1971?
9. When going on television to attempt to win money to pay for your parents' anniversary present, which is being held hostage, why would you prepare one song for the actual broadcast but use a different song for your audition? That's just extra time locked in the garage with Greg's "music."
10. How old were you before you had any idea that the "pork chops and apple-shawss" thing was supposed to be Peter's impression of Humphrey Bogart? I think I respected him more when I thought he was just being strange.
Former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, seen here at a news conference in January 2009, dropped by The Daily Show last night. (Scott Olson / Getty Images)
by Linda Holmes
On last night's The Daily Show, Rod Blagojevich sat down to talk to Jon Stewart about the charges against him, the incriminating tapes made of his conversations, and more. Blagojevich's basic argument is that he did attempt to trade President Barack Obama's Senate seat for something, but he was trying to trade it for public policy victories for the people of his state. Stewart had a little bit of trouble with this claim.
ABC's Modern Family continues a mini-trend this fall of new, surprisingly good network comedies. (Bob D'Amico / ABC)
by Linda Holmes
When you're one of a lot of critics recommending a new show, there's a lot of pressure to say something everyone else isn't already saying. Lots of other people are also telling you today that ABC's Modern Family is a startlingly good pilot for a network comedy, and most of what I have to offer, I have to admit, is enthusiastic agreement.
Ed O'Neill, good jokes, and let's go to the video, after the jump.
Jennifer Garner joined Jay Leno on his show on Monday night, but not too many people tuned in. (Justin Lubin / NBC)
by Linda Holmes
We knew that the story of The Jay Leno Show would take a while to play out, and we only have the early data, but so far, it's gone just about as expected -- complete with the fact that how the show is doing is a highly subjective question.
The first night's ratings were, to put it plainly, huge -- more than 18 million people is a lot in the current broadcast environment. NBC could hardly have hoped for a more successful kickoff.
But there were two big asterisks next to that number. One was that the show featured Kanye West, then at the center of a an explosive but ephemeral controversy involving his behavior at the Video Music Awards. The other was that the regular season hadn't started yet, and the competition that Leno would eventually face at 10:00 p.m. on weeknights was lying dormant, waiting to see just how deep it could sink its fangs into him once the time came to wake up.
Tom DeLay started with the cha-cha last night on Dancing With The Stars. Admittedly, this move is not directly cha-cha-related. (Adam Larkey / ABC)
by Linda Holmes
UPDATED: With video!
If you weren't watching the CBS comedies premiering last night, and you weren't watching Heroes, and you weren't watching House, maybe you were watching as Dancing With The Stars returned for another season.
There's only so much to say about this kind of thing, especially when you can just look at the picture to the left and see what Tom DeLay looks like when doing the cha-cha to "Wild Thing." Unfortunately, ABC did not offer photos of either the opening move in which DeLay wiggled his behind at the camera or the moment when he fell to his knees and lip-synced part of the song.
Completely serious here.
In the end, though, DeLay kept himself in the competition. With a total of 16 points from three judges, he tied UFC champion Chuck Liddell and came out ahead of the NFL's Michael Irvin and the aggressively dull Ashley Hamilton. He seriously could have been worse, and Hamilton is so obscure and was so bad that Tom DeLay will almost surely not be the first man kicked off on Wednesday night. Still, he was no Donny Osmond.
Now that the video is up, you can see for yourself, after the jump.
Andre Braugher will join Hugh Laurie on tonight's season premiere of House, and that can mean only good things. (Michael Yarish / Fox)
by Linda Holmes
Hugh Laurie lost the Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor In A Drama last night for the fourth time (this time to Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston). He may make it look a little too easy, playing the sour and emotion-burying Dr. Gregory House -- there are few histrionics and there's little overt drama. House often seems to be orbiting around whatever the week's medical mystery may be, and rarely is his personal life the central thrust of the story.
But tonight, he's carrying the two-hour season premiere on his shoulders, with some high-octane help.
Elisabeth Moss, who plays Peggy Olson on Mad Men, is just one of our predicted winners who probably won't pan out. (AMC)
by Linda Holmes
As you know, the Emmys will be here on Sunday night, and I'll be covering them live with the help of Joe Reid (who has written for Monkey See, works at SOAPnet, and was my dear pal and colleague at Television Without Pity) and Marc Hirsh (who writes in a couple of capacities here at NPR and writes regularly at The Boston Globe). We are all very opinionated. It should be fun. We'll be getting underway at 7:30 p.m., ahead of the ceremony at 8:00.
But if you can't wait that long and you want to know what will happen, I will do my best to tell you, with the understanding that my prognosticating abilities are notoriously sketchy, as are everyone else's. That's why you should add your own predictions in the comments; it's possible that we can reach some kind of consensus that will approach reality. (Dare to dream, and so forth.) Follow along with the nominations here, using the handy dropdown menus.
Outstanding Drama Series: I see Mad Men repeating here. I think the most likely upset is Breaking Bad (AMC's other prestige show), which could sneak past exactly the same way Bryan Cranston grabbed last year's Outstanding Actor In A Drama trophy that I think 99 percent of pundits thought Jon Hamm was a cinch to take home. Dark horse: Big Love, which has been gaining in critical appreciation and has what is, by all accounts, an outstanding and huge cast.
Jeff Probst of Survivor looks like he's having a thought. Maybe it's about spiritual death, which he believes everyone on Survivor experiences. (Monty Brinton / CBS)
by Linda Holmes
If you listened to the piece on Morning Edition today about the building of the Survivor sets, one thing you learned is that host Jeff Probst takes Survivor very seriously.
He tries to act like he doesn't -- he sees himself as a jokester of sorts, and he's wildly attached to his notion of himself as a cool guy. Still, when he talks about the show, he can't not say things like, "Instantly, you have adversaries, and you have something to fight for!"
Listen to the way he actually trash-talks other reality shows for having cheap-looking challenges that he claims are "literally with tin cans and some string." I have never seen tin cans and string on any show I have ever watched, but even if I had, when you are bragging about how beautifully your obstacle courses are painted, you are taking yourself awfully seriously for a guy who snuffs torches for a living.
The Emmys, Elisabeth Hasselbeck's hair, and more, after the jump...
Jim Halpert (John Krasinski) looks a little nervous. Is it because The Office may be bringing on a baby? (NBC)
by Linda Holmes
Unless we are being treated to a massive dose of misdirection, which signs suggest that we are not, the sixth season of The Office will address, among other things, the fact that Pam is pregnant.
This could be very good news, or it could be very bad news.
The ups and downs of adding an infant, after the jump...
And remember how she got so popular so quickly that it required a backlash tracker to keep track?
Well, I am now prepared to admit that the backlash tracker was missing one optional element: the triumphant comeback. Once the entire cycle has been completed, there are times when it can start all over again, because the running of the original cycle through to its logical conclusion has allowed underdog status to be reclaimed.
Once Boyle didn't win Britain's Got Talent, suffered a few public-relations setbacks, and seemed to be taking her instant fame rather hard, she became ripe for another round, and indeed, her album was #1 on Amazon.com and getting massive attention almost three months before it was released.
Tonight on the season finale of NBC's America's Got Talent (which seriously could be subtitled "But Not As Much As Most Other Countries, Based On This Format"), Boyle will perform for a live American audience for the first time. It would be awfully nice to see this go well for her, but it would be even nicer to see her looking happy again.
Neil Patrick Harris is hosting this year's Emmys, which might be surprisingly interesting. (Cliff Lipson / CBS)
by Linda Holmes
Now that Tina Fey already has an Emmy and Mad Men has already lost a couple of them, it may seem like the suspense of the Emmys is over -- but it's not. On Sunday night, in fact, it could be a far happier occasion than it's been at times.
Emmy night has an annoying tendency to get into ruts in which it does the same dances over and over: it does the West Wing Shuffle, the Boston Legal Mambo, the Frasier Cha-Cha, and Jeremy Piven's Cool Dude Club Moves. And it does them over and over, year after year, until you think, "I want to see something else."
Some of that will undoubtedly continue this year. Some winners will be of the "Ugh, that guy, again" variety, but it looks like most of them won't. Piven didn't get his usual nomination. Neither did James Spader for the last season of Boston Legal.
In fact, in the major categories, there are very few nominations that hang over the ceremony with the Emmys' characteristic note of dull inevitability. Short of Entourage winning Outstanding Comedy -- and I've never been able to tolerate that show long enough to develop a strong critical opinion of it, just a gut reaction that it's unspeakably obnoxious -- there's very little in the big categories that would make me wildly frustrated if it happened. The closest would be Kevin Dillon or Jon Cryer beating out Neil Patrick Harris, Rainn Wilson, Tracy Morgan, and Jack McBrayer for Outstanding Supporting Actor In A Comedy, and even those guys aren't repeat-winning award hogs.
It might be one of the better sets of winners, actually, providing that you put aside the heartbreak of who was nominated in the first place. The big snubs already happened -- Battlestar Galactica isn't going to win anything on Sunday, but you can prepare for that now and get your crippling grief and/or frothing-mouthed anger out of the way.
And if you do, you will be rewarded with several hours of Neil Patrick Harris, who was an underused but perfectly fine host at the Tony Awards earlier this year, and who is not only hosting the ceremony but might even finally win this year for his role on How I Met Your Mother.
If you'll be watching -- or perhaps even if you won't -- please join us here, where we'll be live-blogging the ceremony, beginning at 7:30 p.m. I'll be joined by Monkey See contributors Marc Hirsh and Joe Reid, both of whom, I will tell you, have some strong feelings about television. It should be a good time, and it's less likely than usual to be an intensely frustrating experience, and what more, really, can you ask from an awards show?
Jay Leno got very lucky having an interview with controversy-attracting Kanye West, because otherwise, the opener of his new show was extremely slow. (NBC)
by Linda Holmes
As you've been hearing for months, Jay Leno has a new show, and last night, it finally showed up. So how was the debut of The Jay Leno Show?
It was about like his years on The Tonight Show, only much more unevenly paced, because they've changed the proportions and don't have the flow right yet, and he brought on guests who didn't have anything to say -- with one exception.
The jokes (such as they were), the interviews and the big headliner, after the jump...
Anyone who seeks advice on how to behave from the MTV Video Music Awards will wind up deranged, baffled, socially isolated, and probably arrested. But last night, Kanye Weststill managed to make everyone else there look like a collection of Noel Coward characters, so ridiculous was his outraged outburst when Taylor Swift won the award for Best Female Video.
As you can see in the video above, when Swift was in the middle of her acceptance speech, West leaped onto the stage and grabbed her microphone. "Yo Taylor, I'm really happy for you, I'm gonna let you finish," he said. "But Beyonce had one of the best videos of ALL TIME!" And then he climbed down, and the crowd booed, and Swift stood there like she'd gotten the end-of-Carrie treatment until they played her off the stage.
Later in the show, Beyonce Knowles won Video Of The Year (for "Single Ladies," the same video Kanye West was so angry didn't beat Taylor Swift), and she handed the microphone off to Swift to make her belated acceptance speech.
Kanye West's unplanned trip to the stage was ridiculous, even for a ridiculous event. (Christopher Polk / Getty Images)
It's important not to make buffoonery into outrage -- the VMAs are famous for being the national meeting of the Glorious Unified Council Of Acting A Fool. It's not the Oscars, and it's not meant to be, and as tempting as it may be to compare it to recent decorum-related dust-ups taking place in Congress and at the U.S. Open, the fact remains that ... it is the VMAs. When The New York Times states that the awards were "marred" by West's behavior, it raises the question of whether it's really possible to mar a show that tries so hard to mar itself with outsized ... nitwittery, if you'll pardon the expression.
Why anybody cared, and the surprising winner of this battle, after the jump...
Jay Leno needs some advice, and fortunately, we have some. (NBC)
by Linda Holmes
As we've previously noted, The Jay Leno Show, which premieres tonight, is going to be on for a good long while, whether it's good or bad. Whether the public loves it, hates it, or is utterly indifferent to it, it's going to be filling five hours of prime time every week, so it might as well be watchable. And since everyone knows that the best solution to any problem is to solicit free advice from the Internet, we offer the following suggestions to Leno.
1. Stop complaining about NBC. On Sunday night, Leno appeared at halftime of the NBC broadcast of Sunday Night Football to promote his show in a chat with Bob Costas. During a rather agonizing two-and-a-half-minute piece, Leno managed to mention his disdain for NBC three times: once yukking it up that football fans would enjoy his show, which was NBC's "huge Hail Mary pass," once commenting that he'd made NBC promise to stop showing promos, and once "joshing" that he's featuring new young comics because NBC is already looking to replace him, har har. Three times in less than three minutes -- and he's been doing the same thing in interviews.
Everyone understands that Leno is put out that he was removed from The Tonight Show. Everyone understands that he's probably feeling pretty smug right now over the fact that NBC is now losing the 11:30 slot to David Letterman, while they were winning it with him. Everyone understands the urge to gloat, to mock, and to keep reminding people that he was done wrong. It's how we'd all feel.
But he's got to stop mentioning it. It's ungracious, it's now very tired, and most importantly, it's not nearly as funny or edgy as he thinks. The "Hail Mary pass" joke came off as painfully weak, and the bit about the network already looking to replace him isn't a joke at all so much as it is the kind of passive-aggressive thing angry spouses say at Thanksgiving right before they get divorced. When approached for this job, he would have been within his rights to tell NBC to stick its offer up the nose of its decorative peacock, but he didn't. He took the job, and he's being paid a lot of money, and a lot of people's jobs depend on him, and it's time to stop tweaking the network and get on with it.
This Tina Fey performance (that's Amy Poehler next to her, of course) won an Emmy at tonight's Creative Arts Awards. (NBC)
by Linda Holmes
The standard prime-time Emmy telecast isn't until next weekend, but tonight they handed out the Creative Arts Awards, which cover everything they choose not to include in the big show. That includes lots of very important but little-recognized production categories as well as guest actors, reality programs (not reality-competition, mind you, which are separate), children's programming, and more.
The most famous winners of the night are undoubtedly Tina Fey and Justin Timberlake, who took home Outstanding Guest Actor and Outstanding Guest Actress In A Comedy, both for their performances in last season's Saturday Night Live. (She did an impression you might have heard a little bit about; he continued his well-regarded record of hosting.)
Ellen Burstyn won Outstanding Guest Actress In A Drama for her work on Law & Order: SVU, while Michael J. Fox was Outstanding Guest Actor In A Drama for his appearances on Rescue Me. (That's Fox's fifth win in eleven nominations over almost 25 years.)
But some of the other interesting news was a little lower in profile.
Victories for an already-canceled show, after the jump...
M*A*S*H, starring (among many others over the years) Loretta Swit, Wayne Rogers, McLean Stevenson, and Alan Alda, was an often rule-breaking comedy from head writer Larry Gelbart, who has passed away at 81. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)
by Linda Holmes
The Los Angeles Timesreports that Larry Gelbart died today at 81, and if you watch M*A*S*H reruns -- which a lot of you do, have, and will -- you've seen his name countless times. He wrote lots of other things -- wrote for Sid Caesar, co-wrote Tootsie, co-wrote the book for A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum -- but what he'll likely be most strongly associated with is M*A*S*H, for which he was the head writer during its first four years, which a lot of fans of the show will argue are the best ones. It's a good opportunity to take a look at this show and why it still airs multiple times a day on The Hallmark Channel and TV Land.
When the show started in the fall of 1972, All In The Family was already on the air, so it wasn't as if comedy until then had all been frothy yuks and sketch shows. (Though Gelbart wrote for Sid Caesar, so he knew plenty about that, too.) But M*A*S*H has remained more popular than All In The Family or most of the politically conscious comedies of the time -- it stays and stays, sad and funny, and as long as there are wars, it will always have a certain immediacy. (When I was young and hadn't seen the show much, I clarified with my mother that it was the Korean War and not the Vietnam War. My mother said, "It's the Korean War, but ... the mentality is very much Vietnam.")
M*A*S*H was a workplace show, a war show, a buddy show, and a romantic comedy. It was screwball, it was slapstick, it was wordplay, it was character comedy, it was banter, and it was, of course, often angry satire. It was genre-bending and rule-breaking, and it was a half-hour television comedy squarely aimed at smart and thoughtful people.
On rule-breaking, war talk, and how you do and do not lose a character, after the jump...
Ellen DeGeneres, seen here in January, has a new job. (Michael Buckner / Getty Images)
by Linda Holmes
I immediately suspected someone was punking the entire world of television journalism when the news first broke, but Fox has in fact confirmed that the new American Idol judge is Ellen DeGeneres.
Not as a guest, and not as a special appearance: She is a permanent judge; she is the new Paula Abdul. DeGeneres says of the move, "I've watched since the beginning, and I've always been a huge fan. So getting this job is a dream come true, and think of all the money I'll save from not having to text in my vote."
Initial thoughts? Well, they didn't replace Paula with anyone who's performed as a musician, and that's unfortunate. It means people who are auditioning as pop stars are working in front of a panel that includes no one who was even momentarily a pop star. On the other hand, Ellen DeGeneres is still a performer, and there are a lot of principles of performance that translate across disciplines. She's also worked extensively with other performers on her own show, and she does have a sense of what resonates with audiences. I far prefer this to either a singer with no personality or, heaven forbid, another producer type like Randy Jackson and Kara DioGuardi.
Honestly, from a viewing perspective, my only concern about Ellen is that she will be trying too hard to do comedy all the time. She has been a guest judge on So You Think You Can Dance, and while she was fun to watch, she had a lot of trouble getting away from doing funny lines that sounded like part of her comedy act and giving actual feedback. As much as Idol judges are always showing off, it works better when they are also giving an opinion -- maybe a dumb opinion, but an opinion nonetheless -- of the performance. Paula Abdul was unintentionally funny; I don't know how it affects the chemistry to add a comedian to that panel. Say what you like about Paula Abdul; she gave feedback.
