Housewives, Totally Losing It

Courtesy of Oprah and the continent of Australia.



(Mirrored on 100MC)

Congratulations, Lisa Marie Simpson-Parkfield!

After fifteen long years, the big day has finally arrived. (HT: Arts Beat)

*Sex and the City 2*

I really wanted to like it. Even after reading the dismal reviews, I still wanted to like it. Unfortunately, Sex and the City 2 is embarrassing throughout.

The first film was largely successful as a coda to the series. It was fun to see the stories of these much-beloved characters reach a satisfying resolution. The conflicts writer/director Michael Patrick King concocts in the sequel maybe could have sustained two episodes in the series. But as a (two-and-a-half hour!) movie, it's a complete mess. That King thought transporting these characters to an exotic locale (Abu Dhabi) would breathe new life into this franchise shows he's run out of ideas. SATC 2 makes clear there's nothing left to be said about Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha.

The real shame is that SATC 2 tarnishes the legacy of a great show. I wish were forgettable. That would be an improvement.

Island Music

Music critic Alex Ross has great profile of composer Michael Giacchino in this week's New Yorker (gated, unfortunately). Giacchino is best known for his integral work for the television series Lost, but he is also responsible for some incredible film scores, most notably the Oscar-winning score for Up.

Below are a couple of examples of Giacchino's talent. The first is the "Married Life" movement from Up, which is both charming and heartbreaking. The second is a video from Ross' New Yorker blog, which shows how Giacchino's music heightens the mystery and suspense of Lost.

A Sure Betty

It was a joy to watch Betty White, and the great female cast members of the last 15 years, host SNL last night, even though the material wasn't always as good as the guest stars. The two best bits -- the "Delicious Dish" reunion and Seth Meyers' "Weekend Update" -- are embedded below.

Jay Leno: Then and Now

September 03, 2009:

If The Jay Leno Show succeeds — where succeeding means not getting more viewers than the competition but simply increasing NBC's profit margin — it suggests a TV future in which ambitious dramas become the stuff of boutique cable, while the broadcasters become a megaphone for live events and cheap nonfiction. "If the Leno Show works," says former NBC president Fred Silverman, "it will be the most significant thing to happen in broadcast television in the last decade."

January 22, 2010:

The Jay Leno Show couldn't pull a prime-time-size audience. And when Leno went down, he took local newscasts with him (major markets like Philadelphia plummeted as much as 48 percent).

Hurry, February 2!

This is going to be so good.



Still, the Onion is spot on.


Final Season Of 'Lost' Promises To Make Fans More Annoying Than Ever

NBC's Bad Bet

In what's become a bit of a scandal for NBC, the fourth-place network has reversed course and is giving Jay Leno his 11:35 time slot back, pushing Conan O'Brien's Tonight Show back 30 minutes to 12:05. From the NYT:

The announcement on Sunday, which followed several days of private negotiations inside NBC, is an embarrassing retreat for NBC, which had heralded Mr. Leno’s 10 p.m. show as transformational because it could be produced for far less money than expensive dramas that had been in that hour. The program had its premiere just 17 weeks ago.

Separately, the network announced an aggressive slate of pilot programs, and said it would scrap its early spring “infront” presentations for advertisers, instead opting for a traditional upfront in May.

Mr. Gaspin said the 10 p.m. experiment with Mr. Leno was “working financially” for the network. But it was not working for NBC’s affiliate stations. Many of the stations saw the ratings for their 11 p.m. newscasts drop precipitously after “The Jay Leno Show” debuted last September.

“The audiences that were watching the show were smaller than we anticipated, and they were not staying for the late news,” said Michael Fiorile, the chairman of the NBC affiliates board.

In some cities — including Indianapolis, at Mr. Fiorile’s station, WTHR — the NBC stations that had been No. 1 in the ratings at 11 p.m. were suddenly No. 2 for the first time in many years.

“It was a problem at 10, it was a problem at 11, it was a problem at 11:35,” Mr. Fiorile said.

According to the Associated Press, “some affiliates told NBC in December they would go public soon about their complaints if a change wasn’t made, or even take Leno’s show off the air.”

The only reason why this move is worthy of note is the colossal failure of NBC's strategy for programing its prime-time line up. The original plan was for Leno's cheaper talk show to replace the expensive scripted dramas that are typically shown at 10:00, thus providing the network a wider profit margin. It's an example of Schumpeter's concept of innovation. Not all innovations work. Autonomy always remains with the consumer. No matter how much NBC hoped Leno's star power would change the preferences of its viewers, it didn't work. Creative destruction demands that bad bets will result in failure. It's unclear how this change of course will affect NBC, but it's quite possible that one misfire will lead to another.

The Wire: 100 Greatest Quotes

What a show.



(HT Radley Balko)

When Banter Goes Wrong

New York's WNYW anchor Ernie Anastos inadvertently chooses a very wrong word on air. The NYT reports, and you decide:

Whatever Ernie Anastos, the longtime New York television news anchor, was trying to say, it did not come out right on Wednesday night. His inadvertent use of what could literally be called a barnyard epithet made him an unintended star on the Internet all day Thursday.

In the course of one of those familiar jocular exchanges, Mr. Anastos, the co-anchor on the 10 p.m. newscast on WNYW (Channel 5), seemed to be referring to the old commercial for Perdue chicken when he suggested to the weatherman, Nick Gregory, that “it takes a tough man to make a tender forecast.”

That was not the objectionable portion of the broadcast, but it may have befuddled some viewers because Perdue has not regularly used that phrase in its advertising since 1993. But then Mr. Anastos added a suggestion for what Mr. Gregory could do with the chickens, using a term that qualifies as the sine qua no-no of live television.

Mr. Anastos’s co-anchor, Dari Alexander, looked stunned, and Mr. Gregory tried to grin through the moment. Mr. Anastos appeared not to have noticed that he had said anything wrong.

All the news that's fit to print, indeed. Hurry, call the FCC!

Hooked on Tina

It happens to the best of us.

R.I.P Saturday Morning Cartoons

From the NY Times:

After terminating a deal with 4Kids, an independent producer of children’s programming, the Fox network closed down its Saturday morningblock of cartoons on Monday, and became the first major broadcast network to agree to sell a part of its schedule to producers of infomercials.

Fox executives said that children’s programming was simply no longer viable on network television — mainly because of competition from cable channels.

Somewhere, an Animaniac is crying seltzer water tears.