Fire Him... Please

Specifically fire the guy who came up with the show Fire Me...Please. My God that was awful!

To plumb the depths of the awfulness, let's start with the concept. Two people are sent out to what are basically minimum wage jobs and told that they have to get fired from those jobs as close to 3 p.m. the same day as possible but not after 3 p.m. The big bosses at the companies that they're sent to know that these people are going to be showing up, and their stores are equipped with a number of hidden cameras, but the shift supervisors at the stores don't know, and neither do the other employees. There are only three rules that the "players" can't break: they can't ask to get fired, they can't tell anyone that they're on a hidden camera show, and they can't you know break the law. The player who gets fired closest to 3 p.m. without going over wins $25,000.

It seems clear that the producers wanted a show like the old Candid Camera or the more recent Punk'd produced by Ashton Kutcher and Jason Goldberg or even the practical jokes segments of TV's Bloopers And Practical Jokes, but those shows had a certain charm to them. This does not. This show has two half hours of people acting like obnoxious jackasses each of which is condensed from between five and six hours of people acting like obnoxious jackasses for money. Added to this in post-production is an obnoxious laugh track designed to remind us that this dreck is funny. It might possibly have worked if they hadn't run the laugh track for every scene of the episode that didn't involve the host.

This show is terrible. It is so terrible that I violated what I consider to be the most important rule for any person writing a film or television review - watch the whole damn thing then write. This show was an hour long but I barely made it to the half-hour mark before I could take no more and switched over to an episode of House that was half over and still made more sense to me. The one saving grace to this mess is that there are only four episodes after which it will be replaced by the new season of Big Brother, and never have I been so anxious to see start. No network in North America would have approved this show for broadcast in the regular season, so why was it foisted on us in the summer? In a summer that has featured some adequate and one or two quite nice reality series, Fire Me...Please has to be regarded as a total disgrace. They won't, but heads should roll at CBS and at LMNO Productions which sold them this crap.

TV on DVD - June 7, 2005 - Part 1

A real bumper crop of DVDs this week. In fact there are so many I've decided that the list is too big for one post, so I've split it in half and will run the second part tomorrow.

One thing that I've discovered is that there is on occasion a delay between a series' release on Amazon in Canada and in the United States. Be aware that in some cases, if you order from these links (although none of you have yet) delivery may be delayed because the series hasn't been released in Canada yet.

Home Movies: Season Two
- This series was seen on the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim although there were six episodes aired on UPN in the United States. I'm not sure if it ever aired on Teletoon here in Canada...but I'm certain someone will tell me.

Cat House
- This is part of HBO's America Undercover documentary series which is probably best known for the Taxicab Confessions series. In this documentary we meet the ladies of Nevada's Moonlight Bunny Ranch brothel - including the incredibly over the top Air Force Amy - and Doug Hof, who owns the place. I have in fact seen this - and its sequel Cathouse 2, Back in the Saddle and can honestly say that there are some funny moments, like when the street pimp who is trying to get one of Hof's girls to work for him discovers just how much she's making at the Ranch. On the whole howerer it comes off as pretty much a peep show.

Bear In The Big Blue House: Early To Bed Early To Rise
Bear In The Big Blue House: Sense-Sational!
Bear In The Big Blue House: Storytelling With Bear
Bear In The Big Blue House: Visiting The Doctor With Bear
- Bear In The Big Blue House is, I'm duly informed, quite popular with the preschool crowd. Produced by Disney and the Jim Henson organization it's seen in Canada on Treehouse TV. On those rare occasion when I've seen the show it seemed like good clean fun for little kids, like my nephew Brian.

Davey and Goliath Volume 1
- This series is one of the great memories from my childhood. The show was gentle, occasionally humorous but not in a "gutbusting" way and there was usually a moral to every story. I have to admit that I was surprised when I got older and realised that the show was in fact created for a religious group, the Lutheran Church because it never seemed overly preachy. I can't imagine many religious broadcasters today using this sort of approach, more's the pity.

Dead Zone: Complete Third Season
- The Dead Zone is one of those series that I've never watched, mainly because the whole genre is not one of those I particularly enjoy. That said the cast, which includes Anthony Michael Hall, Nicole De Boer and David Ogden Stiers, seems quite solid. The series, which is based on a novel by Stephen King - which has led to it being called Stephen King's Dead Zone in some markets - is a co-production with Canada's Lion's Gate Films.

Degrassi Junior High: Season 2
- The three original Degrassi series - Kids of Degrassi Street, Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High - combined are one of the great stories of Canadian TV. While the series weren't "cause oriented" they did present an unblinking look at the life of a group of Canadian teens in the mid and late 1980s. The second season included such issues as Spikes Pregnancy, and a substitute art teacher who is a little too fond of his young female students.

Doctor Who: The Leisure Hive
Doctor Who: Ghost Light
- Two Doctor Who serials, Leisure Hive from the later Tom Baker period and Ghost Light from Sylvester McCoy's second season. Leisure Hive is notable as John Nathan Turner's first episode as producer, while Ghost Light was one of the major episodes of the 26th and last season of the original run. Of the two I think Ghost Light is probably better simply because the story is edgier, more serious and more mysterious. It ties in with the whole Fenric Arc that was developed for that season but for various reasons was aired out of order.