In the end, the hope is obviously that this brand of lightness -- and Ellen is, absolutely, a champ at a certain kind of breezy and comfortable good humor -- will provide a balance for the more acidic stuff that tends to come from the rest of the folks on the panel. She might provide a more coherent brand of leavening, and if that happens, it will be all to the good.
One more thing: It was eleven years ago that a lot of people thought Ellen DeGeneres had utterly imploded her career after Ellen went off the air, just one season after its famous coming-out episode. But she hung around, and she was great hosting the Emmys, and she managed to stand out in a sea of talk shows, and here she is, getting what might be the most high-profile job of the new season on one of the most culturally conservative, studiously mainstream shows on television. Oh, television. You are so nutsy.
All of these aspiring models are 5'7" or shorter. This is one show's definition of diversity. (The CW)
by Linda Holmes
The number of times I would encourage you to pay attention to America's Next Top Model in any average year can usually, by my estimation, be counted on the fingers of one hand that only has one finger on it.
But tonight's two-hour season premiere -- which will be going up against So You Think You Can Dance and Glee on Fox for the froth-seeking eyeballs, and will be going up against (for its first hour) the president's health-care address for the politically oriented eyeballs -- is going where no season has gone before by admitting right out that most of the contestants are not genetically destined for traditional success in modeling.
And what's the breathlessly awaited twist? This year, all the girls are 5'7" or shorter. That's right -- 5'7"! Tiny! Wee! Miniatures! Practically able to live under a mushroom!
It has always been the case that the Top Model candidates are too short for traditional runway modeling -- third-season winner Eva Pigford (who now goes by Eva Marcille; I can't imagine why) was in the 5'6"-5'7" range. While researching a piece about the show at that time, I remember talking to a couple of modeling agents whose position on the future prospects of several of the models that season was very simple, and it amounted to this: "Pretty. But generally too short."
Well, no more. Tyra Banks is determined to lift one pocket-sized model to stardom. The CW press release claims that this season, "fourteen hopefuls prove that beauty comes in all shapes, sizes and heights." As you can see from the photo above, the season's prospects indeed range from "very thin" to "very slightly less thin," and they do indeed come in all heights across a range of at least two inches.
Brava, Tyra Banks. You are the wind beneath the wings of those with average-length wings.
What kind of high school did they attend on Freaks And Geeks? The terrifying kind. (Getty Images)
by Marc Hirsh
September is upon us, and with it comes the return of both school and the new television season. Coincidence? Maybe not! Perhaps the long-established schedules of the two connect back to our agricultural roots. I envision a world in which, having attended to the harvest in the crucial summer months, the children return to the withering glare of their teachers while the adults return to the withering glare of their television screens.
Or maybe it's just a big fat coincidence. I admit I was not raised on a farm. Still, with both venerated institutions chugging back up to full speed -- and with Glee, perhaps the most buzzed-about high-school show in some time, returning tonight -- what better time to look at the ways that television has portrayed everyone's favorite time of life? And so I share with you a (highly selective) taxonomy of television high schools.
Freaks And Geeks: High school as every worst nightmare you've ever had, ever. Judd Apatow's cultishly adored series focused on the outcasts that were usually relegated to the margins of other shows (or worse, turned into stereotypes and/or shoehorned into the type of cross-clique group of a type that never, ever exists in real life). There are times when watching it is accompanied by the uneasy sensation that you're about to wake up in a cold sweat. Let's see... Finding yourself naked in front of everyone you know? Your mother breaking up with your boyfriend for you by accident? Being put on the spot for a big test for which you haven't studied (which is essentially what happened when Nick auditioned for local band Dimension)? Discovering that your mom is dating your gym teacher?
Yep, that oughtta do it.
The noir high school, the cartoonish high school, and more, after the jump...
Here, Michaela Watkins appears as Today's Hoda Kotb with Kristen Wiig as Kathie Lee Gifford. If only she'd been less classically pretty. (NBC)
by Linda Holmes
News broke that Saturday Night Live had added two women -- Jenny Slate and Nasim Pedrad -- before it was as widely known that they had ditched Casey Wilson and Michaela Watkins. So it seemed for a brief moment like the show might be trying to increase its complement of women, which would be wise, given the departures in recent years of high-profile women including Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. That's not to mention the rise of Kristen Wiig, who now has the kind of movie career (Extract, Knocked Up, Adventureland, the upcoming Whip It) that makes you start to wonder just how long she's likely to be around.
But no -- there's no building of the female side of the cast. With the booting of Wilson and Watkins, the show will start the season with all of one woman in the nine-member full cast (Wiig), and three women making up four of the "featured" performers -- Slate, Pedrad, and Abby Elliott.
Nobody I know was particularly surprised about the dropping of Casey Wilson, who had a bumpy tenure and didn't make a particularly strong impression. Michaela Watkins, however, had a strong first season and has been the subject of much more angry chatter -- including that of Entertainment Weekly's Michael Ausiello, who has been filling his Twitter feed and column with his strong opinions about how foolish it was to give up a performer of her talents.
But I was particularly interested in this gem from Tom Shales of The Washington Post, who says this as part of a piece about how the show is still wonderful and important, no matter what anyone says:
Two new women who will have the status of featured players -- Jenny Slate and Iranian-born Nasim Pedrad -- will join the cast, not as replacements for anybody, Michaels says, although cute Casey Wilson and glamorous Michaela Watkins have concurrently left. Watkins may have been just too classically pretty to be hilarious. Anyway, the absences of Fey and Poehler will be felt.
Assorted pretty people star in the CW's new look at Melrose Place: Katie Cassidy, Shaun Sipos, Stephanie Jacobsen, Colin Egglesfield, Ashlee Simpson-Wentz, Michael Rady and Jessica Lucas. But will there be a pyramid scheme? (The CW)
by Linda Holmes
So, yes. The CW is bringing back Melrose Place, kind of, and it premieres tonight. The prevailing wisdom about the '90s-era original is that it was dully stupid until Heather Locklear arrived, at which point it became aggressively crazy, what with people ripping off wigs and blowing up buildings and hitting their heads and dying in the pool.
There is some truth behind this theory, yes. No one can deny the greatness of the Locklear addition. No one can ignore how utterly, magnificently, operatically crazy that show became, particularly in the hands of scenery-chompers like Marcia Cross and Thomas Calabro -- the latter of whom was hired to play Michael Mancini as a good husband and only later turned out to be a wonderful faithless and sociopathic nutbar (with extra nuts).
But recently, after being mercilessly seduced (hey, it's a theme!) by a deep discount at Target, I have been indulging in the old original Melrose Place -- the part of Season 1 before Locklear -- and breathlessly noting some of its unique pleasures, which deserve to be remembered. (Kind of.) The CW reboot is clearly going for late-stage Melrose, with the super-soaped-up sleaze factor, but here, I raise my glass to early-stage Melrose, complete with people who were gone really, really quickly.
1. Amy Locane's original accent. Poor Amy Locane. Cast to play Sandy, the beautiful blonde actress and Southern belle, she was the first to get the boot as the show was retooled. Who would have thought the hot blonde would be thrown out the door? And replaced with Daphne Zuniga? It's a world gone mad.
According to her Wikipedia page and her Internet Movie Database entry, Locane was born in Trenton, New Jersey, which makes perfect sense, because her southern accent was hilarious. If you could convince Scarlett O'Hara and Foghorn Leghorn to get married, this was the baby they would have had. Over the course of her 12 episodes (before she got the boot), she gradually dialed it back, which was for the best, but a little sad.
In Extract, Jason Bateman plays a factory owner. But he's played some far sketchier characters in his day. (Miramax)
by Linda Holmes
Jason Bateman, as an actor, possesses great warmth and humor, but he also plays a great con artist. In the new comedy Extract, he plays a factory owner who does a bit of scheming of his own, and if you look back over the guy's career, it really isn't a surprise.
So we wondered: Of all the slicksters and semi-slicksters he has played, who is the slickest?
Michael Bluth, Arrested Development Risk level: Low
Yes, Michael was capable of the odd caper now and then, mostly when the rest of his family forced him into it. And yes, he had questionable judgment with regard to girlfriends. But there's no malice in Michael; certainly nothing that would lead you to believe he was after your possessions.
James Cooper Ingalls, Little House On The Prairie Risk level: Very low
After the death of his biological parents, James was raised by Pa and Ma. (Bateman joined the show late in the run, as the original children aged and it became clear that you could not make an entire show about Laura and Almanzo fighting over tarragon.) If the child had ever in his life been destined for a life of crime, Pa and Ma would surely have put a stop to it.
Corrupting Ricky Schroder, Very Special Episodes, and much more, after the jump...
Tom DeLay and his partner Cheryl Burke practice for the upcoming season of Dancing With The Stars. (ABC)
by Linda Holmes
Ever since Tom DeLay signed on for this season of Dancing With The Stars, many have wondered what his foray into fancy footwork might actually look like. And so we present: the rehearsal photo.
The thing he is strapped into in this photo, by the way, is a device that the pro teachers often use to get people to stand up straight and keep their shoulders back.
It is on a day like this that a pop-culture follower wishes that someone had offered long odds a year ago that "Tom DeLay's Dancing With The Stars Rehearsal Photo" would eventually be a real thing. I am beginning to think I should look for someone who will give me hundred-to-one odds for on the equally likely "Jack Nicholson Signs On To Play Gym Teacher In High School Musical 5" for next year.
Marvel is the golden egg, and Disney is the cake company, and if you keep reading, it will all make sense, really. (Marvel Comics, iStockphoto.com)
By Glen Weldon
On Monday, the news came down. The analyses began. Jokes were joked. Freakouts were well and truly freaked.
The news: Disney acquired Marvel Comics for $4 billion. ("Acquired," which makes it sound like Marvel's a tube of Pink Glitter lip gloss that somehow ended up in Disney's purse as it sauntered out of Hot Topic. "How'd THAT get there?")
If you need a taste of what folks in the comics industry are saying about it, you can't beat The Beat,
or Journalista! The transcript of the Disney/Marvel call to investors is worth checking out, if only to remind yourself that there are people in the world who actually say things like "vertical integration," "the wheelhouse of this distribution channel" and who - willfully! repeatedly! - use "impact" as a verb.
Conventional wisdom soon congealed along these lines: Good for Disney, because Marvel's stable of heroes can help them reach boys age 8-18, a demographic that has thus far proven stoically resistant to the charms of Hannah Montana and High School Musical -- with, um, some exceptions (Hi, Jason! Stay fabulous, kiddo!). Good for Marvel, because Disney's got more distribution channels in their wheelhouse (sigh) than Cruella's got Dalmatian handmuffs.
After the jump: It's not about the comics. And yes, the Tastykake Analogy.
NBC is hoping that promoting its shows as "more colorful," as well as making ones people want to watch, will help its fortunes. The nurse drama Mercy (starring Michelle Trachtenberg, Taylor Schilling, and Jaime Lee Kirchner) is one of its limited supply of new fall offerings. (NBC)
by Linda Holmes
Expect to see the slogan "more colorful" popping up under the NBC peacock this fall. The network has decided to capitalize on the long history of the peacock and the fact that many people remember liking NBC programming at one time or another, and they're doing it by emphasizing the peacock. Everything is "more colorful," you see.
What's more, chief marketing officer John Miller says, "Our goal now is to make sure we have shows that people will want to watch."
Pardon me a moment while I bang my head against the table.
[Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.]
Not to underestimate the power of a good branding campaign, but isn't having "shows that people will want to watch" supposed to be the goal already? All the time? What is the value of a good promotional tagline if you don't have shows that people will want to watch? And while we are asking troubling questions, can you plausibly argue that your network is becoming "more colorful" as you eliminate 10:00 p.m. dramas in favor of five nights a week of Jay Leno? I realize "lower in cost" wouldn't look as good under the logo, but there's only so far you can stretch.
It's not up there with "Imagine Greater" in the world of weird rebranding campaigns, but as someone who has indeed enjoyed NBC programming from time to time (and still enjoys the Thursday night comedy block), I'm hopeful that they have more weapons to deploy than "more colorful."
The Project Runway judges weren't too impressed with Malvin Vien's chicken-egg look. (Lifetime)
by Linda Holmes
Last night's Project Runway challenge asked the designers to put together a maternity outfit for model-actress Rebecca Romijn -- who was richly pregnant with twins she had in December of 2008, which gives you an idea of just how long ago this season was filmed.
Offerings ran the gamut from the expected draped jersey dresses that have been getting women through pregnancy forever, all the way to a tailored dress that absolutely, positively made the model's pillow-belly look like a bowling ball in a bag, just as not one but two people commented to the designer that it did. There were several very strange designs the judges did not love, including a chicken-inspired look, the aforementioned bowling ball, and a very badly designed pair of shorts.
It may qualify as irony that the oldest-skewing show on Fox is Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?, featuring Jeff Foxworthy and guests like Sugar Ray Leonard. (Fox)
by Linda Holmes
Varietyis reporting on a study that indicates that broadcast television has an aging viewership, and that the median age of the live audience for broadcast networks has reached 51.
That statistic is a little misleading, however, because the median age of people who watch network shows on DVRs -- as opposed to live -- is only 40. Not surprising, but worth noting, in part because it underlines just how tricky it's getting to measure audiences at all, particularly once you try to get at demographic breakdowns. Just one example: The median age of people watching CBS's The Amazing Race time-shifted is almost thirteen years younger than the median age of people watching it live.
There are some great statistics in the article, though. Among them: Don't blame some new generation of trash-loving, MTV-nurtured types for goofiness like Fox's Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader, which has the oldest-skewing live audience on the network, with a median age of 57 -- that's only three years younger than CBS's 60 Minutes. And don't blame them for ABC's Dancing With The Stars, which is its oldest show, at 56. How I Met Your Mother is CBS's youngest-skewing show, and it still checks in at a median age of 45.
When we talked aboutHeathers as part of the Summer Of '80s Movies series, there had been news that there might be a Heathersmusical.
But now, there is to be a Heathers television show, too. If you watch the clip above (caution: language not suitable for blasting in your cubicle), in which Veronica (Winona Ryder) meets J.D. (Christian Slater), you will note that there is some darkness to the comedy here that would be difficult to replicate on television.
(That's in addition to the fact that all the characters are said to be returning, which will require either some revisionist history or a prequel, if you know what I mean.)
Still, the concept of remaking Heathers doesn't fill me with as much dread as the prospect of some other remakes. Depending on where it winds up, a TV show could certainly manage some dark comedy about high school. It would probably need a different central thrust than the bumping-off of the popular kids, simply because that doesn't seem like an arc with a long lifespan. But the gang of mean girls with the unhappy member who's involved with an outsider and harboring viciously violent tendencies? That has promise.
I'm a little puzzled by the involvement of Jenny Bicks, whose major credits are Sex And The City and Men In Trees, but I'm willing to withhold judgment. Which is better treatment, I'd point out, than most remakes receive.
Daisy Of Love is just one of the many, many dating-oriented shows VH1 has been running over the last several years. Suddenly, they seem embarrassed. (VH1)
by Linda Holmes
Let us start with this: It is not VH1's fault that Ryan Jenkins, a participant on its Megan Wants A Millionaire show, killed himself after becoming a suspect in his ex-wife's murder. They didn't cause that to happen.
But let us continue with this: For Tom Calderone, the president of VH1, to suggest to the Los Angeles Times that something inexplicably went awry, and that "this is not what [he] signed up for" in working with 51 Minds — the company that made the show, as well as The Surreal Life and Rock Of Love and others — is absurd and disingenuous, and will hold no water with anyone who actually watches his network.
There is nobody who doesn't know that they cast people on Rock Of Love (to pick just one instance) with the clear expectation that those people will engage in bizarre, exhibitionist, self-destructive behavior, probably while liquored up to within an inch of their lives. Suggesting that you figured it was just fine to populate your network with moderately crazy booze-hounds because you did everything possible to nullify the risk that this would associate you with violently crazy booze-hounds is, not to put too fine a point on it, rank hypocrisy.
The vetting process and the problem of overreacting, after the jump...
Fox has acknowledged that the "Snakes On a Cane" image you may have been seeing brief flashes of on TV — they're stitched together in the compilation clip above — was a viral marketing effort on behalf of the network's popular drama House.
And it's fitting that the image involves snakes, because if anything is in the process of consuming its own tail, it's the kind of campaign that is commonly referred to as viral marketing.
Pressing the same button too many times, and the irony of a pun, after the jump...
As big as reality TV is the rest of the time, it's particularly big during the summer — some of the biggest ratings successes of this summer have been things like America's Got Talent, Big Brother and So You Think You Can Dance.
In other words, trying to get your mug on TV isn't about to lose its popularity as a national pastime. But the aforementioned options (and some others like them) are fairly daunting: You probably don't want to lock yourself in an isolated house for several months, have eight (or more) children or become a master dressmaker who can transform car parts into clothing on Project Runway.
No, those methods are for the truly committed or the unusually talented. What about more humble aspirants? What about those of us who aren't prepared for a massive blow to our dignity? What about skipping your own show and settling for a few minutes — maybe just a few seconds — of screen time? Does an ordinary person stand a chance in a world where it seems like everybody wants to be a star?
To figure out the answer, I called Taryn Winter Brill. She's a features correspondent for Good Morning America and a former producer for Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? It's safe to say she's seen plenty of televised mugs in her day, and she was kind enough to offer a few ideas for anyone looking to make a minor splash on the small screen.
