A Horse Is A Horse? Of Course!

This … is not good news:

Sherman Hemsley of “The Jeffersons” fame is lending his voice to the title character in Fox’s updated version of “Mister Ed.” Hemsley joins David Alan Basche, who was previously tapped to play Wilbur Post, and Sherilyn Fenn, tapped as Wilbur’s wife.
“Mister Ed” is a remake of the 1960s talking-horse sitcom. This time around, the equine title character has an urban sensibility.

I have lived my entire life being compared to that friggin’ talking horse, and now it’s going to start all over again. But now, instead of Rocky Lane’s sonorous baritone, I’ll have Hemsley’s snappy, screechy voice being parroted at me every time someone says my first name.
It’s Captain Ed, dammit … Willll-burrrrrrr. [sigh]

To Our Friends Down Under: We’re So Sorry

It’s events like this that cause other countries to decry American cultural imperialism and make us look like a bunch of mouthbreathing morons:

Barry “I still look like Greg Brady” Williams will be touring NSW in March with his more-than-just cabaret show, in which he sings, “teaches Brady Bunch choreography to audience members” and recounts stories from the show.

“Brady Bunch choreography”? Does he mean like the dancing featured on the disastrous Sid & Marty Krofft variety TV series, The Brady Bunch Hour? Perhaps he means the choreography he demonstrated as Danny Partridge was kicking his ass on Celebrity Boxing. Or he could be referring to the moves he tried putting on Florence Henderson while appearing as her son on the original series.
When Williams sticks to telling stories, he can be entertaining and self-deprecating, but Aussies aren’t going to be that lucky:

“Barry Williams raps, rocks, belts, sings ballads and in a nod to his Brady character Greg’s alter ego, introduces Johnny Bravo for a special guest performance and yes, he still fits the suit,” it reads.

There may be no three words in the English language that evokes as much dread as Barry Williams raps, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, Barry intends on inflicting the “Johnny Bravo” character onto our hapless allies. You just can’t put a price on a cheesy has-been TV star clinging to an “alter ego” character that’s cheesier and more never-was than the celebrity. Think of Tim Kazurinsky touring as an old SNL sketch character no one remembers after doing some rap and rock, and you get the general idea.
Australia has been a stalwart ally and a true friend of the US, especially over the past two years, and now Barry Williams threatens to undermine the entire alliance. One performance of Johnny Bravo might lead the entire province of New South Wales to burn the American flag. Can’t Donald Rumsfeld or Tom Ridge take his passport away in the interest of national security??

So Long, Wilson, We’ll Miss You

Fans of “Home Improvement” never saw his face, but no one can deny that Earl Hindman, the actor that played Wilson on Tim Allen’s hit television show for nine seasons, provided a large measure of the show’s heart and soul. Unfortunately for all of us, Earl Hindman has passed away at the too-young age of 61, of lung cancer.
CNN provides a brief obituary for Hindman but neglects his role in Silverado, Lawrence Kasdan’s Western from the 80s, which features Hindman in a small supporting role. Fans of the movie may remember that he played the brother-in-law of Scott Glenn’s and Kevin Costner’s characters and his face was fully visible during his fine performance.
My wife and I, big fans of Home Improvement, send out our prayers to Earl Hindman’s family, and our gratitude for the wonderful entertainment he helped provide our family.

Sailing Into Oblivion

According to MS-NBC, our proud ex-Governor will not be returning from his, er, “hiatus”:

“I’ve decided to focus the majority of our resources on Monday-Friday primetime in 2004,” the cable news channel’s president, Erik Sorenson. said in a memo to his staff Tuesday night. “Consequently, the holiday hiatus for ‘Jesse Ventura’s America’ will continue indefinitely.” … Sorenson said that Ventura will continue to serve as a political commentator for MSNBC during the 2004 campaign season.