Dragnet (1967): Season One
- Jack Webb had a great sense of humour about his TV creation Dragnet but one has to wonder what he'd think of the lack of respect that the 1967-1970 version of the show has earned. There are a lot of unintentionally funny moments as well as the usual bits of deliberate humour with Joe Friday's partner - played in this series by Harry Morgan who even then was a film and TV veteran.For me, the big problem that this revival had was that it lacked the gritty, hard hitting quality that the original TV series had, which was also evident in the 2003 remake by Dick Wolf which starred Ed O'Neill. Webb had by this time assembled something of a stock company. Virginian Gregg, probably best known as the voice of Miss Kitty in the radio run of Gunsmoke appeared in a number of episodes during the run of the series, as does Bobby Troup who was married to Webb's ex-wife Julie London and would later star Emergency.

Dragon Tales: Playing Fair Makes Playing Fun
- Apparently this is the Barney for the new millennium. According to reviews in the IMDB, well lets just say that this Children's Television Workshop/PBS series may be a hit with the pre-school set, but has very low adult watchability. Of course that doesn't matter a lot to kids. (My 2 1/2 year-old nephew loves his Thomas the Tank Engine DVDs but only wants to see the one disc, which after the third or fourth time you've seen it in one afternoon is enough to drive a relatively sane person up a wall.)

Father Of The Pride: The Complete Series
- Stupid Question time: WHY?

Footballers' Wives: The Complete First Season
- Let's just label this as what it is - a night time soap from Britain. The series focuses on the players of the Earl's Court Rangers Football (Soccer) team and their wives. There's the expected amount of scheming, and double dealing mixed in with dollops of sex, violence and drugs. Of course the sex does tend to be a bit more graphic than the PTC would allow on US TV, as is the language. It has aired in Canada on Showcase.

Frasier: The Complete Fifth Season
Frasier: Six Season Pack
- I think it can safely be argued that Frasier is likely the most successful spinoff ever created, simply because it lasted 11 seasons, which was as long as the series that spawned it, Cheers. Although the focus is on the pompous Dr. Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer), some of the best scenes are with show's absolutely perfect supporting cast: John Mahoney, Jane Leeves, Peri Gilpin and of course David Hyde Pierce. The six pack contains the first five seasons and the final season DVDs, all of which are available individually.

Hee Haw, Vol.4
- Hee Haw is probably one of the most maligned TV series ever created. The critics hated it and attacked it with almost shark-like glee, and it was executed along with the rest of the CBS rural lineup in 1971. Everybody hated it...except for the people who watched it in syndication for 22 years after the cancellation. It was a great combination of downright corny humour and solid country music from some of the musicians in the business. I'm not absolutely clear on how they're marketing the DVDs though. This volume features Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter, but I'm not sure if it's a single episode or highlights from their appearances on the show.

Home Improvement: Season 2
- I always liked Home Improvement to the point where, towards the end of it's run, it was one of the few sitcoms I watched on a regular basis. The second season is worth seeing if only to see an unaugmented Pam Anderson who was playing Lisa, the original "Tool Time Girl". Lisa was never as integrated into the episodes as much as Debbe Dunning's character Heidi was. Dunning does make an appearance as a guest star as does Bob Vila who makes his second of three quest appearances.

I Love Lucy: The Complete First Season
- This is a rerelease of the first season of I Love Lucy. The season set the premise for the show and of course the chemistry in the cast is perfect. There are six disks with tons of extras including thirteen episodes of Lucy's radio series My Favorite Husband. (Lucy wanted her co-stars from that series, Gale Gordon and Bea Benadaret to play Fred and Ethel Mertz but Gordon was committed to the Our Miss Brooks series while Benadaret was featured on the George Burns and Gracie Allen Show so the parts were eventually given to William Frawley and Vivian Vance.) There's also the original series pilot which was lost for many years until it was found in the state of the Spanish clown Pepito, who appeared in the episode. There are so many classic bits in the set including the Vitameatavegamin episode, and the episode where Lucy goes to ballet class and gets her leg stuck in the bar (which produced the longest sustained laugh in the entire series - so long that the scene had to be cut).

Loonatics Unleashed - Won't Someone Stop The Insanity?!

The new Loonatics Unleashed! designs are in, and let's just say I don't see much improvement over the old designs. The characters are - from left to right - Lexi Bunny, Rev Runner, Tech E. Coyote, Ace Bunny, Danger Duck, and Spaz B. Wilde. The characters exist 700 years in the future and are the descendants of Lola Bunny, the Roadrunner, Wile E. Coyote, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the Tasmanian Devil, but I guess you already figured that one out. The show is supposed to debut on the Kid's WB this year. Hopefully another 10 year-old kid will come forward to shame the suits at the WB into dropping this whole concept. Report courtesy of Cartoon Brew.

Bullying A Bully

Last week I discussed a recent Parents Television Council commentary on the Paris Hilton commercial for the Carl's Jr. and Hardee's fast food chains. I wasn't alone of course, lots of other blogs commented on it, including Tony Figueroa's Child Of Television, and SpeakSpeak News. What I want to write about now is something that happened a few weeks ago.