How to get your sign on television, why you shouldn't wear stripes, and the best places to be a humble man on the street, after the jump...
If Miley Cyrus and Cher went up against each other, you can probably guess who would emerge as the actual diva. (Frazer Harrison/Getty Images; Michael Loccisano/Getty Images)
by Linda Holmes
Look, I don't mean to be a baby about the word "diva," which I understand has come a long way since it used to be applied solely to majestic, operatic women. I understand that, according to many, you can now be a diva just be complaining about the temperature of your bottled water. I understand about cats that are divas, ten-year-olds that are divas -- at this point, in common parlance, it's mostly about complaining.
But in the spirit of complaining, Miley Cyrus is not a diva.
Back in 1998, when VH1 first started the "VH1 Divas" series of concerts, not everyone was a diva, but there was a certain diva-esque quality to the proceedings, in that there was a lot of royalty floating around. Aretha Franklin was there, Carole King was there -- yes, Mariah Carey, Shania Twain, and Gloria Estefan were also there, but the concept that the show contained diva-like qualities did not seem absurd.
The next year included Tina Turner, Elton John, Cher, Chaka Khan, Whitney Houston, and Mary J. Blige (among others). Other years, Diana Ross has been there, and Cyndi Lauper, and Stevie Nicks, and Debbie Harry, and Gladys Knight, and on and on.
This year's lineup, so far: Kelly Clarkson, Miley Cyrus, Adele, Leona Lewis, and Jordin Sparks. I would point out that three out of these five are competition-show winners (Clarkson and Sparks from American Idol, Lewis from The X Factor in the UK.
Now, they're promising additional names between now and September 17. Perhaps all the divas will be added later. Perhaps this is just the teaser. But at this point, it must be noted that you are not looking so much at a lineup of divas, or even a lineup of faux divas. You are looking at an actual diva's breakfast menu. Let's get serious: if you send Cher and Miley Cyrus in for a cage match, I know which one is coming out alive, and so do you.
Now if you will excuse me, I am off to write my pitch letter to VH1 for my new series: Cher And Miley Cyrus In A Series Of Cage Matches.
You know what a thunderstorm looks like, but do you know what one might sound like? Now, you can find out. (iStockphoto.com)
by Linda Holmes
As the entertainment world's post-summer, pre-fall lull continues, allow your attention to drift to the most fantastically perplexing new online offering I have seen in quite some time: TheWeatherChannelMusic.com.
That's right. As of today, you can personally own -- you can download! -- the music that tootles away in the background as The Weather Channel tells you whether to wear a jacket.
Some of it seems to be more Weather-Channel-adjacent than Weather-Channel-specific (I don't think Benny Goodman ever actually wrote for The Weather Channel). But some of it is rather surprising: they have an album called P.M. Edition Evening Romance. That means, it would seem, that when you are trying to innocently see whether it's going to rain at 7:30 in the evening, The Weather Channel is attempting to get you in the mood. It is waggling its eyebrows at you, saying, "Sure, it might rain, but if it does, there's [waggle] room for two under that umbrella." (I encourage you to listen to, for instance, the sample of "Ooo Baby Baby," and tell me you do not feel romantically coerced.)
This is perhaps the greatest example of an unmet need you didn't even know was unmet until they told you. Imagine how long it would have taken you, had you just been asked to brainstorm about what's missing from your MP3 player, to come up with "the music they play in the background on The Weather Channel." But now you know.
ABC's Shark Tank bears the primary hallmark of unreliable unscripted entertainment: the name of Mark Burnett. Burnett has been producing Survivor since 2000, which is widely assumed to give him a sort of instant credibility (in this context, I'm saying -- credibility in this context).
But the rest of his history only underscores the absolute slot-machine-pull that is the experience of watching a Burnett show. Some of his shows are fun, like Survivor itself. Some of them, like The Apprentice, are fun for one season and then dull and horrible after that. Some of them are very popular in spite of having no detectable merit: Think Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?, a show that almost wrote its own dismissive jokes.
Many of his shows, however, have been unmemorable flops. Remember On The Lot? Of course not. The Restaurant? The Casino? (At one point, Burnett seemed intent on creating a series of establishment-based reality shows; I kept waiting for The Laundromat, The Bank, and perhaps The Mostly Deserted Bookstore.)
We consider the placement of Shark Tank in the Burnett oeuvre, and discuss turkey basters, after the jump...
Tony Danza is all set to teach in a Philadelphia high school, and you can watch him do it on television. (Stephen Lovekin / Getty Images)
by Linda Holmes
There are as many Tony Danza jokes as there are stars in the sky: Who's The Boss jokes, "Keep On Truckin'" tattoo jokes, accent jokes, '80s-hair jokes, Taxi jokes...let's put those aside.
Those are not the reasons it's a bad idea for him to teach at a Philadelphia high school for A&E's new reality show, Teach. (Yes, this is a real thing.)
Danza has apparently studied education -- this isn't something he just came up with. And his on-screen persona doesn't mean he's a dumb guy. The ridiculousness of this idea has nothing to do with that, or with any assumption that having him co-teach a class is going to harm the students or deprive them of an education.
The superintendent says what shouldn't be said, after the jump...
This look on the face of Project Runway mentor Tim Gunn is not good news for this season six designer. (Mike Yarish / Lifetime Networks)
by Linda Holmes
After a very long wait, Project Runway -- which, remember, has left Bravo for Lifetime -- returns with its sixth season tonight. Season five ended in October 2008, so there's a lot of pent-up enthusiasm among people who are fans of the show, and nothing feeds pent-up enthusiasm like a little taste of the marvelously warm and funny Tim Gunn. Gunn is the show's teacher, mentor, skeptical-frowner, and source of a hearty cry of "Rally!" when a harried contestant really needs it.
Last night, he dropped by The Daily Show, where Jon Stewart chatted him up about what makes Runway so good, what the show's relocation to Los Angeles from New York has meant, and the fact that Gunn is about to show up in a Marvel comic.
Tonight marks the return of Bravo's Top Chef, a maddeningly inconsistent show that can be (1) solidly classy and semi-educational, when people make really good food in interesting ways; (2) entertainingly goofy, when people try hard and their food comes out as undistinguished goo; (3) tame and boring, when people are very earnest about yet another seared scallop; or (4) trashy and irritating, when people fight and swear at each other.
And in keeping with this tendency to be either a lot of fun or really embarrassing, this season is going to Vegas.
In the clip above, the new batch of participants take on the first quickfire challenge, which is the mise-en-place relay. Now, without saying too much about how this goes -- the preview clip doesn't show very much of it -- it doesn't speak well of this set of contestants that four of them put together can't come up with the idea that if you are going to try to be the person who can shuck clams the fastest, you should have shucked a clam before at some point in your life, ever.
"Let's have the non-clam-shucker shuck the clams!" Let us all now clap sarcastically.
Project Runway is just one of the many shows returning this fall that we could chat about on today's Talk Of The Nation. (Timothy A. Clary / Getty Images)
by Linda Holmes
One reason we're a little slow posting-wise today is that I'm preparing to show up on Talk Of The Nation this afternoon (along with The Man Who Spoils Everything In A Good Way, Michael Ausiello) to talk about fall television. It should be in the second hour of the show -- that means 3:00 p.m. in lots of places, but you can find the schedule for a broadcast near you right here.
Remember, this is a call-in show, so if you've always wanted to ask me to do long division in my head, here's your chance. (Warning: They will not actually put you on the radio to ask me to do long division in my head.)
Tom DeLay is going on Dancing With The Stars, and there's more precedent for the move than you might think. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
by Linda Holmes
Until now, the answer to the question, "What do Melissa Joan Hart of Sabrina The Teenage Witch and former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay have in common?" was probably "Not much." But now, they are both set to appear on the upcoming season of Dancing With The Stars.
The potential for this to be highly bizarre is not to be underestimated. Do not think only of DeLay doing the regular tango, which I like to think of as the dirty dancing of the very sophisticated. Think of him doing the tango to "Beat It" or the Star Wars theme -- because in seasons past this show has set tangos to both.
You get the idea. If DeLay sticks around, this could turn into a fairly spectacular spectacle. (And he's throwing himself into it, too, if his Web site is any indication.)
Still, DeLay is hardly the first politician (or former politician) to dabble in pop culture -- not by a long shot. Let's take a look back at some other "classics."
Arsenio, Nixon, Tip, and other single-namers, after the jump...
Salvatore (Bryan Batt) and Don (Jon Hamm) enjoy dinner with some new friends during the season premiere of AMC's Mad Men. (AMC)
by Linda Holmes
Last night's third-season premiere of Mad Men was called "Out Of Town," and while critic Alan Sepinwall has put forth a very viable theory that what ties it together is the concept of wishes, to me, it was an episode about travel -- or, really, about displacement.
More specifics and a call for your thoughts, after the jump...
You can read more here about the winner of Ukraine's Got Talent, a woman named Kseniya Simonova, but first, check out the clip, in which she tells a World War II story with sand and light. It is, to say the least, remarkable.
Kate Winslet won the Oscar for Best Actress earlier this year. You may soon see her move to television. (Alberto E. Rodriguez / Getty Images)
by Linda Holmes
Varietyreports that HBO may be about to pick up a miniseries adaptation of Mildred Pierce, starring Kate Winslet -- and written and directed by Todd Haynes, who made I'm Not There and Far From Heaven.
It's an interesting progression: television used to be primarily a place for people who hadn't yet made movies but hoped they eventually would, and then it became an equally welcoming place for people who have in the past made movies, and now, more and more, it's a perfectly viable place for people who remain bankable movie stars and filmmakers.
As Sunday night's premiere of the very cinematic Mad Men approaches, that line between television and film only gets finer.
You might have seen less of the presentation of a few of this year's Emmys -- but that plan was shot down after intense criticism. (Vince Bucci / Getty Images Entertainment)
by Linda Holmes
What have we learned from the dust-up over the Emmys' proposal to time-shift and slightly edit down the presentations of awards in eight categories, by presenting them just before the show and editing the footage a little? We have learned that people who are nominated for Emmys are very sensitive about the perceived slights in the way those awards are not only handed out, but televised. And now, they're getting their way.
The TV Academy has dropped the time-shifting plan, reportedly under threats from various guilds that if the awards in question weren't shown live -- and if every moment of clapping, hugging, standing around, and thanking your lawyer weren't televised -- the Academy would be punished with hefty license fees to use clips in future telecasts.
On the one hand, it seems ungracious to complain that not enough time is being spent televising yourself and those like you getting awards. It is a universe in which most of us simply don't live, where you can complain about the terms under which an award that's supposed to be an honor must be not only given but publicized. So much for "it's an honor just being nominated." Or even "It's an honor just actually winning the award."
But on the other hand, as previously discussed, how stupid was it to choose writers of dramas as one of eight awards you were seemingly demoting? It's all well and good to ask people not to take things as personal slights, but nerves are raw in Hollywood as much as they are everywhere else, and this is exactly how writers have often felt anyway -- that they are underappreciated compared to actors and directors. It's just about the most foolish and politically ham-handed way this could have been approached, for my money, and it's no surprise that it blew up in their faces.
From left to right: Rich Sommer, Elisabeth Moss, Aaron Staton, Bryan Batt, Vincent Kartheiser, Michael Gladis, and Christina Hendricks are part of the Mad Men cast that's raising the stakes for visually satisfying television. (AMC)
by Linda Holmes
The fawning over the attention to detail on AMC's Mad Men, which returns for a third season on Sunday night, can get a little precious, there's no question. When The New York Times spends an entire article discussing the creative process of simulating period cocktails and House Beautiful offers Mad Men-inspired decorating tips -- including a lead on a great typewriter for $140, because who wouldn't want that taking up some room? -- it feels a little fussy.
The thing is: it's all deserved, because this is the show that has made it harder than ever to claim that television is cheap-looking because it's television, and that it cannot be visually imaginative or interesting. It's the first show to build its reputation on its perfect look since HDTV came along and made that perfect look a much more important element of a high-end hour-long drama.
NBC decided to preview the fall comedy Community (featuring Gillian Jacobs and Joel McHale) online. Results were mixed. (Lewis Jacobs / NBC)
by Linda Holmes
One of the fall pilots currently getting a decent amount of positive attention is NBC's Community, a comedy starring Joel McHale, the very funny host of the E! wrap-up show The Soup.
Trying to ramp up the positive word of mouth, NBC decided to post the pilot online for a few days to give people a chance to see it early. In keeping with the idea that you should start and end with the good stuff, let's sandwich the bad news in between the pieces of good news.
The limitations of social media, the importance of functionality, and the pleasures of a good joke, after the jump...
When last seen, Grey's Anatomy's Izzie (Katherine Heigl) wasn't feeling well and was being tended to by her boyfriend Alex (Justin Chambers). Network television could use some TLC, too. (ABC)
by Linda Holmes
A month from now, during the week of Sept. 8, we'll be diving into the fall TV season. Yes, summer is full of a lot more new programming than it used to be, and seasons are far more fluid. But there's still a fall season, and once we hit the CW premieres on Sept. 8 and the regular-season kickoff of Fox's much-anticipated Glee on Sept. 9, it will be underway.
And yes, the top wish is "better shows." The top wish is always "better shows." Every show could be good, and the top wish would still be ... "better shows." Because as a viewer, that's what you always want. That's the easy part. And even aside from "better shows," there are a few things -- particularly at the networks -- that would help the season look a little more promising.
1. Portion control. There really aren't that many network reality shows that air during the regular season. But the ones that are on are on way too much. Even if you find Dancing With The Stars to be frothy and fun, the results show is consistently one of the least necessary hours of television around. And The Biggest Loser doesn't need to be two hours every single week. The amount of real estate these things occupy is massive, not so much because they proliferate as because they expand.
And by the way, when they eventually return, the bloated American Idol and Bachelor franchises could, no matter how you feel about their continued existence, benefit from a chop. Remember that the Idol results show used to be half an hour. There's no reason it couldn't be half an hour again. And if you remove the parts of The Bachelor that start with "Coming Up," it would be about 12 minutes long.
Two-minute overruns, saving Tim Gunn, and more, after the jump...
The reexamination of the best representations of teen angst continues! We have discussed John Hughes and Heathers, and now Hulu has found all 19 episodes of My So-Called Life.
Online archives of old shows can lead you right into a dark vortex of time-wasting (a friend and I recently stayed online late at night watching the famous "Intervention" episode of Party Of Five when we could have been doing more productive things, like...not watching it), but in this case, this particular show is so smart and so well-written that you don't even need to feel guilty.
Honestly, it's all worth it just so I can show you that clip up there, which is six seconds long and contains one of my favorite things ever said on television by an unhappy adolescent.
Of course, if you're looking for a nostalgia trip that's not so artistically sound, there's always the first 13 episodes of 21 Jump Street.
Judy Garland, seen here in 1942, is the star of the day at Turner Classic Movies. (Eric Carpenter / Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
by Linda Holmes
A quick programming note: August is "Summer Under The Stars" month at Turner Classic Movies. All month, they're spotlighting a different actor every day. They've already done James Coburn, Harold Lloyd, Marion Davies, James Mason, and Henry Fonda. And today, it's Judy Garland.
As of this writing, a run of her musicals with Mickey Rooney is already underway, and will wrap up with Strike Up The Band at 10:45 a.m. They'll be showing several musicals she made with Gene Kelly (including For Me And My Gal, Summer Stock, and The Pirate) as well as In The Good Old Summertime, the musical version of the same story in The Shop Around The Corner and You've Got Mail. It's certainly not a comprehensive retrospective, but there's lots of good stuff for fans.
Check out today's schedule, and look out for some powerhouse days coming up, including Bette Davis on Saturday, Cary Grant on Sunday, Audrey Hepburn on Tuesday, Glark Gable on Wednesday...there's a lot to see. The site for the series is annoying to navigate, but will reveal, if you are patient, who's featured for the rest of the month. Sidney Poitier, Elvis Presley, Gene Hackman, John Wayne...a little something for everyone.
Paula Abdul has been on American Idol since day one. Is she out the door? (Jason Merritt / Getty Images)
by Linda Holmes
I think many of us who follow this sort of thing assumed that the ongoing back-and-forth between Paula Abdul and American Idol over her contract for the upcoming season was so much highly visible posturing. But maybe not.
Tonight, Abdul took to her Twitter feed to announce, "With sadness in my heart, I've decided not to return to Idol." At first, it seemed like this too might be posturing, but then Fox made a statement seemingly accepting her tweet of resignation. With the season's auditions starting within days, this is either a massive and high-risk attempt at bluff-calling on one or both sides, or she's really going.
If she does, that wouldn't seem to be good for anybody. It's not good for her, because she isn't as valuable anywhere else as she is on that show. And it's not good for the show, because for all her periodic incoherence, she had -- not a a heart of gold, but perhaps a heart of mashed potatoes, the fluffy and inoffensively comforting nature of which provided balance to the more aggressive judging from the rest of the panel (which will now apparently be made up of Simon Cowell, Randy Jackson, and Kara DioGuardi, who was new last year).
Moreover, she's the only one on the panel with a legitimate -- if brief -- history as a pop star. The Paula Abdul moment, around the time she had a hit with"Straight Up," may have been a short one, but it existed. Now, they're left with a panel of industry people -- people who do production and songwriting, but who haven't had success taking the stage to perform as solo artists, which is, after all, what the winner is supposed to do. Granted, worrying about the credibility of the American Idol judging panel is a little like worrying about the cleanliness of your hovel, but nevertheless, it doesn't help.