Sorenson finally came to the same conclusion that Minnesotans discovered shortly after Jesse took office: he’s not terribly bright, nor is he terribly interesting. The combination makes a deadly dull recipe for a talk-show host, as I posted when it first launched. Among the disasters the show visited upon hapless viewers was a recurring segment called “Dork of the Week”, which would have been a more apt title for the entire show. As I related in the earlier post, he stuck with the same story for the year it took MS-NBC to develop the show, so that his first installment actually referred to an event that had occurred almost eighteen months earlier.
Fans of dumb-jock commentary will either have to wait until Election Night 2004 or the WWF for their fix. With any luck, Jesse the Mouth will fade into well-deserved obscurity.

Life Imitates Art

It looks like the Seinfeld DVD project has hit some snags — three of them, in fact:

Three of the four leading cast members of the hit television comedy “Seinfeld” are declining to participate in the making of a DVD series of the show because they are unhappy with the related financial deals they have had over the years, people close to the actors and the show said on Monday.
These people said that the three actors — Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who played Elaine; Michael Richards, who played Kramer; and Jason Alexander, who played George — made the joint decision not to give on-camera interviews for the DVD or otherwise participate in it.

First, let me make it clear that I am a believer in free-market capitalism. However, it seems to me that the show made everyone a lot of money, not just the owners, although they have raked in the biggest bucks of all. To wit:

The three boycotting actors earn residual payments from the show’s reruns, a fee determined by the Screen Actors Guild. A representative for one of the actors estimated the fee at $100,000 a year. … They famously sought $1 million an episode for the last year of the show, 1998, in part because they said they thought they had been underpaid for many seasons. They ended up with about $600,000 a show, then a whopping sum for television.

Most shows shoot 22 episodes per season, more or less. At $600K per show, each of the three supporting actors grossed $13.2 million in the last season. Plus, they continue to get $100,000 per year just from the residuals. I’m no genius, but it certainly seems to me to be somewhat above yada yada yada cash we’re talking here. This contretemps casts an illuminating light on the meaning of the infamous last episode, where the quartet’s notorious selfishness lands them a year in a New England jail. Instead of making arrangements to put a classy touch on a classic sitcom, this tempest just proves that life imitates art after all. Shame on all of them. (via Amygdalagf)

The Calico Cat Confesses

Michael Kantor over at The Calico Cat confesses to his secret vice of late:

Despite the name of the show, Average Joe, these guys range from a little below average to downright ugly.
I expected to hate the show like I’ve hated all other reality shows I’ve seen. But I was surprised to discover that I actually enjoyed the show and I’m looking forward to the second episode on Monday night. What’s going on here? Have my tastes in entertainment sunk to the lowest common denominator? Will I take up bowling and hunting next week?

Michael’s post is, as always, well-written and entertaining. More so than the television show, I suspect, but then again I’m no fan of reality TV. He suspects that the guys are the butt of the joke despite the advertisements we’ve seen, depicting the show as a karmic payback to a pretty woman with overweening hubris.

It Never Fails

I hate it when they cancel my favorite TV shows:

Bad guys no longer have to fear the “L.A. Dragnet” crimebusters. ABC on Thursday canceled the show starring Ed O’Neill as police Sgt. Joe Friday. The series, based on the classic Jack Webb “Dragnet” series, had low ratings despite a second-season makeover.

I could see this coming — they had moved the show to the Dead Zone of network programming, Saturday nights — but had hoped that the quality of the show and Dick Wolf’s influence would keep it on the air a bit longer while it found its niche. I liked the original line-up but thought the second-season improvements were very good. I loved Ed O’Neill as Joe Friday, too. What a bummer. I’d call for a viewer protest, but three out of the five of us are out of town this weekend.

‘8 Simple Rules’ Returns Without Ritter

ABC struggles to keep its hit show, ‘8 Simple Rules’, going without its star, the late John Ritter:

Ritter had completed three episodes for the new season when he died of a heart ailment Sept. 11. His last episode aired Oct. 7.
Gambling that a lighthearted sitcom can sustain the loss of its central figure, “8 Simple Rules…” is making a desperate bid to carry on as one of ABC’s higher-rated series. Doing so, the producers and the network have risked conspicuous failure as well as criticism for tastelessness.