The PTC has made a major push against a recently formed organization created to promote responsible television viewing without governmental action. The PTC made Television Watch a major target of their ire because three of the four major US networks or their parent corporations support the organization: Fox (News Corporation), NBC (NBC Universal) and CBS (Viacom). On the whole the come across as the schoolyard bully complaining about being bullied. A cartoon on the PTC website depicts TV Watch as a puppet under the control of the monstrous hands of CBS, NBC and Fox (I won't reproduce the cartoon here - the PTC seems like the sort of group that would sue if someone who didn't like them reproduced something from their site). PTC president L. Brent Bozell has something to say about those individuals and groups (including The American Conservative Union, Americans for Tax Reform, and the US Chamber of Commerce) that are not networks but are part of TV Watch:

"This supposed coalition needs to be taken - and dismissed - for what it is: a collection of random citizen and public policy groups that have simply been hired and paid for by the networks to do their dirty work. Some of these organizations, like the American Conservative Union and Americans for Tax Reform have never given a moments thought to the suffocating sewage coming from the entertainment industry. That in and of itself is shameful. But now, suddenly, they care? Its a laughable proposition to think that this hired gun coalition will have any impact whatsoever on the ongoing debate over decency and the public airwaves.

"The question needs to be asked, and I now ask it publicly: Given that these organizations have never before participated in the debate over television indecency - why the sudden interest now? These organizations, and this so-called coalition, have an obligation to disclose the level of funding they're receiving, directly or indirectly, from the networks and the entertainment industry to do their dirty work."

Actually, I don't think that they do any more than I think that the PTC has an obligation to disclose the level of funding that they receive from evangelical religious or conservative groups - or even why Steve Allen is still shown as a member of their "Celebrity Advisory Board" despite having been slightly dead for almost five years. Where does their funding come from? They would have us believe that they are a grassroots organization of people outraged by what's on Television - sorry the "suffocating sewage coming from the entertainment industry" - but what are their ties with groups like the American Family Association or Focus On The Family which are backed by the conservative Protestant churches?

The thing is that I can readily understand why groups like The American Conservative Union, Americans for Tax Reform, and the US Chamber of Commerce are supporting Television Watch. On the whole economic conservatives take the point of view that "the government that governs least is governs best", by which they really mean that the government that regulates least is best, and the describe liberals as wanting more and more regulation. On the other hand the agenda of the social conservatives is that government must make regulate human behaviour to make it "correct" (at least in their view). Television regulation is an area where the two visions of conservatism conflict.

To further explain this I need to dip back into my brief and disastrous attempt to become a teacher. One of my required classes was in educational administration where we were introduced to the concept of in loco parentis. If your Latin is even more nonexistent than mine, this roughly translate as "in place of the parent". In simple terms this meant that from the time the kids arrived at school to the time they got home, the teacher had powers over them equivalent to their parents. According to the acts and regulations governing the schools in Saskatchewan this meant that the teacher was to act in the manner of an idealised "fair and responsible" parent in all areas including discipline (which at the time that I was in university included corporal punishment as a last resort). It seems relatively clear that what the PTC and groups like it want is for the television industry to program their networks as if they were in loco parentis, and for the FCC to punish the networks if they don't. But all of this seems to ignore the role of parents.

In the darkest period of World War II, when France had fallen and the United States had yet to enter the war Winston Churchill told the United States "Give us the tools and we will finish the job." Government and the broadcast industry have done a lot to provide parents with the tools that they need to be fair and responsible. They have willingly surrendered certain of their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech by accepting laws on the language and images that can be shown. They provide rating labels in front of every entertainment show indicating what age group the show is suitable for, and sometimes include warnings both in text and spoken form at the start of shows. They make their labels compatible with the V-Chip technology as mandated by the FCC. Consider the tools available on my TV and cable set-up. My TV is equipped with the V-Chip (although it doesn't work with the Canadian ratings system). My TV allows me to block channels and is password protected. My digital cable box allows me to block specific programs, and to lock out entire channels. It too is password protected. Unlike people in North Korea I'm allowed to change channels. There's an on-off switch on both the TV and cable box. It seems to me that the existing regulations - the regulations which both the liberal and conservative supporters of Television Watch find acceptable - give parents plenty of tools to do the job.

What the PTC wants is reminiscent of what the campus Communists at the University of Saskatchewan wanted. Every Friday they'd set up their information tables in the College of Arts building under a big sign that said "No Free speak For The Klan." They wanted to decide what sort of speak was acceptable, and it seems to me that what the PTC wants to accomplish is pretty much the same thing. The question I always wanted to ask the campus Communists and would like to ask the PTC is this: once you've denied free speak for one group, what is to prevent someone else from denying free speak to another?

So I'm No Bob Vila

This is just a short, off topic, post to explain why this isn't a longer, on topic, post.

I had planned to do another post on the PTC, following up on last week's post about the Paris Hilton ad, and hopefully I'll get it written tomorrow. However my mother is getting the carpet guys in on Tuesday to do the dining room, which means that the old carpet (which I helped install about ten or fifteen years ago) had to come up on Friday and the old floor had to have any of the padding that remained stuck to the original, 1950's vintage, asphalt tile floor scraped off using a chemical formulation that I refer to as "Gunk" to loosen the glue. Because of course it wouldn't do to leave all this to the last minute like Sunday and Monday.