It remains to be seen whether the next 48 hours will suddenly bring more flexibility on someone's part. But when Abdul says she's leaving and it's a done deal, and her employer says she's leaving and it's a done deal, it takes a real optimist (or pessimist, depending on your position regarding Paula Abdul) (understanding that you may well not have one) to assume you'll be seeing her judge this year's crop of caterwaulers.
(You can read another take on this from Andrew Wallenstein of The Hollywood Reporterhere.)
Colette Burson (here with her husband and Hung co-creator Dmitry Lipkin) raised a few eyebrows with her comments about the scarcity of women who are pretty, funny, and over 35. (Jason Merritt / Getty Images)
by Linda Holmes
Well, that was an unfortunate thing to say.
As part of a New York Times Magazineprofile of Anne Heche, who appears on the HBO drama Hung, the show's co-creator, Colette Burson, talked about how lucky they were to cast Heche and said, "We auditioned a lot of people...It is incredibly difficult to find beautiful, talented, funny women over 35."
Zoiks.
After finding herself on the receiving end of a lot of criticism, Burson has now reached out to the blog Women And Hollywood to clarify her remarks. (Since I mentioned her comments on Twitter this morning, it seemed fair to discuss her follow-up.)
She says that what she meant to say was that there are so few roles for beautiful, talented, funny women over 35 that they've all quit in frustration, so they don't go out on auditions anymore and you can't get anyone to come out.
Upon reading it, it struck me that her explanation would make a lot more sense if she'd said, "We couldn't find people to audition," rather than "We auditioned a lot of people." The way she said it, it doesn't seem to speak to a shortage of prospects so much as a conclusion that plenty of people showed up, but they weren't talented enough, funny enough, or pretty enough.
And, strikingly, she sticks to her guns on the fact that the combination of pretty and funny is inherently rare, adding that it's "talked about in Hollywood." Certainly, pretty (in Hollywood terms) is rare, and really funny is rare, so mathematically, that would make pretty and funny rare. But then Burson says "blonde and funny" is also rare.
Blonde and funny? What is the possible rational connection between being blonde and being funny? If natural blondes dye their hair, are they funnier? Can you take a brunette and make her a blonde and make her a funny blonde? Is it genetic? Cultural? What is the theory under which brunettes are funnier than blondes?
It's undoubtedly good for business that Burson spoke out, and you can't blame her for shifting the focus to the lack of roles for women over 35, which is certainly real. And she seems to have some history taking gender politics seriously in her work (that link goes to her frank discussion of a movie she wrote about the sex lives of teenage girls, by the way).
But it leaves some interesting questions open about what's part of the solution and what's part of the problem, when it comes to casting for women who are -- as she put it -- over 35.
Mad Men Yourself allows you to create a personalized cartoon you, which can look however you'd like. (Created at MadMenYourself.com)
by Linda Holmes
If you've seen your Facebook or Twitter feed over the last week turn into a patchwork of little cartoon heads, you're probably experiencing the effects of Mad Men Yourself, an AMC-sponsored online application that creates a personal, Mad Men-ized version of you -- or of what you wish you were. (I was honest enough to give myself coffee, anyway, as you can see.)
The site has been very successful; the icons it generates have been popping up all over social media. And it turns out that, to create this terrific online doodad, AMC turned to someone who was already making great Mad Men online doodads: an artist who goes by the name Dyna Moe and has been creating a beautiful set of drawings called Mad Men Illustrated for quite some time.
As she explained in a recent interview, Dyna didn't start out as some ordinary fan of the show; she knew a cast member and so wasn't a total stranger. Still, what she was doing wasn't authorized by anyone. But rather than send her the cease-and-desist she admits she half-expected, the show decided to adopt her and get her to work for them, and now they have one of the most clever and quickly adopted marketing tricks for a TV show that has gone by in quite some time.
It's particularly interesting to see AMC go down this road, because the network got itself into a dust-up about a year ago when it forced Twitter to suspend the accounts that fans had set up in the names of Mad Men characters. The network eventually backtracked, but it was a forehead-slappingly dumb example of alienating your best resource, which is your superfans.
It appears that between last summer and now, somebody has learned something about unauthorized riffs on your show that are done by people who love your show: before you send an attorney's letter ordering them to stop stepping on your toes, consider asking them to dance. They might say yes, and it will be more fun for everybody.
On HBO's Hung, Thomas Jane plays a man who finds his world of privilege abruptly upended. (HBO)
by Mark Blankenship
Most of the time, I use the term "guilty pleasure" as a genre label. Like...I don't feel ashamed that I still listen to Ace Of Base, but I call "The Sign" a "guilty pleasure" because I know that's the cheesy, content-free sector of pop culture where it was born.
But when it comes to HBO's new comedy Hung, about a broke schoolteacher whose large physical endowment leads him to a sideline job as a hooker, my enjoyment produces actual guilt. There's never been a show that makes me feel so mean.
The Man takes a fall and gets very little sympathy, after the jump...
Why yes, that is a cake depicting a zombie emerging from a grave, being assembled on TV. Why do you ask? (TLC)
by Linda Holmes
Have you ever looked at something and thought to yourself, "Is that a thing now? I didn't know that was a thing."
Perfect example: Cake shows. I'm not talking about figurative cake shows — sweet, airy shows, or shows with many layers. I'm not being metaphorical here. I'm saying: cake shows. Shows about cake.
On Ace Of Cakes, which moves to a new time slot tonight at 10 p.m. on the Food Network, Duff Goldman of Baltimore's Charm City Cakes works with a large crew to create wildly elaborate cakes.
He made one recently for Alaska's 50th birthday, and one for the cast of Lost, which involved sculpting all the cast members individually out of edible paste. (They were, I must say, surprisingly recognizable.)
But Duff is far from alone.
More shows, the good cakes and the bad cakes, and the "logic" of spending this kind of money on something you're just going to eat, after the jump...
In news that seems like a rewind from April, HBO is developing a half-hour comedy about an older woman who's a former feminist icon. This one comes from Buffy The Vampire Slayer scribe Marti Noxon and will star Diane Keaton.
Back in April, word was that the network was working on a show called Women's Studies, about a "former feminist It girl" (consider the question: does feminism have It girls?) who's now a women's studies professor. This new one is about a "feminist icon" who decides to "reignite the movement by starting a sexually explicit magazine for women." The other show was to come from Daily Show/Colbert Report producer Ben Karlin and star Julie White.
It's hard to imagine HBO going forward with both of these shows given their similarities, but interesting to see them working on two projects about aging feminists in a period of a little over three months. (One would hope the Noxon/Keaton show will be a little fresher than some of the comments from Noxon about the role of leg hair in feminist theory and how women have become "more sexual" since the Kinsey report in 1953; it's much too early for genuine concern.)
HBO may have believed it was winding up behind the curve of female-led comedy, given that it doesn't really have anything right now that would compete with, say, Weeds on Showtime. But either way, chalk up another film actress finding her way to a regular job heading up a TV show.
In support of the release of This Is Spinal Tap on Blu-ray and their album Back From The Dead (which came out in June), the members of Spinal Tap appeared with Jon Stewart last night on The Daily Show. They performed "Gimme Some Money" and "(Funky) Sex Farm", and in the clip above, they explain to Stewart what they've been up to.
On last night's Tonight Show With Conan O'Brien, William Shatner showed up to provide an interpretation of the opening of Sarah Palin's farewell speech, which (intentionally, I think) embraced a lot of Alaska-specific imagery that, if you're not from Alaska, sounded rather mystical. You could certainly give the same treatment to many -- if not most -- speeches delivered in grand settings, but here, the collision of the natural wonder of Alaska and William Shatner and bongos does make for an effective moment of poetry.
Those who were infatuated with the very charming first episode of Fox's Glee, which premiered in May, have been anxiously awaiting the show's return this fall. And now, this preview clip emerges, showing Mercedes (Amber Riley) performing "Bust Your Windows." It's catchy and flashy, but I find myself wondering...is it corny enough?
My concern about Glee has always been whether it will be able to maintain its adorably cheesy tone for any period of time. In order to be able to sell a bunch of people nerding out over "Don't Stop Believin'," you have to stay in the zone. It works for an hour, but what about a full season? I worry that this is too straight-faced; that it verges on going for actually cool, instead of geekily cool. Perhaps I'm worrying too much; what do you think?
Mary McNamara, television critic for the Los Angeles Times, argues today that television offers women better roles than film, making it crazy for a actress — her example is Katherine Heigl — to leave TV and make movies.
An artistic reason to remain in television? It's a world gone mad!
Problem with the thesis? A look at the evidence, after the jump...
The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, known colloquially as GLAAD, puts together something it calls a Network Responsibility Index -- a yearly report that measures how the various TV networks represent gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trangender people on the various networks. This year's report just came out, and it's an interesting bit of reading.
Of the broadcast networks, ABC and the CW received "Good" scores. Fox was marked "Adequate," while NBC and CBS earned a "Failing" grade.
A note about methodology: The report takes into account the substance of portrayals, but only up to a point. Much of a network's score, it turns out, is based on the simple visibility of LGBT characters.
So ABC gets credit for the story of Callie, Grey's Anatomy's bisexual doctor, while the CW gets credit for the transgender contestant on America's Next Top Model. It's not an award for heroism, necessarily, is all I'm saying.
On the cable side, HBO was the clear winner (vampires count!), emerging as "Good." Showtime earned the same ranking, though with a lower score, while networks including Lifetime and FX were "Adequate" and A&E and TBS were "Failing."
Dig deeper, and you'll find an analysis of the racial composition of the gay and lesbian characters, as well as the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender breakdowns. (Which leads, in the text of the report, to repeated pleas for more "lesbian impressions," which just means more lesbians on television, not ... lesbian impressions, if you see my point.)
The report also looks ahead at where there are opportunities for each network to improve its score. CBS, the authors point out, could have some gay people on scripted shows, rather than just on reality series like Survivor and The Amazing Race.
Things have not been going well for NBC's prime-time schedule — not well at all. That's part of why they're undertaking the Great Jay Leno Experiment in the fall to begin with.
So it's no surprise to anyone that NBC Entertainment is parting company with co-chairman Ben Silverman, who's headed off to create a new production company with IAC, Barry Diller's media company. (Diller has had a very long broadcast-TV career at ABC, Fox, and USA.)
The new head of the entertainment division will be Jeff Gaspin, who's been running the cable side.
Silverman's tendency to say silly-sounding things has made him far more of a gossip fixture than most network executives — check out the fun they've had with him at NYMag.com over the years. Gaspin is going to have to start putting his foot in it very quickly if he's going to continue the tradition.
Mad Men: Wannabe ad men are among those submitting photos to AMC for its walk-on contest. AMC
by Linda Holmes
Think it's easy to look like the fancy people on Mad Men? Think again.
AMC is currently running a contest in which fans of the show can submit their photos and try to win a walk-on role in Season 3 (premiering August 14).
Some of them are pretty close: This lady could pass for a Mad Men wife. Other ones don't make a lot of sense: Who is this guy, in the Sterling Cooper universe?
Current contest leaders (as of this writing) include Leather Sofa Joe, Va Va Va Voom Joie, and Mr. Hart, who definitely looks like the repressed decade in which he lives is getting the better of him. Congratulations also go out to Cupcake Vanessa, who went all out with props.
As you review the back-and-forth over the late-night television battleground, you might wonder: What's the point? For me, when it's fun, a late-night show is like last night's Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, where he and Blues Traveler's John Popper played a little harmonica. There's nothing to it, really, except that if you have John Popper on your show, you should want to play harmonica with him, and it's that weird, warmly game quality that's really working for Fallon right now.
Also great from last night? Fallon's bit where members of the audience throw hot dogs through the mouths of cutouts of famous people in the news. You kind of had to be there.
Incidentally, if you had told me six months ago I'd be waving the flag for Jimmy Fallon, I would have had you checked for psychosis-inducing spider bites.
If you grew up in the 1980s and had cable (or a friend with cable), then there's a good chance that you spent your afternoons with a Canadian actor whose name you almost certainly didn't know. But you knew Barth, and you knew El Capitano, and you knew Senator Lance Prevert, and you knew Ross Ewich.
In other words, you knew Les Lye, who died yesterday at the age of 84. Lye may have started out as the only cast member of You Can't Do That On Television whose age didn't start with a 1 (at least until Abby Hagyard was brought in to play the female characters), but he fit in perfectly. In a show ostensibly run by kids, adults were hypocritical, disgusting, tyrannical and just plain ineffective, and Lye jumped into his role with gusto.
It's not something just anyone would have gotten right.
A weird show, just the right approach, that young Canadian in the clip above, and more, after the jump...
Jay Leno: The excitement of his construction webcam is something to behold. NBC
by Linda Holmes
The Jay Leno Show premieres on September 14, and NBC has rolled out the inevitable web site to support it.
So far, the original content consists primarily of a blog from a band member who's trying to lose ten pounds before the show starts and a blog from Leno's stand-in. But by far, the greatest thing about the site is the live webcam of the giant studio that is in the process of being built.
Now, rather suspiciously, as I was preparing to post this entry, the thing went offline entirely. This means that their plan for a 24/7 feed has gone awry, OR something started happening that they couldn't show (striptease?), OR they are secretly tapping my computer and were aware that I was about to blow the lid off the webcam's greatness and overload their servers with eager eyeballs. Either way, I will not be dissuaded. I'm sure it will be back soon. Even when it's offline, it's mesmerizing -- for a brief moment, it was showing what was clearly someone's computer screen, as the mouse was moved around. Bizarre! Satisfying!
Based on what was showing when last it was available, the webcam has been placed in what appears to be an unassuming corner, behind a broom handle and a bunch of junk. Yesterday, there was sound: specifically, there was a constant, high-pitched, ear-splitting chirp, as if a cricket had ingested three gallons of coffee and then been run through a paper shredder over and over again. It seemed vaguely hostile, as if NBC were saying, "Oh, you want to see the studio, do you? How about this? EEEEP! EEEEP! EEEEP! Did you like that, smart-aleck? Now go away, we are working."
Today, the chirp has apparently been resolved, or the cricket eaten by a lizard, or something of that nature.
What can you see on the webcam? Well, you can see a large cart of some kind. And you can see some motorized doohickeys that could be floor polishers or small, sentient robots. Now and then, there is a burst of excitement as a person ambles into view. And then out of view. And you cry out softly, "Come back!" But he does not. He has important things to do.
The show claims that on Monday night, it will premiere what it is calling "our 'live' streaming show" -- with the "live" in quotation marks, as if it will be not actually live, but a thing that many people like to call live. It will be "live," in the same way that certain "bands" play "rock and roll."
I will give the show credit for unfailing optimism, however. At the bottom of the page, it says, "Because it's a shared connection, every 15-20 minutes you'll be asked to confirm that you're still watching." They just want you to know this, in case you feel inconvenienced as you enter Hour Seven of your viewing marathon of the Mostly Dormant Construction Site Webcam And Prescription-Strength Horse Tranquilizer.
If you increasingly find yourself irritated by the number of commercials airing during your favorite broadcast show, you may not be imagining it. In 2008, the number of minutes of commercials shown on the broadcast networks during prime time increased 3.5 percent over 2007.
Granted, 3.5 percent may not be a huge number. But that's 3.5 percent in one year.
According to this chart, there has been an increase of almost 20 percent in total prime-time commercial minutes on broadcast networks since 2000. Since 2000! Not since Texaco Star Theater or The Honeymooners -- we're talking about 20 percent more broadcast commercial minutes just since the year Survivor premiered.
[IMPORTANT CAVEAT: These are totals across all networks, not per-hour averages. That means that the simple fact that MyNetworkTV, which is counted here, didn't exist in 2000 could affect the numbers -- although at that time, what's now the CW was split into the WB and UPN. What I'm saying is that what constitutes "broadcast television" shifts in various ways that make longer-term comparisons tougher to interpret than they seem. Averages -- especially per-hour network-specific averages -- would be be more meaningful.]
For people who watch their TV live, this means (naturally) that you're sitting through more ads than you used to. But even if you watch everything on a DVR and fast-forward through the commercials, the increased minutes given over to advertising aren't available for content.
Cable is getting squeezed as well -- witness Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner's recent dust-up with AMC over its desire to cut show length by two minutes to fit in more ads. (Weiner won, kind of, though the network got its extra two minutes of ads anyway.)
Just another lovely day in the economic life of broadcast television in 2009.
When Katherine Heigl was on The Late Show With David Letterman in support of The Ugly Truth this week, he asked her about her return to Grey's Anatomy, and she told him (it's at about the 1:25 mark in this clip) that her very first day back was a seventeen-hour day. "Which I think is cruel and mean," she said with exaggerated somberness, before moving on to talk about how it was great to be back, she misses former co-star T.R. Knight, and so forth. If it were anyone else, mentioning that she thought seventeen hours was a rather long first day, it would have gotten no attention whatsoever.
But she is not anyone else. She is Katherine Heigl.
Sure, there's a presidential press conference about health care tonight that will be covered by most of your major broadcast and news networks (but not Fox). For TV viewers, this is notable mostly because it's bumping Wipeout from 8:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Oh, the humanity.
(Fox, incidentally, has decided to stick with So You Think You Can Dance. Perhaps the president should have tried a cha-cha.)
But why stop at several broadcast networks and several news networks? I don't want to tell basic cable how to live, but I have some humble advice if they'd like to get in on the health-care-debate action. And they wouldn't have to venture far from the shows they make anyway.
