April has been banished. One of the most vain, needy, self-centered contestants of any BB season was tossed out in a 6-0 vote. It wasn’t hard to achieve. She had simply revolted too many people and yet could not understand why –in her chat with sex partner/showmance partner Ollie—anyone would not like her enough to boot off. That’s how deep April was. The bleach blonde finance manager (at a car dealership) from Arizona who came on strong at the beginning, who formed alliances, then ruined them, then isolated herself altogether, really had no allies by the end. Perhaps she had Michelle’s sympathy, if not vote, and that’s only because she was the only woman left who spoke to her. April tried to get Dan’s vote and even hinted she’d give him money she won weeks ago, but Dan deftly exposed the fact that someone offered him money (it could have been Jerry, the other person on the block) for his vote. In the end he didn’t use the POV and created a little excitement in the run up to last night’s unanimous vote. For the third week now, Dan becomes the unlikely wild card vote.  Other developments this week: Read the rest of this entry »

NBC probably doesn’t look forward to this week. After posting boffo ratings for its coverage, there is evidence that this has been very much related to the eighth wonder that is Michael Phelps. Phelps last night won his eighth gold medal at the Beijing Olympics, as the US team defeated the Australians in the 400 medley relay.

NBC has
certainly
milked each
and every Phelps winNBC has certainly milked each and every Phelps win, and it’s worth following his every move as he made it to the Water Cube, iPod in his ears, or putting a microphone in front of him to ask him (ugh) what “was going through his head”, etc., as he picked up yet another medal. NBC has stayed very close to Phelps’s Mom and his older sisters too, even dispatching analyst Cris Collinsworth to sit next to her at the swim events and dedicating a camera and microphone to record Mama Phelps’s every utterance. She has become almost the super media star that her son has, posing for photos with mega luminaries such as Kobe Bryant, Jason Kidd and Lebron James, all NBA stars and members of the US Olympic basketball team. Phelpsmania is everywhere.

Now with the swim events over, NBC’s ratings are almost certain to drop. As we here in the US of A cope with Phelps phever and deal with withdrawal, here is a list of suggestions we’d submit to NBC to improve its coverage in this, the second and final week of the Beijing games: Read the rest of this entry »

Michelle was HOH last week, and her first order of business was to “win this” for Jessie. She wanted to avenge his ouster the week before by going after Libra and Keesha, both of whom she blamed for this. Their heads were quickly put on the block. Picking Libra was too easy. She has proved to be the ultimate whiner and screamer, having others (like Keesha) do her dirty work, complain when she doesn’t do well in physical challenges, and, just be generally miserable and bossy. Even on the evening that Jessie got voted out, she got into a nasty yelling match with former ally, April, who gracefully called her, among other things, a scallywag and ‘ho -this was seconded by her cipher/nightly fornicator Ollie.

Libra certainly has done a lot to merit all the resentment. The problem is that Read the rest of this entry »

Finally! BB10 is getting good. And by good I mean an incredible amount of rage, yelling, bloated egos, screams, throwdowns, crying at birthday cakes being lit and otherwise petty, nasty behavior among otherwise normal human beings. April was the HOH this week, and she put up Memphis and Jessie for eviction. She had told Michelle during the last HOH competition (a ridiculous stunt in which they had to stand on a a sloping ledge, amid wind, water and dust that could have killed Jerry) that she would save Jessie and not vote him out. Memphis was her real target because he has been aloof, flying under the radar a lot and having potentially great physical strength. He was a perfect target, and one that April was able to convince her troop (Libra, Ollie, Keesha and the hanger ons Jerry and Renny) to go along with.

Except that it wasn’t Memphis who was ousted. Surprisingly, it was Jessie, the arrogant jackass who Read the rest of this entry »

Tell me you have not wanted to poke your eyes out every time you saw or heard the inescapable commercial or jingle from FreeCreditReport.com. You know which one. The one where this curly-haired slacker and his band, dressed as pirates, have taken to working at a poor man’s Red Lobster (if there is such a thing) seafood joint, “serving chowder and iced tea” to “tourists” in what is clearly a low-paying, dead-end job. Or the one where the same dude is bopping his head as he sings again –same melody, slightly different lyrics—this time in a beat-up old Geo Metro, pulling up the stoplight while a carful of babes in a new convertible next to him are laughing at him –and his Read the rest of this entry »

CNBC’s “Mad Money” host and financial gadfly Jim Cramer went on Joe Scarborough’s
”Morning Joe” on sister cable network MSNBC yesterday morning and for once, he didn’t yell and scream, in his usual deranged, unhinged and gimmicky way.

In fact, he was pretty subdued. Maybe he was catatonic or in a medicated stupor – of the type that Paula Abdul goes on sometimes on American Idol when she thinks she’s seen two performances instead of one (this happened earlier this year). Cramer was part of a panel that was discussing the stock market and whatnot; he is a regular guest, except that he really wasn’t well. Discussing economic policies of yesteryear, primarily during the late 1970s, he seemed to Read the rest of this entry »

Keesha, the Hooters girl from Burbank was HOH this week. She was going to avenge the eviction of Steven last week because she felt a kinship with him. They bonded, even cried, about their dogs. Keesha sought first to target the person she felt responsible for this –Angie, who she felt organized the votes to oust Steven. This was understandable. Except that there were far more reprehensible and devious people who claimed to be on Keesha’s side, telling her what to do and whom to put up.