The Gunk is, according to its label, so environmentally friendly that it can be cleaned up with soap and water. I also smells - strongly - of lemons. It took me about five minutes to get heartily sick of the smell of the Gunk, and about ten minutes for the smell of the Gunk to give me a raging headache. Of course you need to let it sit to really loosen the glue that's holding down remnants of the underpad; a half hour seems to be the ideal length of time. That's half an hour of dealing with that smell. And you have to do small areas because doing it all at once would cause a mess. It took me about two hours to finish that dining room and by the end of it all I had a raging headache and was feeling downright irritable.

Which brings me around to my feelings about DIY. Certain jobs can be done by the amateur but if you're smart you'll get a pro to do it. I don't like painting but I can do it fairly well as long as it doesn't involve heights. I'm relatively proficient with plumbing although I've reached an age where spending extended time under sinks is becoming very uncomfortable. When the carpet is in I'm considering replacing the quarter-round in the Kitchen and Dining Room and the hall leading to the bedrooms, because quite frankly the old stuff is showing it's fifty years. With my brother's miter saw and a rented nail gun, that job shouldn't take that long. I'm even willing to tackle (very) minor electrical jobs. However after several bad experiences with flooring I'm here to tell you all that hiring professional installers is the way to get a good looking job that's going to last. Of course that could just be me.

Leon Askin - 1907-2005

Leon Askin died in Vienna on Friday at age 97.

Probably best known to North Americans as General Burkhalter, Askin's professional career actually began in Austria in the 1920s. Born Leon Aschkenasy, his first stage appearance was in 1926, and he worked steadily through the 1930s both in theater and doing political and literary caberets in Vienna, Dusseldorf, and after the rise of the Nazis and later the Anschluss in Austria, in Paris. At the start of World War II he was interned in France as "an enemy alien". He emigrated to the United States in 1940 - before the German invasion of France, and did stage work as both an actor and director with Washington DC's Civic Theater. His production of Shakespeare's anti-war play Troilus & Cressida had the misfourtune to open on December 5 1941. Following the U.S. entry into the war, Askin joined the U.S. Army Air Force and rose to the rank of Technical Sergeant writing orientation material for soldier going overseas, and eventually serving in England. During this period he became an American citizen. At the end of the war he was able to travel to France in an effort to locate members of his family. He learned that his parents had been sent to the concentration camp at Teresienstadt and later learned that they had been executed. Returning to the United States, Askin returned to directing this time on Broadway, where he was also a founding member of Actors Equity.

In 1952 Askin went to Hollywood to work in the Columbia film Assignment Paris. He remained in Hollywood until 1993 and appeared in over 60 movies, usually as a foreign "villain". Among the films he was in were Road To Bali with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, The Robe with Richard Burton, Knock on Wood with Danny Kaye, Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three with James Cagney. He also worked in Germany in the period, notably in the 1962 remake of the Fritz Lang classic The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. His IMDB entry lists over 60 TV appearances, including The Adventures of Superman, My Favorite Martian, Daniel Boone, a two part episode of Switch (with Eddie Albert), Happy Days, and Three's Company. He did voices on Scooby and Scrappy Doo. His last American TV appearance was in an episode of Different Strokes, although his final TV appearance was in an Austrian miniseries, Alma - A Show biz ans Ende. In 1993 Askin returned permanently to Vienna where continued to work occassionally in film and theatre with his last film credit coming in 2001. In 2002, at the age of 95 he married media specialist Anita Wicher.

It is a General Burkhalter that Leon Askin is likely to be best remembered. Although most people writing about the series describe Burkhalter as a Nazi, it is more complex than that. Burkhalter would probably be better described as an old imperial officer who just happened to be working for the Nazis. He's sufficiently apolitical to not care who is in charge just so long as he has the best wine, the best food and the best women. Burkhalter was an opportunist, but he was also at least vaguely competent, certainly more competent Colonel Klink but it also makes him less sympathetic than Klink, and much less sypathetic than Sergeant Schultz. (Of course Howard Caine's character - Gestapo Major Hochstetter who really was a Nazi - was the least sympathetic of the lot.) Nevertheless Burkhalter was an immensely funny character to watch, alternating between the impeccable Prussian martinet who constantly threatens Klink with a one way trip to the Russian Front, and the jolly aristocrat who is enjoying the war because of the food and the wine and the beautiful women. What made it work of course was that Askin was an excellent actor, and had both the face and voice to make the character work.

If Only It Were The Ultimate Social Experiment

We came upon them upon their arrival, Geekus Americanus in a variety of subspecies. They seemed unfamiliar with their surroundings, blinking occasionally as though unfamiliar with the sun. The common types were present of course, the Fanboius and the Mensacus, but there was also examples of rarer types like the Scoutus Grosso, and the Doctorus Nervoso. Then we saw him, a magnificent specimen of a type thought only to exist as a myth and in bad movies, the Nerdus Maximus. For purposes of the study we named him Richard.

Soon the herd of Geekus Americanus were joined by a covey of Beautius Regina, lured by their mating call of Bling-Bling. They were a lovely sight. Their numbers included the diminutive Fashionista, Barbius Vivius, the rare Modelus Scantius, as well as the common Leaderus Cheeribus and the Sisterus Sororitanus. It was a rare meeting as the presence of Geekus Americanus in a location is with rare exceptions enough to drive out all signs of Beautius Regina. However it soon became clear that the circumstances here were anything but ordinary.