TLC The Effect Of Insurance Regulation On The Woman With Eight Arms
Big Brother: Horrifying and offensive rants like the recent one from Braden Bacha (center) have become par for the course -- and it's hard to believe that's an accident. CBS
by Linda Holmes
CBS's Big Brother is never the kind of show anyone feels particularly good about watching. It's dumb, it's dull, and unlike Survivor or even American Idol, it focuses on a group of people genuinely lying around doing nothing. But as disreputable as it is most of the time, it's rarely been quite as disreputable as it is right now.
The first contestant to go home was evicted on Thursday night. Surfer Braden Bacha looked, if you watched the TV show, to be a guy who was tossed out because he wasn't terribly well-liked, because he was perceived as shifty, or just because power was being thrown around somewhat haphazardly as it so often is.
What you would never have known from watching the show -- you would never have known it at all -- is that shortly before he was booted, Bacha went on an intense and racially driven tirade in which he hurled slurs at two other contestants and told one of them -- who's half-African-American and half-Japanese, incidentally -- to "go to back to Mexico."
No, this is not something they are actually trying to hide. We'll talk about why, after the jump...
For the last few weeks, the NBC line on Conan O'Brien's takeover of The Tonight Show has been that, while he had lost some total viewers as compared to Jay Leno, he was doing better in the younger demographics that the networks prioritized -- he had lowered the average age of the audience by about ten years, they pointed out.
Now, things are getting worse.
How it looks, and whether it really matters, after the jump...
Two And A Half Men: Is this just like what happened to The Dark Knight? We think not. CBS
by Linda Holmes
My jaw absolutely dropped when I read this analysis of the Emmy nominations, which begins like this:
When cult cable series "Flight of the Conchords" snags a best series Emmy nomination and the most-watched comedy in America, CBS' "Two and Half Men," loses out, TV academy voters are willfully thumbing their noses at mass appeal.
It seems the Emmys have adopted the TV equivalent of the Academy Awards' smaller-film fixation that has lifted critical darlings to Oscar glory over such box-office hits as "The Dark Knight."
I'm sorry to appear momentarily gobsmacked, but: WHAT?
Is the argument here that the failure to nominate Two And A Half Men -- while, it should be noted, still nominating its two main actors (Charlie Sheen and Jon Cryer) -- is the equivalent of the near-shutout of The Dark Knight, one of the best-reviewed movies of last year, in every major category except one?
REALLY?
It's true that Flight Of The Conchords is a lower-profile comedy. So is Weeds. Entourage is kind of in the middle -- yes, it's pay cable, but it's very much an established brand. But there are seven nominees for Outstanding Comedy Series this year, and the other four are The Office, 30 Rock, Family Guy, and How I Met Your Mother. This is hardly a snubbing of mass appeal in favor of the television equivalent of Kate Winslet's illiterate Nazi adventures in The Reader.
Comparing the "snub" of Two And A Half Men to the Oscar snubs of The Dark Knight and WALL-E last year is entirely absurd. Those weren't considered snubs simply because the movies were popular. Nobody is going to write this year about the Oscar snubbing of the second Transformers movie or Paul Blart: Mall Cop.
We look more closely at the nominations, after the jump...
Well, it's about time:How I Met Your Mother nabs an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Comedy Series. CBS
by Linda Holmes
For me, the most surprising Emmy nomination of the day (here's the list of major nominations) is Simon Baker for The Mentalist, who nudged James Spader out of the Lead Actor In A Drama category. It just goes to show you, I think, how much networks are struggling right now and how much of a premium there is on headlining a new network show that's actually successful. Other than that switcheroo, the other five nominees were, indeed, exactly the same as last year.
Also: No Piven! No Piven! Jeremy Piven lost his spot in Supporting Actor In A Comedy, and bothJack McBrayer and Tracy Morgan were nominated for 30 Rock. I never, ever would have guessed that Piven's spot would be lost before Kevin Dillon's, but that's why I don't put down money on these predictions. Perhaps the "mercury poisoning" publicity didn't reflect well on him.
Other surprises?
Surprises, my Category Of Shame, and more, after the jump...
Jeremy Piven: You'd better start preparing yourself right now. Michael Buckner/Getty Images
by Linda Holmes
Lead Actor, Comedy
Just like Lead Actress in a Comedy, this category is not crowded, simply owing to the fact that it's not a boom time for comedies like it is for dramas. There just aren't that many guys clawing for these six nominations, and there are even fewer who have realistic hopes.
Alec Baldwin: Obviously. Steve Carell: Definitely. Tony Shalhoub: Given that he's been nominated every year since 2003, you'd think so. Charlie Sheen: Probably. So that leaves two.
There seems to be a growing consensus that Jim Parsons is likely to be nominated for The Big Bang Theory, which, as we discussed on Monday, is one of the few comedies that seems to have some spark of life at the moment. Even people who dislike that show often like Parsons in it (that was my reaction to the pilot back when the show started -- I hated it, but thought he was by far the least bad thing about it), so it certainly seems plausible.
Lee Pace was nominated last year for Pushing Daisies, but that show slipped so far under the radar this year -- and since it's canceled, it no longer has the "root root root" factor that may have led people to support Pace as a way to support the show -- that a nomination for him would really surprise me.
If the two guys from Flight Of The Conchords, Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie, could be nominated as a pair, they might be a good pick, but I'm not sure there's enough momentum behind either of them individually.
Zach Braff? Eh, maybe. Zachary Levi in Chuck? Ideally, yes. Realistically, no. No, the most likely outcome, to me, is David Duchovny for Californication. Not a very exciting nomination, but a pretty safe one.
Emmy actresses: Is a thoroughly goofy ghost/cancer story enough to bring Grey's Anatomy star Katherine Heigl back into the Emmy fold? ABC
by Linda Holmes
Our peek at the Emmys continues today with a look at the actresses. As you'll see, some of these are pretty easy to call, while others just make you scratch your head.
Lead Actress In A Comedy
The thing about this category is that there just aren't that many plausible contenders, compared to other categories. The number of high-profile comedies has shrunk, the number with female leads is relatively low, and as a result, there's not a huge amount of realistic competition.
Last year's nominees were Tina Fey for 30 Rock, Christina Applegate for the (now-canceled) Samantha Who?, America Ferrara for Ugly Betty, Julia Louis-Dreyfus for The New Adventures Of Old Christine, and Mary-Louise Parker for Weeds. Given that there's another slot opening that will let one other person into the race, it's hard to imagine any of those women -- all of whom, in different ways, have pretty distinguished reputations -- being bumped.
So who's getting the sixth slot? Could be a Desperate Housewives lady. People like Felicity Huffman. I don't sense that Amy Poehler made enough of an impression on Parks & Recreation, but she's got an awful lot of goodwill built up, so I wouldn't rule it out.
But my guess is Toni Collette of The United States Of Tara. She's playing a person with multiple personalities on a show written by Diablo Cody, and I think the show may well get nudged out of the running for Comedy Series. Movie actresses who come in and helm pay-cable shows are the big guns in this kind of category, and Collette is exactly the kind of person who tends to be nominated.
Looking at some of those who are on other folks' lists, Sarah Silverman is a possibility, but it seems like if she were going to be nominated, it would have been last year. Debra Messing has been inexplicably haunting the Emmys for years, but The Starter Wife doesn't have the steam to get her back in the game, I don't think. And nobody is getting nominated for In The Motherhood.
The drama leads and the supporting actresses, after the jump...
Last night, while waiting for Big Brother 11 to come on -- I mean, while waiting for NOVA, which turned out not to be on CBS, much to my surprise -- a friend and I saw this utterly hilarious Andy Rooney rant about fruit at the end of 60 Minutes. We laughed a little, and then more, and then at the end, I said, "Was that just ON?" I swore at the time I would write about it today, and then I promptly forgot.
Fortunately, others remembered, and my memory was jogged by its appearance at the Sling.com blog. So with a hat-tip to them, here is the Andy Rooney Fruit Rant.
Here is my challenge to you: Describe the point of this segment in ten words or less. What point is Andy Rooney making? Discuss.
Richard Hatch: He did not persuade a judge to free him for the purposes of being on Survivor. But he still has his 2000 victory to look back on. Getty Images
by Linda Holmes
So it turns out that original Survivor winner Richard Hatch -- who served about three years in federal prison for tax evasion and is almost done with his sentence -- won't be allowed to leave home confinement early to go to Samoa to be on yet another edition of the show (he's already been on one "All-Stars" version).
The judge had apparently previously noted that Hatch seemed to need, among other things, "mental health counseling." It seems that tribal council with Jeff Probst does not qualify.
For followers of the criminal justice system, this is a data point regarding what is and isn't adequate to earn early release. For followers of Survivor, it mostly has the effect of rather emphatically announcing the format of the season that's about to start filming: they are bringing back past contestants again, as Reality Blurred reported yesterday. (An email confirming as much wound up filed with Hatch's court papers, OOPS.)
Surely, CBS intended some massive announcement of the plan to bring back past players in some format not involving court proceedings, so they must be a little disappointed.
So we are in for another All-Star season, which will occur as only the fourth round of the show after the (very overrated) "Fans vs. Favorites" season that ran in the spring of 2008. It is much too soon for this.
For reality-show gossip-likers, note that this is all being commented on at great length by Survivor: Palau's Coby Archa, who most recently sought attention by sending out a press release announcing that he and a handful of other obscure former Survivors were fasting for Darfur for three entire days. It was a press release I received but somehow managed not to mention, as he was joined entirely by people I barely remembered, including Kimberly Mullen -- most famous for finishing in 15th place in the spring of 2005.
(For those of you who follow the show: Kim was the showmance girlfriend of Coconut Jeff, who rolled his ankle and had to quit. Oh, the good old days.) (If you read Coby's comments about all this -- which Reality Blurred has quoted extensively -- you will note that he is still very angry about not being an "All-Star" himself, despite his missed-it-by-that-much ninth-place finish.)
So, only three seasons after the last time they returned to the Well Of Past Survivors, they will be returning again. But apparently, they will do so without Richard Hatch.
No Reservations: In this clip from tonight's season premiere, Anthony Bourdain confronts a very, very large Chilean hot dog.
by Linda Holmes
Anthony Bourdain is one of the fairest people you will ever see on television. Sometimes blunt and nasty, yes. But very fair. When he's a judge on Top Chef, he congratulates you if you're good and lets you have it if you're bad. He's not determined to hate everything just so he can make a quip at your expense; he'll give you a decent chance.
You wouldn't think this quality would be particular relevant on his Travel Channel show, No Reservations (which returns tonight), but in fact, it's critical.
The surprisingly fair Anthony Bourdain, after the jump...
Emmy season:The Office had an outstanding year and should be a shoo-in for another nomination. Beyond that, things get more complicated. NBC
by Linda Holmes
Emmy nominations will be out Thursday, and they'll look a little different this year: in ten major categories, there will be six nominees instead of five. Those categories include the awards for best drama and comedy, as well as lead and supporting actors and actresses in each. Today, we'll take a peek at how the show categories shape up, and over the next couple of days, we'll check in on actresses and actors.
Comedy
The Office and 30 Rock are probably locks. 30 Rock had a so-so year and The Office had an outstanding year, for my money, which is a bit of a reversal from recent seasons, but they both have such solid reputations and well-regarded casts that there's no way either gets locked out.
I also suspect Entourage is in, because its ability to win awards and nominations has been remarkably robust, in spite of a constant apparent erosion of the ratio of people who like it to people who find it insufferable and obnoxious. Award-giving bodies react to change with the blink-and-you-miss-it agility of the three-toed sloth, so I doubt Entourage's souring reputation has caught up with it quite yet.
The rest of comedy and all of drama, after the jump...
With apologies for the NPH-heavy coverage of recent weeks (hey, it's not my fault he just hosted the Tonys and is making a deal to host the Emmys; I don't make the news), tonight brings Monkey See Favorite Neil Patrick Harris and his love of magic to Bravo's Top Chef Masters.
So far, Masters has been, as Randy Jackson would put it on American Idol, just all right for me. If you haven't been watching, it's a variation on Top Chef where, instead of a large pool of unknown chefs being eliminated one by one, it's a series of groups of four well-known chefs who compete for charity, and the winners of those four-person matches will come together at the end of the season for a sort of Tournament of Champions.
The stakes are very low, because while there's are brief flashes of grasping professional jealousy, for the most part, the chefs who compete have given themselves over to the idea that it's all in fun. And nothing kills the pressure of a competitive reality show like people who are genuinely doing it all in fun. It's intriguing at times to see that even people who are well-regarded geniuses don't always have everything perfectly under control -- their gelatin doesn't jell, or their ice cream doesn't freeze, or what have you -- but it feels awfully mellow and airy for people who are used to the pressure and pacing of Top Chef Classic, and you never really get to know anyone in a single episode.
But a dinner cooked at the Magic Castle? A dinner that, presumably, is going to involve magic in some fundamental way? That sounds very, very watchable indeed.
The Great American Road Trip: This is host Reno Collier. He looks so happy; how could it not be great? NBC
by Linda Holmes
Tonight, NBC premieres The Great American Road Trip, a competition show in which seven families pile into RVs and drive around the country competing in "a medley of humorous challenges."
So basically, if your favorite part of travel is the part where you pull into a Perkins after eleven hours of driving and you can't even order a simple plate of meatloaf without listening to an argument at the next table about whether Frank Junior (also known as "Weasel") did or did not crack a CD case belonging to his broken-hearted sister Madison, who is almost too devastated to continue text-messaging her friends at home? This is the show for you!
The first tip-off about this show's unique "greatness" is that its publicity insists that it is "humorous and relatable." Who ever heard of advertising something as "relatable"? It's the sort of thing you'd see in a pitch -- "Please make this show I thought up; people will find it humorous and relatable!" -- but in marketing materials, it sounds weirdly bullying. "HEY! OUR SHOW IS RELATABLE!"
During the trip, the families will encounter famous (hilarious and relatable) landmarks, "ranging from the World's Largest Chair to a sneaker the size of a car." If you've ever heard the famous Weird Al song, "The Biggest Ball Of Twine In Minnesota," you are probably humming it to yourself right now. What could be funnier (or more relatable) than a family standing near a huge sneaker? Ha ha ha, oh, how we will clutch our sides with laughter.
And then there are the families themselves. And that's where it gets terrifying.
Spiritual exploration: Is there a reason one would not use a game show as a way to choose a religious path? Hard to believe. iStockphoto.com
by Linda Holmes
It may come as a comfort, if you are poised on the edge of despair about the possibility of a T.J. Hooker remake, to consider that appalling mass-entertainment ideas are apparently something that unites people around the world. Unites them in the spirit of ... you know, despair.
It is in this spirit that I pass along the news that Turkey will soon have a game show that will take 10 atheists and hook them up with four spiritual guides — a monk, a priest, a rabbi, and an imam — who will try to convert them.
If you are successfully converted, you win, and you get the prize of a pilgrimage to Tibet, the Vatican, Jerusalem or Mecca. Depending. Now, I suppose you also win the prize of belief/salvation, provided that you think of belief/salvation as game-show prizes.
My favorite part is this: "A team of theologians will ensure that the atheists are truly non-believers and are not just seeking fame or a free holiday."
I admit to some level of curiosity about how this will be accomplished. I suppose you could try a lengthy interview, but it seems like it would be easier to just abruptly lock the person in a large box with, say, a lion, and see whether they in any way indicate an expectation of, or a hope for, divine intervention.
Good news, bad news: The availability of ABC shows like Grey's Anatomy on Hulu strengthens the service for the moment, but is it getting too powerful for its own good?
by Linda Holmes
As we discussed in late April, ABC has joined up with Fox and NBC to provide content through Hulu.com, and that kicks off today with Grey's Anatomy.
The announcement I saw promises that other shows will follow, although distressingly, the ones mentioned -- which apparently are not an exhaustive list -- include I Survived A Japanese Game Show but not the far superior Wipeout.
(Is there to be no Wipeout? That seems impossible.)
The big question, of course, is whether Hulu is, as it believes itself to be, a consumer bonanza, or whether it's just a force that's now so big and so inevitably harmful to traditional revenue models that it's going to drive cable companies to develop ways to drive online TV right back into the controlling arms of your cable provider.
For the time being, however, you can get all your tumor-hallucinating dead-boyfriend drama without getting up from your computer.
After last year's very bad decision to turn the Emmy telecast over to the five nominated reality-show hosts -- all of whom flopped, with the exception of the always-lovely Tom Bergeron -- the show planners seem to have regained their senses: Reports say they're trying to make a deal with Neil Patrick Harris to host the show in September.
While he didn't get to do as much at the Tony Awards as I was hoping -- with the exception of the fantastic closing number, which you can watch above -- Harris was a lovely host and would undoubtedly make the Emmys a whole lot more watchable.
He also probably won't be upstaged this time by a guy who gets clocked by the scenery, so that's good news.
Make that deal, Emmy planners! If I have to liveblog three hours of Ryan Seacrest, I will be very upset.
It's a slow news day in Cleveland. How slow? Slow enough not only to spend a solid two minutes (out of what, 22 minutes of newscast?) on a non-story about a non-attack by a non-bear, but to take the time to make props and costumes. Who knew that WJW even had an arts and crafts department? Special kudos to Cleveland Metroparks naturalist Carly Martin for her insights into bear scat, and to the reporter who provided such an enthusiastic simulation of ursine climbing.
On last night's edition of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart spoke to Mike Kim, the author of Escaping North Korea: Defiance And Hope In The World's Most Repressive Country. Kim spent four years helping North Korean refugees who were leaving the country through China, along a "modern-day underground railroad" that stretches 6,000 miles from Pyongyang to Bangkok, Thailand.
It's not uncommon for Jon Stewart to have interesting guests, or guests with great stories, but I think from the show's perspective, this particular conversation was almost a Platonic ideal of a Daily Show interview.