Let me tell you, I watched last night’s episode, and I was mightily impressed with their effort. They made an excellent decision to film the show without a live audience, and so even the humor was muted and sad. James Garner and Suzanne Pleshette did an excellent job as a bitter and bickering couple who try with limited success to bury the hatchet to support their daughter. Larry Miller pitched in with a small guest shot that started out as a bit creepy but resolved itself very nicely. The real effort came from Katy Sagal and the actors playing the teen-age children, whose tears were copious throughout and, one suspects, were as much for losing their friend and co-worker than from the script.
I couldn’t keep the tears out of my own eyes, either. John Ritter should have been there. Gilda Radner should be here. John Candy should be here. Last night, I missed them all.

CBS Bails?

Drudge Report has a headline without a story saying that CBS has dumped the miniseries on the Reagans. In the little Matt Drudge has posted, apparently Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone got involved and moved the miniseries to another Viacom subsidiary, Showtime, where it will run uncut.
Of course, this will allow Showtime subscribers to demonstrate their displeasure by canceling and switching to HBO … they may have done better to just cancel it altogether. Maybe they will. Expect squeals of McCarthyism from ultraleftist Judy Davis and Jim Streisand, er, James Brolin.

Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

The Republican National Commitee appears ready for a public-relations disaster in demanding that CBS allow them to preview the Reagan miniseries prior to broadcast:

The Republican National Committee Friday asked CBS to allow a team of historians and friends of former President Ronald Reagan and his wife to review a miniseries about the couple before it airs. … Gillespie said that if CBS denies the request, he will ask the network to run a note across the bottom of the screen every 10 minutes during the program’s presentation informing viewers that the miniseries is not accurate.

Well, ouch, won’t that hurt! Is the RNC the last group of people on Earth that hasn’t figured out that Hollywood is almost never historically accurate? Here’s a list of educational items if they’ve just stumbled onto this:
* The British did not burn down churches full of people during the American Revolution (that was WWII Nazis), and free blacks were illegal in South Carolina during that era, let alone them having beach villages full of laughter, dancing, and carefree moments for lovestruck lead actors. (The Patriot)
* The Americans did not secretly capture an Enigma device from a German submarine during WWII; that was the British. (U-571)
* Bobby DeLaughter did not singlehandedly convict Byron De La Beckwith of Medgar Evers’ murder. (Ghosts of Mississippi)
* In JFK, … nah, way too easy.
* Pocohantas married, traveled to London, where she died as a young woman. (Pocohantas)
* And in The Untouchables, an otherwise entertaining film is marred by the fact that Eliot Ness wasn’t the man who put Al Capone away (it was an entirely different group of people), none of his men were ever killed during the duration of their task force, Frank Nitti took over for Capone instead of being tossed off the courthouse roof, and of course Kevin Costner stunk, which if you see enough of his films, qualifies as a certain sort of historical accuracy.
No one in their right mind would expect Hollywood to turn out a historically accurate film on anything — if Warner Brothers produced a film on the Boston Red Sox, they’d show them winning the 1986 World Series. The only practical result of this RNC grandstanding is to generate a hell of a lot of publicity for what promised to be a mediocre and thoroughly forgettable effort (c’mon, it stars James Brolin, for Pete’s sake), and to allow the left-wing elements associated with the film to argue that Republicans stifle free speech … which certainly seems to be the case here. The notion that CBS will run a crawl every ten minutes explaining that the film is not historically accurate stretches the limits of credulity. What’s next, a demand for equal time whenever The American President or The Contender is shown on broadcast TV?
Perhaps someone at the RNC can fill us in on the Grand Strategy at play here. Because unless the idea is to depict Republicans as tight-assed, self-defeating paranoids, they’ve gone off the rails. Wouldn’t their time be better spent on generating support for Justice Brown and thereby promoting free speech?
UPDATE: Check out this post at Jessica’s Well, a great blog, if you want information on contacting CBS to express your views on this subject. CBS management, and stockholders, will be much more impressed with howls of outrage from millions of viewers than petty and unlikely demands from the RNC.