In advertising Beauty And The Geek The WB and producers Ashton Kutcher and Jason Goldberg described it as the "Ultimate Social Experiment". If only it were the ultimate in one of the correct meaning of the word - that is the last. Sadly I doubt that this is the case. Although superficially similar in format to the various dating shows, or something like The WB's previous show High School Reunion, the "social experiment" here is to bring brainy but socially inept "Geeks" together with the attractive but less than intelligent "Beauties" and hope that a little of the Geeks' brains and the Beauties' social skills would rub off on each other. Oh who are we kidding, they just wanted to make fun of the Geeks being socially inept and the Beauties being too dumb to know who was President of the United States during the Civil War. At its heart it's really a six episode game show.

The format is simple the seven Geeks pair up with the seven Beauties. They share a bedroom and in some cases a bed. They have to work together to prepare for challenges which confront their perceived weak points. The not particularly intellectual Beauties are tested on things like intelligence or how to change a tire by themselves, while the socially inept Geeks have to dance with their partner or how to give a woman a massage. The Geeks have to teach the Beauties what they need to know for their challenge and vice versa. Then in Apprentice like fashion the teams that win their respective challenges get to select two teams to face elimination. If one team wins both challenges they get to pick both teams. Elimination is done by quizzing members of the teams on their weak points with the team that has the fewest correct answers when their scores are combined being ejected from the game. The last team left gets $250,000.

As always personalities are key to a show like this and, particularly among the Geeks they hit a gold mine. There's the usual suspects; a computer programmer, an English major who has never been on a date and a couple of Mensa members. There are three who really stand out however. Chuck is a medical student who has an unfortunate habit of getting a nose bleed when he's stressed out. He had two nose bleeds in the first episode. Bill is a civil engineer but he's also vice president of the Dukes of Hazard fan club, and if he wins the $250,000 would like to buy the General Lee - the actual car from The Dukes of Hazard. But beyond a doubt the star Geek was Richard. Richard, who is graduating from Brandeis University with a double major in History and Spanish, was described by his partner Mindi as "the white Urkel" and I swear that she got it exactly right. From big glasses to pants hiked halfway up to his nipples, he is a pigmentally challenged Steve Urkel. As for the women, well most of them are not particularly extreme, but of particular note is Erika who describes herself as a "lifesized Barbie model" to the point where she named her dog "Skipper". When confronted with some of the stuff they need to know for the "Beautys" first challenge (fifth grade school subjects) she says fifth graders these days must be really smart" because she doesn't know Then there's Lauren who thought that she had a really high IQ "like 500". She was the first one out of the first challenge because she thought that "tattoo" was only spelled with two "T"s not three. Krystal, a cheerleader dancer for the Philadelphia 76ers doesn't know which is further south , North Carolina or South Dakota, and doesn't care because it's not something she'll ever need to know.

In the end Richard and his partner Mindi won both challenges because self described Sorority Girl Mindi knew that the abbreviation IA stood for Iowa and the audience thought that Richard's "nerd dance" (I swear I saw Urkel do it once on Family Matters or maybe it was Jim Carey in Dumb and Dumber) was better than the guys who at least tried to be serious about it. They chose Erica & Joe and Cheryl & Eric to face elimination with Cheryl & Eric being eliminated because Cheryl didn't know the answer to any of the history & politics questions she was asked. Still the fact is that the entertainment value of a show like this isn't in the anticipation of who will get eliminated, it's in watching the two groups of people being inept in the areas that the other takes for granted. Knowing that, I have to say that it's only mildly entertaining. I may watch it again if there's nothing else of real interest on, but if it was up against Dancing With The Stars or Hell's Kitchen or even certain reruns I could ignore it without any sense of loss. It makes me mourn the loss of better programs - like the original version of The Mole - all the more when I see a show like this.

Well Apparently They Were

I thought that America wasn't ready for Dancing With The Stars and said so in my review. Apparently I was wrong, at least for the first episode. The overnight ratings are in and ABC scored an impressive (particularly for the summer) 10.6/16 rating with 13.23 million viewers. In the important 18-49 age group the show drew a rating of 4.2/12. This made it the highest rated show of the night. By contrast the show's lead-in, a Supernanny repeat, drew a 5.9/10 with 7.74 million viewers and an 18-49 rating of 2.4/6. The WB's Beauty and the Geek which was on opposite Supernanny had 3.5/6, 3.09 million viewers, and an 18-49 rating of 1.6/6 to finish 4th in the time slot.

Who knew?

Is America Ready For This?

Three new reality shows debuted tonight, two in the United States and one in Canada. Predictably I'm going to review the one which seems just slightly more innovative than the others - and also the one that I think will probably be the lowest rated, which in the summer of 2005 is saying a lot.

Every so often you come upon you come upon a train wreck. It may not have happened yet but you know it will. Dancing With The Stars is going to be a train wreck. I just don't know that the United States - or Canada for that matter - is ready for ballroom dancing on network TV, particularly when the dancing is done by people who have very little experience in ballroom dancing.