Why getting your news from The Daily Show is more complicated than it sounds, after the jump...
Tonight marks the return of PBS's Nova scienceNOW (hey, that's how they type it; I don't know), the science magazine show featuring host (and astrophysicist, and Stewart/Colbert favorite) Neil deGrasse Tyson.
The season premiere includes a discussion of synthetic diamonds; a visit with Luis von Ahn, the computer scientist who developed those little pictures of squiggly letters that you have to type in to prove you're not a robot; a look back at the anthrax attacks of several years ago; and -- best of all -- a close-up look at AutoTune, including the AutoTuning of Tyson's own very bad singing. The von Ahn and AutoTune segments are both utterly charming, and Tyson is a marvelous sport.
Check your local PBS listings, but Nova scienceNOW is generally airing alongside the regular Nova season premiere, "Musical Minds," which Oliver Sacks discussed on The Daily Show last night. I haven't seen "Musical Minds" yet, but I have read the Sacks book Musicophilia on which it is based, and The New York Times, while expressing some reservations, calls it "full of fascinating information."
So if you're the kind of person who likes to sit down for a little nerd viewing, this might be your lucky evening.
The remote DVR: The Supreme Court yesterday cleared the way for a new cable option. iStockphoto.com
by Linda Holmes
One of the few drawbacks of watching television on a DVR rather than live is that you have to have a physical device -- either a separate product like a TiVo or a hard drive within your cable box -- that stores the programs you want to watch. Yesterday, that drawback got a step closer to elimination when the Supreme Court declined to consider a legal challenge from content providers to a plan for the "remote DVR."
Cablevision in New York is preparing to launch a program where, instead of a hard drive in your house, your recorded programs would be stored on your cable company's remote servers, so you wouldn't have to have a physical hard drive. Cablevision says it will make DVR use easier and less expensive.
And the network and cable content providers seem to agree, given that they're pursuing a legal challenge, claiming that it's one thing for you to record and save their programs in your house for personal use (not something they always admitted you had any right to do, by the way), but it's another thing for Cablevision to save the programs for you offsite. That, they say, violates their copyright.
(Interestingly, it looks like one of the important features of this program is that Cablevision won't simply store one central copy of something that can be accessed by any of the people who have asked to record it. In order to preserve this idea that it's just off-site storage and not unlicensed on-demand programming, they have to store a separate identical copy of the same show for each subscriber.)
The broadcasters lost the last round of maneuvering and asked the Supreme Court to intervene, which, yesterday, it decided not to do. That means Cablevision gets to roll out the remote-DVR option for its subscribers later this year.
That could mean big changes for the existing viewership model.
The possible effects of remote storage and the hard life of a broadcast (or even cable) network, after the jump...
The Mentalist: The CBS drama, starring Simon Baker, is only one of several shows to benefit from CBS's "Project LENO." CBS
by Linda Holmes
This has really been an oddly bruising week on the pop-culture beat on levels both significant and petty, between exhausting saturation coverage of Jon and Kate, three much-discussed celebrity deaths, the giant box-office haul for the almost universally despised Transformers movie, and general (and repeated) stupidity relating to Perez Hilton, about whom I always prefer to hear (and say) as little as possible.
But eventually, you have to kind of return to normalcy, and today, we find the march toward the fall television season continuing with CBS's announcement of what it's calling "Project LENO" (har har, it stands for Late prime Enhanced News Opportunity," geddit?).
This is its attempt to cooperate with its affiliate stations to promote the 10 p.m. dramas -- The Mentalist, The Good Wife, Numbers, and the C.S.I.s both Miami and N.Y. -- that it will be putting up against Jay Leno.
Expect a lot more of this nonsense as the fall draws closer. Dear CBS: If you're going to be cute and come up with fake acronyms, you can do better than that. "Late prime Enhanced News Opportunity"? That is Large Annoyance Made Easy.
Farrah Fawcett: In 1977, her hair was iconic. But she did some real acting as well. Hulton Archive/Getty Images
by Linda Holmes
I kind of loved Farrah Fawcett, even though the entire first phase of her career -- the one where she became a giant superstar -- missed me, for the most part. I didn't watch Charlie's Angels, so most of my exposure to her came from the uphill battle for respectability she fought once she had left behind what had been gleefully and obnoxiously called "jiggle TV."
On television, this really started with The Burning Bed in 1984, a harrowing, multiple-Emmy-nominated TV movie about an abused woman that was made at a time when the TV movie was a much more common format than it is now. She was nominated for her work in it, though by then, she had also been on stage in Extremities, an entirely different harrowing story about an abused woman. She went on to a well-received performance in the TV version of that, as well.
But I won't lie: the thing from this era that I remember best is Small Sacrifices, the TV adaptation of Ann Rule's true-crime book about Diane Downs, a woman who shot her kids and claimed to have been attacked by a stranger. It shows up now and then on cable -- I assume it will again soon -- and Fawcett is thoroughly creepy and unsettling in it. It took her a long way away from the victim roles in Extremities and The Burning Bed.
She kept on acting and working -- like in The Apostle with Robert Duvall, for which she was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award, and in a short run on Spin City -- but she also suffered some indignities, like a famously odd interview with David Letterman in 1997. Ultimately, she became a bit of a well-known oddball, which tends to endear people to me.
What's particularly sad about Farrah Fawcett is that she might have been a great candidate to have her own cable drama if that option had been there for her in, say, the early 1990s, the way it has become such a great option for Glenn Close, Kyra Sedgwick, and Holly Hunter. She was a good, often really interesting actress, and a powerfully popular television presence. I think she would have made a go of it. In a lot of ways, those dramas are the TV movies of this decade, but they offer non-ingenue actresses a lot more choices.
At the time Farrah Fawcett became a poster girl -- literally -- and at the time her hair became a lot more famous than "the Rachel" ever was, she didn't seem a likely candidate to ever act with Robert Duvall or be nominated for a decent haul of awards. As hard a pop-culture box as "TV sex symbol" can be to bust out of now, it was even harder when Farrah Fawcett did it.
Before you get too excited about the notion that maybe we are throwing away our televisions entirely, keep in mind that cable isn't sharing in the networks' misery. USA is humming along with Burn Notice and Royal Pains, TNT is getting good numbers for things like The Closer, and you've probably heard that HBO got its best ratings since The Sopranos when it brought back True Blood for a second season.
And of course, this week, there's been you-know-who and you-know-who plus you-know-what, but as we've discussed in the past, that tends to be a fairly transitory thing.
But for the networks, this week has to have been downright alarming.
Bad strategy and simple freedom of choice, after the jump...
I have fond memories of the old ABC Superstars shows, which would gather athletes from different sports and have them compete against each other in events like swimming and, most famously, an obstacle course. In the above clip, Joe Frazier swims against, among others, Jean-Claude Killy. It's kind of great. (Though not for Frazier, who unfortunately can't swim.)
I didn't even know until I was reading up on the show that it ran long enough for more recent editions to be won by Jason Sehorn. But now, ABC brings Superstars back tonight, with a twist. Of course.
And what kind of twist? A twist involving random B-list famous people. Of course.
A reminder about network television: NBC won an important demographic on Friday night...sort of. iStockphoto.com
by Linda Holmes
If you consult the very useful web site TV By The Numbers, you'll see that the Friday night ratings race among the 18-49 demographic was won by NBC, with its Chopping Block (is that still on?) and two hours of Dateline NBC.
But it's not quite that simple. If you use the numbers from the Cynopsis newsletter, also a very helpful daily bulletin about ratings as well as lots of other things, you'll see a different result.
Jon & Kate Plus 8: What does it all mean? Maybe not as much as you think. Discovery Health Channel
by Linda Holmes
It took exactly one highly rated episode of Jon & Kate Plus Eight for the conclusion to be reached that they were the new king and queen of TLC, and possibly monarchs of all TV. When the news broke that almost 10 million people watched the season premiere, we were off to the races.
I really wasn't sure where to put this video in which several test subjects voluntarily play the new Grey's Anatomy game for the Wii. Television? Games? Unrelenting horror?
Just...I'm going to let them explain it as they go, because if I told you how weird it is, you wouldn't believe me anyway. Take it away, College Humor.
Lost: What it's worth to you in Blu-ray depends on how much you're all about looks. Buena Vista Home Entertainment
by Linda Holmes
The minute you acquire a Blu-ray player, the jokes begin: "It's a good thing I can watch Dude, Where's My Car? on Blu-ray! How else would I appreciate the glorious visuals?" "How will I ever appreciate the cinematography of Miss Congeniality 2: Armed And Fabulous while I can only see it in standard definition?"
Not everything benefits from being seen in beautiful HD, but if there's one TV show that really is different with a high-quality picture, it's probably Lost.
What the Blu-ray release has to offer, including saving your place, after the jump...
As part of the run-up to the Emmy nominations, The Hollywood Reporter's web site has been running a series of videos in which various showrunners -- including Mad Men's Matthew Weiner, True Blood's Alan Ball, and Grey's Anatomy's Shonda Rhimes chitchat about various aspects of production, from network standards to product placement.
In the clip above, they express frustration about the proliferation of spoilers -- leaked information about what's going to happen on episodes that haven't aired yet. (This is indeed the traditional definition of a spoiler; it is only much more recently that the term has, for some, taken on the new meaning of "information about a show that you personally haven't chosen to watch yet and perhaps never will, but it would be great if nobody would say anything about it in case you eventually do.")
Their varied reactions are fascinating. Ball (along with The Office creator Greg Daniels) is annoyed by the effect of spoiler-hunters on the logistics of filming, Weiner seems affronted by the disruption of his creative process when people don't digest the show at the pace he intends, and Shonda Rhimes -- Shonda Rhimes, of all people -- professes to just not understand, as she puts it, "why spoilers make people happy."
Weiner goes on to insist that people don't actually enjoy reading spoilers; they are only fun for the people who are doing the revealing, who are in fact making everyone else miserable. That's true in the case of people being involuntarily spoiled (a major problem for, in particular, all online communities where serial shows are discussed).
But there is also a massive, thriving community of people desperate to be voluntarily spoiled, and it's fruitless to pretend that part of the challenge isn't that you're trying to defeat simple curiosity -- the fact that people are impatient and don't like waiting.
Furthermore, if you were looking for a defender of spoiler-free living, you would not logically go to Shonda Rhimes.
The tease and the long history of string-pulling, after the jump...
AMC has been rolling out news about the third season of Mad Men, and the details include a season premiere on August 16, preceded by a Season 2 marathon all day on August 10.
But if you've never seen this much-discussed, Emmy-winning show, you can get a taste of the pilot online -- that's it, at the top of the post. All of Season 1 is currently available On Demand (depending on your provider and so forth), and Season 2 will be available On Demand later in the summer. You can bet your smoke-filled conference room that Mad Men will grab another stack of Emmy nominations when they come out on July 16, so if you want to judge for yourself whether it deserves all the hype, this is the time.
Josh Holloway If you were watching him on Lost right now, you'd be distracted by trying to count individual beard hairs. Trust me. ABC
by Linda Holmes
So today is digital switchover day, when local stations will shut off their analog signals, leaving those who get over-the-air broadcasts either (1) in really bad shape, if they don't have digital receivers; (2) in intermediate shape, if they have digital receivers and so-so signals in their area; or (3) much better off, if they get good reception of digital signals and will now get cable-quality reception through their rabbit ears.
But in addition to the end of analog, this transition could potentially mean a lot more people watching in high-definition, because some of those new digital broadcast signals are in HD. As someone who only relatively recently got a decent-sized HDTV, I look forward to seeing some other (relative) newbies experiencing The Summer Of Stubble.
Once you start looking at high-definition television (and you know this if you're used to it), you realize that people on screen have been, relatively speaking, vague blobs of flesh-colored light until now. I've been watching the first season of Lost on BluRay (more on this next week), and I'm here to tell you, I have seen some stubble. Some close-up, jump-off-the-screen, highly attenuated stubble.
It's no wonder that there is now special "HDTV makeup" for people who are going to be seen on high-definition television, because it is no joke that it is unbelievably unforgiving. It is spurned-lover unforgiving. It is embittered-relative unforgiving.
Eyebrow hairs, facial injuries, and more things that look crazy terrifying in HD, after the jump...
Mythical species: If seeing what's attractive about Adam Lambert is what it takes to be a cougar, then cougars don't exist. Frazer Harrison/Getty Images
by Linda Holmes
It was this Newsweek piece, entitled "Why Cougars Crave 'Idol' Runner-Up Adam Lambert," that finally broke me.
It is time for the word "cougar" to go, preferably instantly.
The Newsweek writer, Joan Raymond, spends paragraph upon paragraph explaining why she and her "cougar court" spent an American Idol season sweating over the heavily hyped, extremely popular, out-without-having-ever-been-in Lambert. How could this be? How could it possibly be that they, as non-teenagers, could be interested in an American Idol who, at 27 years old, was young enough to be ... their nephew, if they had a significantly older sister?
When I first heard it, "cougar" was a crude slam; I think I first noticed it on the "Aldrin Justice" episode of How I Met Your Mother, which aired in October 2006, though this ABC story was chatting it up in 2005, and it surely is much older than that.
But interestingly, as the ABC story notes, it began as a putdown — a term of ridicule for older women who went home from bars with "whoever was left."
We could go through the sexual politics, the cultural baggage that comes with older men and younger women vs. younger men and older women. We could explain why seeing women gleefully referring to themselves the same way Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris) did on How I Met Your Mother is kind of disheartening.
But really, it's not necessary. The term "cougar" can be easily retired, simply on the grounds that it's so stupid.
Crazy fans, too many sex therapists, and never calling yourself "punk rock," after the jump...
It's very, very rare for rumors about the resurrection of old shows to come true, but here's one that did: Comedy Central has ordered 26 new episodes of Futurama — last canceled all the way back in 2003 — for a whole new season.
The show's delightfully wackadoo sense of humor — you can sample it in the clip above, which cobbles together all the opening-title screens, with their little notes like "Featuring Gratuitous Alien Nudity" — will undoubtedly return with creator Matt Groening.
But that's not all: According to The Hollywood Reporter, Groening is bringing the entire voice cast and the bulk of the writers back with him.
Futurama's die-hard fans have hung in a long time; it's a big payoff for them. Chalk up another victory for unconventional scheduling/viewing arrangements, because you can bet that without DVDs, the proliferation of cable channels, and the Internet (to keep the fans talking to each other), this resurrection probably wouldn't be happening.
That's real dancing: Choreographer Jean Marc Genereux, a professional ballroom dancer and choreographer, teaches a routine with his wife and partner, Frances Mousseau. Kelsey McNeal/Fox
by Joe Reid
Chances are, if your circle of friends contains even a few avid summer-TV watchers, you've been encouraged to watch So You Think You Can Dance. The American Idol-style dance competition has been steadily growing in popularity over the last four summers -- so much so that it's making a leap to Fox's fall schedule in September -- and its fans tend to be proselytizers.
Whoops, looks like you've got one right here.
The easiest way to win a Dance convert (says the zealot) is to describe it as "'American Idol, but better." Lots of people watch Idol but do so while holding their noses: it's cheesy, it's corporate, it's soulless, it's amateur hour, and the judges have no earthly idea what they're talking about.
And that's coming from yours truly, who actually likes the show.
A Dance fan will offer no such caveats; ask them why they watch the show, and even the most hardened, cynical ironists will end up using words like "beauty," "technique," and "artistic" within three sentences.
So with the fifth season about to kick into high gear with tonight's first competition episode, you may be asking what is it about this glitzy, commercial show that gets TV fans discussing "artistry" in the middle of June? Count off with me while I offer eight reasons:
1. The threshold of success is much lower. That doesn't mean expectations aren't high -- quite the opposite, particularly if contemporary choreographer/frequent judge Mia Michaels has any say about it. But the winner of So You Think You Can Dance receives the title of America's Favorite Dancer, a cash prize, and...not much else.
No contract with 19 Entertainment. No Kelly Clarkson-sized profitability expectations. America isn't really in the business of crowning superstar dancers. They might actually become very successful -- a role in Step Up 3D, a Christina Aguilera music video, a Broadway show -- but because that success comes without a media spotlight, the judgery gets to be less preoccupied with marketability and focus on the dancing.
The rest of the list and some illustrative clips, after the jump...
Okay, so Bradley Cooper (fresh off The Hangover and right on the edge of becoming a giant movie star) is maybe going to take the Dirk Benedict part in the upcoming The A-Team movie. And Liam Neeson is in talks to replace George Peppard.
And then the Varietypiece throws in the fact that, you know, they haven't quite figured out who's going to replace Mr. T as B.A. Baracus.
Now, it occurs to me that this is a fairly serious problem. In a baby-name book I saw once, it was argued that you can't give your baby certain names if they are overly strongly associated with one famous person. The chapter was called, "There's Only One Arsenio."
They could very easily have called it "There's Only One Mr. T." (Well, they could have if there were more of a threat of anyone, ever, actually naming a baby "Mr. T.")
So where do you begin looking for Mr. T replacements? Nobody is kind of like Mr. T. Nobody is the new Mr. T. Nobody captures the spirit of Mr. T. It becomes increasingly apparent that Mr. T is Mr. T, and he's the only Mr. T there's ever going to be.
Nevertheless, I am prepared to step forward with several ideas. You are welcome, Hollywood.
1. Mickey Rourke.
Based on that clip, you can see that B.A. is physically powerful, he dresses badly, and he doesn't make any sense. It's a perfect fit. Mickey Rourke is vaguely nutsy, he's aggressively unique, and he certainly has the requisite experience with bombs. (Hotcha!)