Keesha put up Angie and Jessie as targets, and Angie ultimately left with an 8-0 count. This after a few days of yelling and hollering, a real 5.2 earthquake, more body posing by Jesse and a surly attitude to boot, plus an explosive near-beatdown by previously-mellow Memphis on Jerry (yes, 75-year-old Jerry) that got lots of attention. April and Ollie are still rolling around in the sheets and they have Read the rest of this entry »

I decided to give “Hurl!”, the new game show on the G4 cable channel, a couple of viewings since it premiered a couple of weeks back. Not because it needed some seasoning, or that its quality would improve. Nope –there’s absolutely nothing that you could do to make this stinker any better. It has absolutely no social value; it is barely watchable; but it isn’t the most appalling thing on TV this summer. I’ll get to those shows a little later.

Hurl!, if you can believe the concept, is essentially a game in which five guys get together and Read the rest of this entry »

Steven is history. By a 9-0 margin, the champion gay rodeo star from Texas was tossed out of the Big Brother house. Fairly or unfairly, he was caught in the same web that felled Brian, the pushy former Air Force guy, last week. Steven never really allied himself with anyone.

The mistake he made was waiting too long for mercy this week, asking the April-Ollie-Libra-and-maybe-Keesha team to save him, but by then it was too late. He never really had a chance. Deep down, I think Steven was much too disinterested in the game and he seemed to tune out early. He seemed despondent, even depressed, and when he was accused of not being nice, he became nasty.

Maybe he didn’t really know that Jessie was showing off his Read the rest of this entry »

In this lazy summer of crushing gas prices, home foreclosures and general misery all around, the President the other day gave a news conference in which he pronounced himself an “optimist”. Things are really not as bad as they seem. Before taking the usual tough questions by the White House press corps, he tried to deflect any criticism that he, the lamest of lame duck Presidents with a lower-than-low—28%, according to the latest Gallup poll– approval rating, is really not out of touch with the state of the American economy:

The bottom line is this: We’re going through a tough time, but our economy has continued Read the rest of this entry »

SMASH TV: 2008 EMMY NOMINATIONS

The big story of this morning’s Emmy nominations, read by Kristin Chenoweth (“Pushing Daisies”) and Neil Patrick Harris (“How I Met Your Mother”) and themselves nominees this year, was cable, cable, cable. HBO’s “John Adams” received 23 nominations, including Outstanding Miniseries or Made-for-TV Movie, and lead acting nods for Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney. Other strong showings by “Mad Men” (AMC), Dexter (Showtime) and some HBO programs or movies have once again reminded us that there is rather good quality to be found beyond the traditional TV networks.

For the lead categories, the Emmys have it almost right. Outstanding Drama Series nominees this year are Read the rest of this entry »

“The Cleaner” is William Banks, a former drug addict who has the somewhat shady and dark role of rescuing other addicts from their various drug, sex or gambling addictions. Or at least that’s what’s in store this season in A&E’s new drama series that premiered on Tuesday. It’s a show that has received a tremendous amount of advertising and according to a Wall Street Journal article, it’s the first original scripted show on A&E in six years.

On one level the show is old hat for A&E. It’s the network that shows real life addicts on their often-harrowing documentary series, “Intervention”, which as the title states, culminates with a real, therapist-led family intervention where the subject either decides to leave immediately or not. It’s raw stuff, and Read the rest of this entry »

It’s back to basics for Big Brother 10, and it’s already getting good. I know, it’s a bit pathetic to think that I really haven’t missed an episode, and that I remember the very first season with Chicken George, and thrilled to the evil Machiavellianisms of Dr. Will Kirby a couple of years later. I even had to hold my nose during this past winter’s special edition festival of debauchery, thanks to the writers’ strike. This past Sunday, the new season finally began, with Julie Chen’s (or the “Chenbot”), tall, thin and perky presence at the helm.

The 411 is familiar by now: 13 strangers live in a house for about three months and all their actions are recorded, and they compete for food and the “Head of Household” title each week. The HOH lives in a lavish room and this person gets to nominate two people for the weekly elimination. The “housemembers”, as Julie calls them, vote secretly and that person leaves the house immediately. The one who is left at the end Read the rest of this entry »

You’d think that a TV program called “I Survived a Japanese Game Show” just has to stink. Thanks to You Tube and the Internet, and even tawdry shows on Spike TV like MXC (with those cheesy voiceovers), we have a basic idea of what these game shows are: boisterous, screaming crowds, over-the-top hosts and contestants performing all sorts of humiliating tasks to try and score cash and prizes.

There was even a “Simpsons” episode about this several years ago. Homer and family fly to Tokyo and commit all the worst and base cultural faux pas relative to the Land of the Rising Sun. Out of money, they go to work at a sardine factory, but are then transported to the set of a noisy Japanese game show, where they perform stunts so unbelievable that, well, they belong in a cartoon.

That’s exactly what happens on “I Survived”. Except that there is no rickety bridge with hot flames like in “The Simpsons”. Here it’s just regular people, typical Americans who are not even told when they arrive at LAX what they have been chosen to do. They proceed to take the next flight to Tokyo and attempt to take in the sights and lights of Shibuya Square, which the show calls the “busiest intersection in the world”. They are pretty overwhelmed and can’t believe what they see. And here you have, as far as reality TV casts go, the typical awful American who a.) is a sassy, spoiled girl from Staten Island; b) a brotha with the street-cred from the inner-city; c) the hick from the “dirty South”; d) the meek young housewife from the Midwest and e) the middle-aged balding schlub from Punxsutawney, PA. Yes, there are others (10 in all), but you get the picture: no one has ever traveled outside of their respective towns (surprise, surprise) and they really seem to stick out in this faraway land. As they stood there that evening on the bustling Tokyo street, I also thought this: there’s a TV show is being filmed here with panicked Americans, but the average passer-by doesn’t seem all that fazed..

The conceit of the show is quickly revealed by Read the rest of this entry »