Ballroom dancing has achieved a new level of visibility recently. The 1996 Japanese movie Shall We Dansu? receive critical raves when it was eventually released in the United States, and was eventually remade last year as Shall We Dance? with Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon and Jennifer Lopez. ABC has describe Dancing With The Stars as an international sensation, and it is, although not always under that name. In Britain the series is known as Strictly Come Dancing and has featured UK media "stars" like comedian Julian Clary, David Dickinson (host of Bargain Hunt), and opera singer Leslie Garrett. The Australian version, also called Dancing With The Stars had veteran actor John Wood, Olympic Gold Medallist James Tomkins, and Home And Away Star Rebecca Cartwright, and there's a New Zealand version that's currently airing.

The show's format pairs a "star" with a professional ballroom dancer. Let's just say that some are more adept than others. In the US version of the show there are six teams (the British, Australian and New Zealand series had eight to ten). They are John O'Hurley (Seinfeld) with Charlote Jorgenson; four time Heavyweight Boxing champion Evander Holyfield with Edyta Sliwinska, Joey McIntyre (Boston Public and the band New Kids on the Block) with Ashley Delgrosso; Kelly Monaco (General Hospital) with Alec Mazo; supermodel Rachel Hunter with Jonathon Roberts; and reality star Trista (Rehn) Sutter (The Bachelor and Ryan & Trista Get Married) with Louis van Amstel.

The partners have had five weeks to work together to learn the various dance moves and to develop routines for each of 10 styles of dance. Following their training period the teams dance at a Los Angeles club in a live broadcast hosted by Tom Bergeron America's Funniest Home Videos. Here I think is part of the problem with the show. Instead of playing it straight, Bergeron decides to go for the cheap joke. Thus when talking about Rachel Hunter he mentions that even though shes a supermodel she "uses her powers for good." it's an old joke and it was a bad joke when it was new. I get the distinct feeling that Bergeron would rather be anywhere else. Fortunately Tom doesn't get to talk much, which is just as well because a little of him goes a long way. Then things go to the judges. The head judge is professional Ballroom Dancing Judge Len Goodman, who was also a judge on the British series Strictly Come Dancing and has been either dancing or judging dancing for most of his adult life. He's assisted by Hollywood choreographer Carol Ann Inaba, and Bruno Tonioli who was also on the British show and has worked with people like Elton John, Michael Jackson, Paul McCartney, Kate Winslet and Tina Turner. They each rate the dancers from 1 to 10 (Bergeron: "Which means that the tops score is thirty"). Finally viewers get a chance to vote American Idol style by phone or on-line.

The dancing was variable, ranging from slightly better than high school prom quality to not quite ready to enter a real competition. Teams had the choice of the Waltz or the Cha Cha Cha, and while no one truly embarrassed themselves in terms of screwing up, but a couple of these people shouldn't be allowed on a dance floor unless they're the ones getting married. Evander Hollyfield gave a particularly poor performance, mainly standing in place moving his arms and occasionally his feet while his partner Edyta moved around him. Allegedly he was doing the Cha Cha Cha. The dance that Rachel Hunter and Jonathon Roberts were doing was allegedly the Waltz, but it looked to ballet like for my definition of the Waltz. The worst judges' assessment waited for Kelly Monaco who was described as looking too stiff, "as if someone had died." The best dancers may have been the teams Joey McIntyre and Ashley Delgrosso and John O'Hurley and Charlotte Jorgenson (although I at least was impressed with Trista and Louis).

There were few if any problems with the live broadcast. There were a couple of times when Bergeron tried to talk over the crowd and the crowd won, and one incident where a camera literally lost a pair of dancers in the flare from a footlight, but those sort of things can almost be expected in a first broadcast. The judges were relatively mild in their assessments of the teams. There are no Simons in this group: the meanest comment was when Len said of some team: "A garden needs a mix of lawn and flowers. You were all lawn." It says something however that I can't remember which team he said it of.

I can see the appeal of Dancing With The Stars. Ballroom Dancing is a beautiful thing and even sensual thing when you're doing it (the dancing generations of the '50s and '60s have a lot to answer for), and if there's a market for hours of figure skating in the winter, then there should be a market for this. The trouble is that I don't know what that market is, and whether they'll be watching in sufficient numbers to give this show the ratings it would need to survive. The problem isn't that the people are "B" or even "C" list celebrities - on the whole television doesn't attract "A" list celebs at the best of times and this show isn't going to make a breakthrough in that area (well Robert Duval might be interested - he's a major fan of ballroom dancing to the point where he taught Waltz classes on the set of Lonesome Dove) - and loathe though I am to say it, the problem isn't Bergeron. The reason I don't expect the show to succeed is simply that it doesn't have the excitement and fire of an American Idol or the dramatic tension of a Survivor or even a Hell's Kitchen. Worse, despite the success of Shall We Dance? I don't believe there's as much interest in Ballroom Dancing in North America as there is in Britain and Australia. All of which saddens me slightly because unlike a show like The WB's Beauty And The Geek which also debuted Wednesday night (and which I'll review tomorrow after it re-airs) it at least has the advantage of originality.

TV on DVD - May 31, 2005

A rather slow week, with some items delayed for a week or two. On the other hand there are a couple of real gems in this weeks listing.