More ideas I am generously prepared to share, after the jump...
You know, there are sayings in the theater. The show must go on, and so forth.
Another one of them emerged from last night's Tony Awards, and it's this: Whenever it takes five minutes to sort out a tech issue at the beginning of, say, a live-blog, you can guarantee that those will be the five minutes during which Bret Michaels, lead singer of Poison, will be standing his ground instead of retreating and will get conked on the head by a descending stage segment.
You can sort of see the other guys run back behind what turns out to be the problematic piece of scenery the minute the music stops, because they clearly remember from rehearsal that it's time to hustle and get out of the way. Michaels, however, was enjoying his moment (probably unlikely to appear on the Tonys too many times in the future, even before this happened), and he forgot to dash behind the backdrop. Gotta wave to the fans! Give 'em a wave! Love you!
[BONK.]
(His publicist seems to be suggesting he's okay and even hoped to "hit some after-parties," and he didn't break his nose, don't worry.)
The other notable thing, I think, is that while she clearly didn't have any idea what was happening, Stockard Channing managed to launch into "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" in a manner that unavoidably comes off like she's giving you her best exasperated "Aaaanyway..."
Best headline goes to the Times-Picayune, for this: "Opening the Tony Awards, Bret Michaels of Poison chews scenery on Broadway."
Stephen Colbert: His USO tour is certainly not all talk, as you can see from what's about to happen to him here. USO
by Linda Holmes
Stephen Colbert will be broadcasting The Colbert Report from Iraq all this week while on a tour with the USO, and he's not wasting any time getting down to business.
As you can see, Colbert has gotten a military haircut in solidarity with the troops he's visiting. (He really did go through with it, too -- he is not, in this photo, about to leap from the chair and yell, "Psych!") The show, which, as you can see, features Colbert in a camouflage business suit, will air tonight on Comedy Central at 11:30 p.m.
The Tony Awards: This handsome fellow is your host, Neil Patrick Harris. CBS
by Linda Holmes
You probably know that Neil Patrick Harris is one of the Official Favorite People Of Monkey See, and we're just terribly excited that he's hosting The Tony Awards on Sunday night.
So I will be joined by regular Monkey See contributor Marc Hirsh for Sunday night's telecast. We are both, shall we say, theater enjoyers but not necessarily theater nerds, so we hope you'll come and appreciate it as a singing, dancing barrel of fun, which is what we're hoping for.
Check out the list of people who are scheduled to appear: Dolly Parton, Elton John, Liza Minnelli, and Poison. COME ON, people. That's entertainment.
If nothing else, you'll want to be here in case former American Idol contestant Constantine Maroulis wins a Tony for his performance in Rock Of Ages, because my head will truly explode.
Sunday night, 8:00 p.m., be there or be...watching reruns, and nobody wants that.
Marriage television: Fox apparently forgot what happened the last time they tried a show about arranging marriages. iStockphoto.com
by Linda Holmes
I realize that practically nobody watched the disastrous 2003 Fox show about arranged marriages, Married By America, and for good reason. It was atrocious, stupid, boring, and completely anticlimactic, since in the end, nobody got married. I would never have watched it myself except that I was being paid to write about it at the time.
But now, Fox is back at it, developing a show called I Married A Stranger, which is essentially the same show, but worse. Worse! Last time, your family and friends just picked the fiancé, and you had to go off and live together. It was at least up to you whether to get married.
This time, the family and friends pick the person, and you don't meet him until you're standing at the altar, where you're expected to go through with it right then.
Let's get this out of the way: it's an odious, offensive, revolting, entirely meritless idea from any point of view that respects marriage, men, women, or relationships. This, we know. This debate does not need having.
What's insane is that back in 2003, it also turned out to be bad television. I don't expect Fox to refrain from making it because it's so tacky. But you'd think they might remember that it was unbelievably dull. This was not a guilty pleasure; this was a non-pleasure.
I guess there really is no well so laden with frogs and muck that you can't go back for another sip.
If you're like me (okay, at least in this regard), you may have managed to make it through your entire childhood without ever seeing an episode of Rhoda.
For reasons unknown, Rhoda, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Bob Newhart Show were distinctly absent from the batch of sitcoms that I watched every day after school, unlike Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, The Jeffersons and Taxi.
Lord, how I watched me some Taxi growing up.
Rhoda, on the other hand, has been akin to a myth seen only in fleeting, multicolor-headscarfed glimpses, which means that I approached the recent DVD release of Rhoda Season One with a completely fresh perspective.
Fashion aside -- also a theme song that manages to incorporate both tuba and wah-wah guitar, which, seriously: very impressive -- there's not a lot to date the show 35 years after the fact.
It's very well-made. It's still funny. And certain things that were probably meant to be borderline-shocking at the time -- such as the fact that Joe, Rhoda's soon-to-be-husband, was a divorced father -- were presented and dealt with in such a way that a modern viewer wouldn't even know they were once issues.
There are, however, two things that date the show, both of which are inadvertently showcased in "I'll Be Loving You, Sometimes," the third episode of the show's five-year run. And it all starts with the clip up at the top.
In this scene, Joe, who started dating Rhoda not long after she returned to New York from Minneapolis in the first episode, tells Rhoda that he loves her. And what's the response from the live studio audience?
Nothing. No "ooooh!"s. No gasps. Not a "Wooo!" to be heard. Nothing. The audience simply let the scene play out and laughed at the jokes.
Compare that scene to this one 20 years later on Friends, in which the audience is a little more, I don't know, vocal.
Burn Notice: If you're all ready for tonight's third-season premiere, you're well ahead of me. USA Network
by Linda Holmes
Tonight is the third-season premiere of USA's Burn Notice, a critically acclaimed show that has been crucial in the growth of the network's reputation as a genuine source of original scripted programs.
Please don't tell me what happens. Or what has happened since the pilot.
Because, in keeping with the great migration toward unconventional viewing habits, I've just started watching it. (I bought it online myself; you can also get it on DVD, if you are so inclined. And there have been marathons on USA the last two days, but it's already too late to get in on that action in a useful way.)
If you're not familiar with the premise, Jeffrey Donovan plays Michael Westen, a spy who wakes up one day to find that he's been basically banished -- not just fired as a spy, but wiped off the map of creditworthiness and so forth -- for reasons unknown. ("Burned," you see.)
So now he has all his spy skills, a beautiful associate (Gabrielle Anwar), and his old friend Sam Axe (Bruce Campbell). But no money and no job and no way to survive except -- you guessed it -- by his wits. The result, which makes him basically a very driven, very overqualified private investigator in Miami, is utterly delightful (so far), with exactly the kind of wry, self-aware narration that I very nearly demand in a show of this kind.
At least that's how things are as of the early part of the first season; if he's been abducted by aliens since then, or he's become a time-traveling space soldier, you couldn't prove it by me. I'd be sad, I admit.
It used to be that the third season of a well-respected show with a lot of rich back story was just too late to jump in. It's always been one of the big frustrations with good dramas -- by the time they get going and the buzz gets to the point where you hear about it, you've missed too much. This is especially challenging now that there are far too many shows for even a devoted good-television aficionado to possibly keep track of.
But at the same time, that same irritatingly fractured landscape is supported by a variety of increasingly easy ways to bring yourself up to speed.
So I don't just suggest you keep an open mind about shows you've been ignoring and use the much-improved late-adopter options to improve the overall quality of what you're watching; I do it myself. Judging by my speedy catching-up habits with past shows, it shouldn't take me long to get to the new season. Until then, I'm keeping my eyes closed.
Nurse Jackie: Showtime's new offering brings Edie Falco back to pay cable and is only the tip of a much larger nursing iceberg coming to series television. Showtime
by Mark Blankenship
You may have noticed that for the next few months, scripted television will be a nurse-a-palooza. On June 8, Edie Falco dons white rubber shoes for Showtime's dark sitcom Nurse Jackie (you can see an edited version of the pilot here), and eight days later, Jada Pinkett Smith debuts on TNT's HawthoRNe, the press materials for which really do capitalize the "RN" in the title.
And you're probably thinking, "That's great, but I need more Trachtenberg." Fortunately for you, the fall will bring NBC's Mercy, starring Michelle Trachtenberg as part of a trio of hardworking nurses.
But what's causing this sudden influx of nursing series?
Cynical media hounds will tell you they aren't surprised. They'll say the country's inexhaustible appetite for medical dramas was bound to produce a nursing spike, because TV execs would rather convince us an old formula is new than try something that hasn't been tested.
You can imagine the pitch meeting, right? "Yes, Jackie Hawthorne's Mercy will be America's 450th hospital show, but this time, the doctors are supporting characters and the nurses are the leads! It's totally original!"
Meanwhile, sensitive social analysts will declare that these nursing shows demonstrate television's ever-growing stature as a great place for female narratives. Hawthorne joins Saving Grace and The Closer in TNT's slate of femme-friendly dramas, while Nurse Jackie shares a network with Weeds and The United States of Tara.
Throw in shows like True Blood, Damages, and Big Love, and you can see that for every movie with a poorly developed girlfriend character, there are three series with complex female leads. Television honors a woman's worth.
And yeah ... maybe. But I think we know the real reason these shows are springing up.
The sins of the TV-nursing past, after the jump...
Too Close For Comfort, you may or may not recall, was a sitcom that aired from 1980 to 1986 (which is much longer than I thought it was on), starring the late Ted Knight.
Ted Knight is not coming to lunch, obviously, no matter how much you pay. But the bidding currently stands at $150, and you have to pay for everyone's lunch. Compare this to better-faring items like Daytona with Patrick Dempsey, currently at $4250 as of this writing, or watching the U.S. Open with Andre Agassi, currently at a cool $8000 with three weeks of bidding to go.
Poor Too Close For Comfort.
Are you a sharp-eyed tipster? Because we love hilarious tips, and are perfectly happy to credit you as "sharp-eyed tipster who is totally not [your name here]" or "sharp-eyed tipster who is totally [your name here]." Or even "Sharp-eyed tipster who is totally [what you always wished was your name here]." We're flexible. Send your gems to monkeysee (at) npr.org.
CATAPULT!: This is something more shows should consider. ABC
by Linda Holmes
The lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer often lead to flights of fancy. This one has to do with the giant catapult that flings people through the air (and into the water) on ABC's strangely addictive Wipeout.
I know, I know.
But hear me out.
It's not Wipeout that appeals. IT'S THE CATAPULT. (See it in action a few seconds into this promo.)
And a whimsical discussion taking place here at NPR has led to the development of a list of other shows that would also benefit from a giant catapult. Here they are, complete with simulations of what they would sound like if they did have catapults.
1. The Bachelorette. "Jillian, I really want you to know I'm here for the right reasons. I feel a connection between us, and I think as we get to know each other, you'll find out that AAAIIIIEEEEEEEE!"
2. American Idol. "Those judges don't even know good singing. This unsuccessful audition in which I wore a clown suit and sang 'Don't Rain On My Parade' will not be the last you'll hear of me, because I will be back, and I will AAAIIIIEEEEEEEE!"
3. House. "The patient doesn't have piccolocystic fluteopathy, or the whistling coming from his teeth would be much more high-pitched. Did you see the way his shoelaces were tied? Clearly, this man is suffering from AAAIIIIEEEEEEEE!"
If you heard Alex Cohen's Morning Editionpiece yesterday about the new Land Of The Lost movie that comes out this weekend, you heard her talk about the fake waterfall in the opening sequence of the old TV show.
It's a good thing you can now find episodes of Land Of The Lost online, because you really have to see it for yourself. If you've never seen the show or any significant time has passed since you saw it, nothing anyone can tell you could possibly prepare you for this.
One of the things I don't have to do in this job is subject myself to the entire MTV Movie Awards, partly because anything that's worth seeing will show up online the next day anyway.
To wit: This digital short featuring Andy Samberg, Will Ferrell, and...well, J.J. Abrams in an awfully unexpected context. The language is only intermittently salty, and the subject is: "Cool Guys Don't Look At Explosions." It's rather wonderful.
Old times, new tricks: On Jay Leno's last Tonight Show on Friday, he and Conan O'Brien looked back at their on-stage meeting in 1993, just after O'Brien was announced as the new host of what had been David Letterman's show.
by Linda Holmes
Watchers of the late-night scene know very well the tale of a then-unknown Conan O'Brien taking over what used to be David Letterman's show back in 1993, having worked primarily as a writer (most notably for The Simpsons) before that time. He overcame early bad reviews to become quite beloved at 12:30 a.m., and now he's got the big desk at The Tonight Show, starting tonight.
Guests for the first week will include Will Ferrell, Tom Hanks, and Ryan Seacrest, as well as musical guests Pearl Jam, Green Day, and The John Mayer Trio.
The pressure is on, but one of the things Conan has going for him is that he's done this before; he's been patient. If he isn't an instant hit at 11:30, he's conditioned not to wilt.
Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag: If everyone on I'm A Celebrity...Get Me Out Of Here! were thrown into landfill, which is not a bad idea, they would go first and second. NBC
by Linda Holmes
I regret to inform you that tonight is the premiere of NBC's summer series, I'm A Celebrity...Get Me Out Of Here!.
Of course, the trick to this show is that the title suggests that people are there involuntarily -- perhaps they're on probation, or they're genuinely lost, or their relatives are being held for ransom, and only you can help them. Get them out of here!
The problem is that these people want on this kind of show fairly desperately. Patti Blagojevich doesn't actually want to be rescued. If she didn't want to be there, perhaps when her husband was told that he was legally prohibited from participating, she might have seen it as a sign and said, "Whew! Well, honey, at least that's over." Rather than, you know, rolling up her sleeping bag and packing her hair dryer.
But as happy as they all are to be here, this is a particularly distasteful group. Even to me, with my relatively high tolerance for nonsense, this is some high-octane nonsense.
Now, I never actually wish anyone harm, but as I came to grips with the fact that the arrival of this show was inevitable -- it will air Monday through Thursday nights throughout the entire month of June -- I began to entertain a purely frivolous fantasy in which all of these people were dropped headfirst into a large landfill. (And unharmed! Just smelly.) Almost involuntarily, I began to play a mental game called, "In What Order?"
So here's the order in which I decided I would drop them into the landfill.
1. Spencer Pratt. Spencer made his unwelcome invasion of popular culture by being the boyfriend of Heidi Montag, the official Useless Los Angeles Person of MTV's The Hills. It has become a cliché to complain about people who are famous for being famous; Spencer has pioneered a whole new kind of meta-complaining, in which we lament people who are famous just for the fact that we all hate the fact that they're famous. It's quite a logical thicket -- leave a breadcrumb trail so you can get home.
In any event, both a coward and a bully, Spencer is probably the single person on the planet Earth I would most like to see under a pile of leftover lasagna and old shoes. I decided he would go into the landfill first, not only because he will be gone immediately, but because it means everyone else will land on top of him, hopefully at awkward angles.
2. Heidi Montag.. Heidi will not see much reason to go on once we're rid of Spencer. In fact, she probably won't know what to do. Five minutes after he's gone, she'll be trying to recapture their old routine by hugging a tree and pretending to be reading about herself and the tree in Us magazine while an imaginary cameraman from Us magazine takes a picture of her with the tree that will later be captioned, "Celebrities And Trees Are Just Like Us...They Read About Themselves!"
The rest of the cast, including a ubiquitous Baldwin, after the jump...
Susan Boyle: Her fans may not have been prepared, but the way things ended for her was no surprise. Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images
by Linda Holmes
Shocking! Upset!
Yes, that's right: Susan Boyle, who became instantly beloved, and almost as instantly overexposed, after singing "I Dreamed A Dream" on Britain's Got Talent, didn't win the final, which is being treated as a massive shock in most corners.
It isn't. Remember the backlash tracker? Susan Boyle was always going to lose this show. Always, always, always.
People will tell you that it was the fact that she was supposedly caught swearing this week, or that she lost her fans by getting a makeover, or that there was a bum note in "Memory." It wasn't. She was a story -- not an arts story, but a digital-culture story -- and her story did not include winning.
The predictable workings of the teardown industry and the natural cycle of competition shows, after the jump...
Mayim Bialik started out playing an eerily convincing version of a young Bette Midler in Beaches, but it was her role on Blossom that made her a pop-culture icon.
She then became a well-known Surprisingly Normal Person for a former child star -- she retired (mostly) from show business, though she's popped up recently on Curb Your Enthusiasm and Bones, and studied neuroscience, and had kids.
And now, rather amusingly, she's the subject of tonight's season premiere of TLC's What Not To Wear. (See a sneak peek here.) Given that Blossom is one of the show's go-to references for bad '80s fashion, it's a surprisingly witty meta-reference to make Bialik -- now a mom, much like many of the other women who appear -- the next makeover.
Based on a little sneak preview I got of the episode, Bialik looks to be incredibly game, happy to josh about Blossom and her ugly clothes and the way she danced on that show at the drop of a hat. It looks like it might actually be a lot of fun -- perfect for an '80s TV nerd on a lazy Friday night in summer.
The difficult goodbye: Wednesday's Tonight Show had, in the first 15 minutes, two O.J. jokes and two jokes about Bill Clinton being a womanizer, but little in the way of sappy farewells.
by Linda Holmes
Jay Leno's last Tonight Show airs tonight, but you'll notice the hype is nothing like it was when, for instance, Johnny Carson aired his last shows. (Carson's last was a little-recalled retrospective; his second-to-last show was the one with Bette Midler that everyone talks about.)
Of course, it's a very different event for NBC. Carson was retiring; Leno is leaving for his own prime-time show that will air every weeknight at 10 p.m., come fall. In theory, this is a good thing. In theory, Jay Leno is being promoted. What can be bittersweet about being given a third of your network's weeknight real estate? That's just sweet, right?
So while there has been some looking back this week with clips and so forth (and a silly Thursday-night medley from Billy Crystal), Leno will probably not get his "Here's That Rainy Day." Not just because he's emphatically not that guy, but because he's not really in a position to acknowledge that there's a real possibility that he's experiencing a sad ending.
The great uncertainty that is Jay Leno's prime-time project, after the jump ...
It can be hard to know what you're getting with TV. Maybe all the jokes are in the commercials, maybe the boring lead character is downplayed in favor of a funny neighbor...you know how it can go.
Maybe that's why I have a soft spot for ABC's preposterous Wipeout, the second season of which premiered last night. If you think this promo is funny, you will find an hour of Wipeout absolutely hilarious. (Nobody ever seems to be injured, so as far as I know, you don't have to temper your enthusiasm with guilt.)
If, on the other hand, you think this is the sound you hear right before your civilization collapses and we all experience backwards evolution until we are one-celled bits of goo, there is absolutely no way I would endeavor to change your mind.
For all intents and purposes, this is an hour of people getting pies in the face. It has no redeeming value whatsoever. None at all. But remember: pratfalls have been around for a long time. Human beings have often, perhaps only in the shamed corners of their conscious minds, found other people falling down to be sort of funny.
But the real advantage of Wipeout is simply that you have every shred of information you need about whether you will like it, just based on watching the ads for it. It is, in that sense, unreviewable. Do I like Wipeout? Who cares? I can't review it. I can't sit here and tell you that I have insights into Wipeout. I can't "recommend" Wipeout, like, "Hey, try that Wipeout, you might like it!" And I can't "not recommend" Wipeout, because if you like that commercial, you're going to love it for an hour at a time.
You already know the answer that exists in your own heart. But I won't make you tell anyone.
The National Spelling Bee: Here, Emily Fletcher sweats her way through her turn. Alex Wong/Getty Images
by Linda Holmes
Tonight, ABC will broadcast the finals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee from 8:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m., giving a bunch of school-age kids a slice of Thursday-night prime time of the type usually reserved for people like Tina Fey.
Spelling bees have made enormous gains in pop-culture significance in the last, say, ten years. Or maybe it's 12 years, because the first big spelling-bee splash of my lifetime came in 1997, when the utterly unique Rebecca Sealfontspelled "euonym" to win the Bee. Everybody was talking about Rebecca, and this was before the Internet was what it is today, and before there was YouTube to show her to you.
Since then, we've had the wonderful documentary Spellbound, the hokey but endearing Akeelah And The Bee, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee on Broadway, and much, much more.
And now, we've reached the point where ESPN will be showing the national semifinals at 10:00 a.m., followed by the prime-time telecast hosted by my hands-down favorite TV host, Tom Bergeron (who usually handles things over at Dancing With The Stars).
And there are good reasons to tune in.
"Very, very bright and unusual," after the jump...
The Goode Family: Mike Judge has made some good satirical projects, but this is not one of them. ABC
by Linda Holmes
At my recent college reunion, my friends and I were confronted by water-conserving toilets that invited you to either pull the handle up or push the handle down, which resulted in a stronger or weaker flush in accordance with what the posted signs termed "your needs." I'm no stranger to the fact that there is much amusement to be had at the expense of the most self-consciously noble ideas.
Still, The Goode Family, the new animated comedy from Mike Judge that premieres tonight on ABC, mines surprisingly few laughs from its subject: the environmentally fanatical, hypersensitive vegans of the title. (The marketing makes heavy use of the term "politically correct," which has pretty much lost all meaning at this point due to overuse, but that's the idea.)
Where a good satirist goes wrong, after the jump...
In honor of today's release of the first season of Designing Women on DVD, it's time to write your own Julia Sugarbaker rant (like the one seen above).
As you know if you ever watched this show, its signature moment was sending Julia (Dixie Carter) on some incredibly indignant rant, at the end of which there would be thunderous applause. Now, in the spirit of Mad Libs, you can write your very own.
The game is simple. Grab something to write with (or, you know, open a blank document) and write a list of the following twenty things, which you will later plug into your rant. After the jump, we'll show you where they go. And if you think your rant is particularly good, don't forget to post your favorite parts in the comments.
(Unfortunately, it's about a paragraph too long to fit the whole thing in a comment -- it wouldn't be a Julia rant if it weren't, so snip judiciously.)
The items:
AN APPETIZER
A FAMOUS CRIMINAL
AN INEXPENSIVE RETAILER
A SMALL AMOUNT OF MONEY
A METAL
A BREAKFAST CEREAL
AN ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEM
A POPULAR GADGET
A JUNK FOOD
A REALITY SHOW
A KIND OF CANDY
A SPORTING EVENT
A HISTORICAL FIGURE NAMED "JOHN"
A CELEBRITY NAMED "JOHN"
AN ARTICLE OF CLOTHING
A HOME ELECTRONICS COMPONENT
A CHAIN RESTAURANT
A CITY IN THE SOUTHERN U.S.
A POPULAR TOY
A LITERARY FIGURE
Summertime: "Complaint Box" is just one of many episodes of NewsRadio that might get you through a sweaty July.
by Linda Holmes
To the degree there's still a regular television season, it's basically over now. And yes, if your favorite shows are ending, you can use that time for gardening or going to the movies or sitting in a hammock with your feet up; seeing the sun is important.
Furthermore, pop-culture-wise, spring belongs to television finales and summer belongs to big movies, and that shift will happen with or without you, or me, or any of us.
But there are also people who use the summer to become viewers of the good things they've been missing, and it's easier than ever. It used to be that you had to hope for well-timed reruns to catch up, but now you can rent or buy DVDs, use Amazon or iTunes, watch online from free network sites, or try a variety of other methods if you want to upgrade the quality of what you watch.
So here, in particular order, are a few things you might try between now and the start of the fall season, during the time when even deciding you don't want to see the sun doesn't mean you should watch I'm A Celebrity...Get Me Out Of Here! just because that's what's on.
American Idol: Kris Allen, center, is your new champion — but what did he do to earn the title?Fox
by Linda Holmes
By now, you have probably heard that Kris Allen won this year's American Idol. You may also have participated in one of the many raging battles about whether his final-round opponent, Adam Lambert, was robbed.
If you haven't, feel free to pop down after the jump, where we'll talk about the fact that there are some very good arguments to support the case that the right guy came out on top.
Five things done right to plant the crown where it wound up, after the jump...
Long-running fictional characters: Sure, there are a lot of candidates, but who takes the prize? iStockphoto.com
by Glen Weldon
"Longest running" is open to interpretation, so let's define our terms:
In any medium, what character has been consistently featured in continuous new adventures over the longest stretch of time?
Got that? Just the three criteria, here:
Consistent:
Makes regularly scheduled appearances — no yawning gaps between adventures.
Continuous:
The character's adventures form a central narrative that builds on what has gone before. (Read: Katzenjammer Kids, I know you've been around a long time, but you're a gag strip, not an ongoing narrative. Thanks for playing, we have some lovely parting gifts.)
New:
The constant churning out of fresh content, not simply adaptations, retellings or reprints.
So: Guesses?
After the jump: We review the top contenders, provide The Answer, and explain why The Neverending Story should really have been a horror film.
Dancing for recognition: The Dancing With The Stars judges weren't very helpful in crowning the winner, since they gave out so many perfect 10s, but the viewer voting was there to fill in the blanks. ABC
by Linda Holmes
Between the network up-fronts and the slew of season finales, it's a TV-heavy time, I understand. But suppose you are trapped Memorial Day weekend in a conversation in which people are discussing their favorite moments of this season of Dancing With The Stars. Don't you want to be able to contribute?
Okay, "contribute" is a strong word. "Comprehend"?
"Feign interest"?
Whatever, whatever. The eighth season of one of the highest-rated shows on television came to an end last night as Shawn Johnson (who is actually sort of famous in that she is an Olympic gymnast), Gilles Marini (who is a tiny bit famous in that he was the naked guy in Sex And The City who barely did anything except shower), and Melissa Rycroft (who is briefly famous for being dumped at the very end of The Bachelor) faced off for the right to claim a very, very ugly trophy.
Seriously, it may be the ugliest award on television. It may be uglier than the award Melissa almost won on The Bachelor, which you will recall was a highly suspect engagement to a sketchy dude who could not shut up about following his heart.
But someone still won it.
Who won, and the dance that took the trophy, after the jump...
Glee: "There's nothing ironic about glee club," says a character in Fox's irrepressibly happy new high-school comedy.
by Mark Blankenship
As I write this, it's been approximately sixteen seconds since the pilot episode of Glee -- Fox's new comedy about a high school teacher trying to redeem himself and his students by coaching their glee club -- finished airing on the east coast.
Already, the cast rendition of Journey's masterpiece "Don't Stop Believin'" is top five on the iTunes sales chart. Already, I've seen 400 Facebook status updates and 43,000 tweets about the show. What will happen when it airs in California? Will the Lakers spell the word "GLEE" on the basketball court?
Considering the publicity blitzkrieg they've launched for this thing, Fox execs have got to be sobbing for joy. And lord knows, from the moment I heard about this series, created by Nip/Tuck's Ryan Murphy, I wanted it to succeed. Sure, the dorks-make-good premise smacked of Election and Saved! and every other teen narrative, but the commercials suggested Glee could be the Platonic ideal of those familiar parts.
It has some growing to do, but after watching the first episode, I'm delighted to report that overall, Glee lives up to its hype.
Jane Lynch, complex neat freaks, and taking theater very, very seriously, after the jump...
Kris Allen: He was understandably shocked that he made it into the final two, and so were a lot of other people. Fox
by Marc Hirsh
As we go into the final week of American Idol (the last performance show airs tonight, with the winner announced tomorrow), the hysteria surrounding the show reaches a fever pitch as visions of management contracts, recording careers and bragging rights swirl through everyone's heads.
One thing that can be easily forgotten in all of this is that it's a television show. And that's why Kris Allen should win.
Why the wee Arkansan's victory would make better television, after the jump...
Cougar Town: ABC has an idea to bring Courteney Cox back to television. Or...an "idea," anyway. Jason Merritt/Getty Images
by Linda Holmes
Network upfront week continues today, and the latest network to release its official fall schedule is ABC, which is getting notice primarily for introducing a Wednesday-night sitcom block.
And what do these new comedies have in common? All four of them star the sitcom stars of the '80s and '90s. And all four of them kind of look...terrible. Let's check the list.
Chuck: Don't look so serious, Zachary Levi. Your show is apparently on the way back.NBC
by Linda Holmes
Update:In not at all good news, ABC has apparently scrapped the budget-cutting plan outlined here for Samantha Who?, and has canceled it. Boo.
Networks may be getting almost exclusively bad news about audience erosion and the slow leak of viewers going to cable, but they're managing to hand out some good news to fans.
If you've been following the saga of NBC's Chuck and the endearingly insane fan campaign to get it renewed, you've probably already heard that there have been increasing drumbeats pointing to a renewal. Last night, Entertainment Weekly and some other outlets reported that it's now a done deal.
The order is for 13 episodes rather than what was once the standard 22-episode full season (though more and more shows are on unusual schedules), and the network is cutting the budget (who isn't?). But for people who are attached to this sweet, weird show that is so visibly a labor of love -- if any star has ever done anything any more adorable in support of his show than Zachary Levi leading hundreds of fans to Subway to participate in the Save Chuck campaign, I've never seen it -- it's a lot better than nothing.
And it looks like it might be the beginning of a larger shift, because it's not just Chuck.
Joss Whedon and the possible end of the hit-churning cycle, after the jump...
There was much to love in last night's 30 Rock season finale, but perhaps nothing was quite as satisfying as the "We Are The World"-style songfest that Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) organized to try to find a kidney for his newly discovered biological father, Milton Greene (Alan Alda). (Find the song at about the 17:40 mark of this clip.)
Yes, that's Sheryl Crow, and Mary J. Blige, and Elvis Costello, and Cyndi Lauper, and Moby, and Rhett Miller, and some other people (not all of whom are mentioned in that link).
For some reason, they left off the name of Clay Aiken, who got probably the best joke of the episode, when it was revealed that he's the Kenneth The Page's cousin. Well, of course he is.
Lost: Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell), Sawyer (Josh Holloway), and Kate (Evangeline Lily) were only three of the many characters tied up in last night's season finale, which we loved ten times and hated ten times. We can explain. ABC
by Glenn McDonald
ABC's Lost wrapped up its fifth season last night in typical fashion, with an ambitiously irritating (or is that irritatingly ambitious?) season finale. My love/hate relationship with the show continues to grow. Nothing else on TV elicits such strong reactions from my spot in the recliner, and I suppose that's what it's finally all about.
Here, I present a mathematical breakdown of last night's top ten and bottom ten moments.
Warning: Lots of insider-y fanspeak, arcane references, and several dozen spoilers dead ahead.
The top ten moments of the finale, and the bottom ten, after the jump...
30 Rock: Tina Fey's beloved Emmy-winner is only one of 11 network shows ending seasons tonight. NBC
by Linda Holmes
It's hard to identify the end of the regular TV season anymore, what with the proliferation of cable channels and the rise of split seasons, partial seasons, half-year reality shows, and everything else that has unraveled traditional scheduling.
(Fun fact: According to The Futon Critic's wonderful listing system, there have been only three nights so far in all of 2009 that didn't feature either a season/series finale or a season/series premiere somewhere on the dial.)
But if you had to pick one night to represent the end of the 2008-09 season, it would probably be tonight, when eleven network series will depart for the time being.
The roll call: Bones, My Name Is Earl, Parks and Recreation, Smallville, CSI, The Office, 30 Rock, Grey's Anatomy, Hell's Kitchen, Supernatural, and CSI: NY.
Mad Men: Wannabe ad men are among those submitting photos to AMC for its walk-on contest. 
Jay Leno: The excitement of his construction webcam is something to behold. 
Big Brother: Horrifying and offensive rants like the recent one from Braden Bacha (center) have become par for the course -- and it's hard to believe that's an accident. 
Two And A Half Men: Is this just like what happened to The Dark Knight? We think not. 
Well, it's about time: How I Met Your Mother nabs an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Comedy Series. 
Jeremy Piven: You'd better start preparing yourself right now. 
Emmy actresses: Is a thoroughly goofy ghost/cancer story enough to bring Grey's Anatomy star Katherine Heigl back into the Emmy fold? 
Richard Hatch: He did not persuade a judge to free him for the purposes of being on Survivor. But he still has his 2000 victory to look back on. 
Emmy season: The Office had an outstanding year and should be a shoo-in for another nomination. Beyond that, things get more complicated. 
The Great American Road Trip: This is host Reno Collier. He looks so happy; how could it not be great? 
Spiritual exploration: Is there a reason one would not use a game show as a way to choose a religious path? Hard to believe. 
The remote DVR: The Supreme Court yesterday cleared the way for a new cable option. 
The Mentalist: The CBS drama, starring Simon Baker, is only one of several shows to benefit from CBS's "Project LENO." 
Farrah Fawcett: In 1977, her hair was iconic. But she did some real acting as well. 
A reminder about network television: NBC won an important demographic on Friday night...sort of. 
Jon & Kate Plus 8: What does it all mean? Maybe not as much as you think. 
Lost: What it's worth to you in Blu-ray depends on how much you're all about looks. 
Josh Holloway If you were watching him on Lost right now, you'd be distracted by trying to count individual beard hairs. Trust me. 
Mythical species: If seeing what's attractive about Adam Lambert is what it takes to be a cougar, then cougars don't exist. 
That's real dancing: Choreographer Jean Marc Genereux, a professional ballroom dancer and choreographer, teaches a routine with his wife and partner, Frances Mousseau. 
Stephen Colbert: His USO tour is certainly not all talk, as you can see from what's about to happen to him here. 
The Tony Awards: This handsome fellow is your host, Neil Patrick Harris. 
Marriage television: Fox apparently forgot what happened the last time they tried a show about arranging marriages. 
Burn Notice: If you're all ready for tonight's third-season premiere, you're well ahead of me. 
Nurse Jackie: Showtime's new offering brings Edie Falco back to pay cable and is only the tip of a much larger nursing iceberg coming to series television. 
CATAPULT!: This is something more shows should consider. 
Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag: If everyone on I'm A Celebrity...Get Me Out Of Here! were thrown into landfill, which is not a bad idea, they would go first and second. 
Susan Boyle: Her fans may not have been prepared, but the way things ended for her was no surprise. 
The National Spelling Bee: Here, Emily Fletcher sweats her way through her turn. 
The Goode Family: Mike Judge has made some good satirical projects, but this is not one of them. 
American Idol: Kris Allen, center, is your new champion — but what did he do to earn the title?
Long-running fictional characters: Sure, there are a lot of candidates, but who takes the prize? 
Dancing for recognition: The Dancing With The Stars judges weren't very helpful in crowning the winner, since they gave out so many perfect 10s, but the viewer voting was there to fill in the blanks. 
Kris Allen: He was understandably shocked that he made it into the final two, and so were a lot of other people. 
Cougar Town: ABC has an idea to bring Courteney Cox back to television. Or...an "idea," anyway. 
Chuck: Don't look so serious, Zachary Levi. Your show is apparently on the way back.
Lost: Juliet (Elizabeth Mitchell), Sawyer (Josh Holloway), and Kate (Evangeline Lily) were only three of the many characters tied up in last night's season finale, which we loved ten times and hated ten times. We can explain. 
30 Rock: Tina Fey's beloved Emmy-winner is only one of 11 network shows ending seasons tonight.