Combat: Season 4 - Conflict 1
Combat!: Conflict 2: Season 4
- Combat! was one of the great series of my youth and it holds up. Season 4 was the last season shot in Black & White. In my opinion B&W was the right style for World War II series like Combat! and 12 O'Clock High but the nature of the television at the time meant that every series was going to go into colour or be cancelled. The DVDs contain a number of extras including commentaries, but the episodes don't appear to be in order on the disks. Still it's always fun to see Rick Jason and V*c M****w. (Special joke just for Tom Sutpen.)

The Dick Van Dyke Show: The Complete Series (All 5 Seasons)
- This is a massive package consisting of all five seasons of what was on of the seminal series of the 1960s, all of which have already been released on DVD, but wait. If you haven't bought any of the earlier releases of single season boxed sets, this might indeed be the way to go. Based on the Amazon.ca price of $194.95 (Canadian) for the five season set and the price for each of the single seasons - $79.95 (Canadian) - this five season set is priced at slightly less than two and a half single season sets. Of course if you are a fanatic for the Dick Van Dyke Show you've already trudged to the store to get each set as it was released.

Danger Mouse: The Complete Seasons 1 & 2
- Okay, this is another one that I never saw. In my defense it was a little later than my prime cartoon watching era and I don't know if it was even shown on a station that I had access to. Now Secret Squirrel I remember.

Dark Shadows: V18 Collection
- I live in a part of Canada that is rather unusual: it is more than 100 miles from the US border. Most Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border and as a result in the 1960s had easy access to cross border broadcast TV signals. They saw Dark Shadows, I didn't. The series only lasted from 1966 to 1971 but it developed a cult following (appropriate term that). It spawned a rather tepid 1991 remake starring Ben Cross which ended up as a casualty of the Gulf War (or more likely poor casting and network weasels), and there was talk of another remake on The WB in 2004 which didn't get off the ground. But the fans are loyal to the Jonathon Frid version with the sort of devotion that you'd expect of followers of a cult. Certainly it is likely the only daytime drama - soap opera really - that is likely to be released on DVD. Volume 18 collects the episodes from December 5, 1969 to February 2, 1970 on four discs, with bonus interviews on each. Now if only someone would do something with The Edge of Night (my favourite soap opera).

The Dukes of Hazzard: The Complete Third Season
- Here's a bit of trivia. Of the main actors on The Dukes of Hazard - John Schneider, Tom Wopat, Catherine Bach, Denver Pyle, and Sorrel Booke - none was born in the south. That's neither here nor there. The Dukes of Hazard was fluff, never meant to be taken seriously but just good clean car jumpin', cop humiliatin' fun. There's little to distinguish most season from each other except for the 13 episodes where Schneider and Wopat sat out for a raise and were replaced by Byron Cherry and Christopher Mayer as Coy and Vance Duke. It took that long for the producers and the network to realise that Dukes weren't interchangeable. The show featured a lot of country singers in performance and this season was a gem for that, including Tammy Wynette, Hoyt Axton, Dottie West, Freddie Fender, and Roy Orbison. Whether music clearances will allow those performances to be included on the DVDs is another question.

Moonlighting: Seasons 1 & 2
- The series that marked the supposed revival of Cybill Shepherd's career and also the breakout role for a guy named Bruce Willis. It very quickly became apparent that the series wasn't just an ordinary detective show. It should also have become apparent that it wasn't going to be a smooth run. The first season consists of just six episodes while the second season had 18. Which may not seem like a lot but it was the most episodes that the show would ever produce in a single season. What made the show work was the personal chemistry and sexual tension that existed between David & Maddy, which is ironic given that Shepherd and Willis hated each other. Just one down note on the set: it is brought out by Lion's Gate Films and while the company has a good reputation as a film maker they have a rather poorer reputation when it comes to DVDs of TV series. Apparently they release shows which have been cut for syndication without restoring the cuts and this appears to be the case on this set.

Rifleman, The Set 4 Rifleman Box Set Collection 4
- Another blast from my childhood. Chuck Connors as Lucas McCain was one of the great western heroes. The series was created by Sam Peckinpah and had a distinguished list of directors including Peckinpah, Ida Lupino and William Conrad. An IMDB reviewer described it as a "Western noir". I'm not sure about that but that may be because I haven't seen the show since I was 6.

This Is Your Life: Ultimate Collection
- This Is Your Life was one of the legendary series of the 1950s which lasted nine years in its first incarnation, and was revived a number of times since it left the air in 1961. Amazingly the British version which started in 1955 lasted until 2003. This set of three disks features 18 episodes of the American series from 1953 to 1987 and includes guests as diverse Milton Berle, Johnny Cash, Shirley Jones, Jesse Owens and Betty White. Perhaps the gem of the disc is the episode featuring Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Stan didn't want to talk much because he didn't want to make their first TV appearance on an unscripted show; he wasn't going to put on "a free show for them." However Stan suffered a stroke soon after the show was broadcast and by the time he was able to perform again Oliver Hardy's health had deteriorated. Thus, this one episode of This Is Your Life is the only TV appearance they ever made. (Thanks to Mark Evanier's New From Me for this story.)

The Tomorrow People: Set One
- This is a British Science Fiction series from the 1970s about teens with superpowers including telepathy and teleportation. It's classified as a "children's series" but apparently it's a children's series in the same way that its contemporary Doctor Who was a children's series. I've never seen it although apparently it was shown in the United States on Nickelodeon. Produced by ITV it reportedly was done on an even smaller budget than Doctor Who if you can believe it.

Hell's Kitchen - The Apprentice For Chefs

There is one thing that makes Hell's Kitchen worth watching and that is Gordon Ramsay. The format is very much taken from The Apprentice. You have two teams of people all competing to become the one winner. In this case the prize is their own dream restaurant. There are challenges to face and at the end of each episode one team wins and one team loses. The best person on the losing team gets to pick two of their teammates for the boss to send home. We have seen the format before, and heaven knows we'll see it on several other shows this season. What makes this show worth giving a second look to is Ramsay.

Gordon Ramsay is a culinary superstar. His British restaurants have a total of seven Michelin stars, he has been the subject of two documentaries - Boiling Point and Beyond Boiling Point - on Britain's Channel 4 in which his yelling and swearing at his kitchen staff were revealed. He has also hosted his own Channel 4 series called Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares in which he showed up to try to turn failing restaurants into successes, all while yelling and swearing at staff. Reportedly he has banned his four children from watching him on TV so that they don't pick up his "colourful" language. He's also written a number of books on cooking. It's a long way from his beginnings. Born in one of the rougher parts of Glasgow, Ramsay was signed at 15 to a football (soccer) contract with Rangers. His career was cut short by a major knee injury at 18 and he studied cooking in Britain and in France. In 1998 at age 32 he opened his own restaurant, Gordon Ramsay at Royal Hospital Road in London. His empire, with partner Marcus Wareing and protege Angela Hartnett now includes seven restaurants in and around London including the Savoy Grill. Hell's Kitchen in Los Angeles is (supposedly) his attempt to crack the American market. That's where the show is set.

In addition to Ramsay the staff are his Maitre d' Jean Philippe, and his two sous chefs Scott and Mary Ann. While Jean Philippe deals with the customers, Scott and Mary Ann are there to advise the contestants but not to participate in the cooking. The contestants are a diverse lot. They include four professional chefs and a culinary student, and seven non-experts, people who like to cook. As soon as they arrive at the restaurant, before they're even introduced to Ramsay they are told that they have 45 minutes to prepare their signature dishes. That's how they will introduce themselves to Gordon Ramsay. It is not a pleasant experience. The first dish he tries is immediately spat out. He describes it as "dog *bleep*" with not only his word but his mouth obscured so as not to offend the sensibilities of lip readers. Then the teams are split into a red team and a blue team and sent to their respective dormitories to settle in. It won't last.

The teams are about to face their first acid test. They have to master five appetizers, five entrees and five deserts. Oh yes, and the restaurant is opening tonight! Each team has its own complete kitchen and it's own half or the restaurant to serve. And this is where Hell's Kitchen veers away from the model of The Apprentice. While "The Donald" usually shows up only to give his little wannabes their assignments then disappears until it's time to find out who won the task and later to do the firing, Ramsay is there all the time and it is a real pressure cooker. It is his reputation at stake and nothing goes out without it meeting his standards. Who be unto anyone who doesn't meet his standards. Or anyone who gets in his way for that matter. In one case a pair of customers who have been waiting an hour for their food come to Ramsay to complain. He drops a rather choice obscenity at them and tells the staff not to talk to "these bimbos". Shortly after, when their friends come up to say that Ramsay has hurt the feelings of one of the women he instructs Jean-Philippe to take these ladies back "to plastic surgery." But it's the apprentice chefs who bear the brunt of Ramsay's ire. When one makes risotto so sticky that he can turn the plate on its side and not have anything slide off he chucks plate and all into the trash. One has his plated lamb chop pushed into his jacket. Finally, after two hours of not being served some of the guests start to leave. Soon after Ramsay closes the kitchen down and tell Jean-Phillipe to ask the patrons who are still there to leave.

In the postmortem, he tells the tams that their section will be judged by customer reaction cards. They aren't pretty and as Ramsay tells the teams it isn't so much that the Blue Team won, rather they did less horribly than the Red Team. Finding one of the Red Team - the risotto lady - whose food was actually edible after the first error to be the least bad on the team he gives her 30 minutes to select two team members for Ramsay to consider firing. The one that he does fire - a woman desert chef who hadn't really pitched in to work with her team - is sent packing, her chef's jacket impaled on a meat hook.

Hell's Kitchen is so *bleep*ing derivative of The Apprentice that it could actually be sued for plagiarism if others hadn't already done the same schtick, and would certainly be unwatchable if it weren't for Gordon Ramsay. One contestant compares Ramsay to Simon Cowell from American Idol. It's a comparison that is about as apt as comparing Rhode Island with Texas. Ramsay and Cowell are both Brits who can be insulting, like Rhode Island and Texas are both states. That's where the comparison ends. Ramsay is driven into rages. He is a perfectionist with his people and there is a quintessential reason for it: it is HIS reputation that is on the line; HIS name is on the restaurant, no one else's, certainly not the 12 - now 11 - wannabe chefs. Simon Cowell doesn't have that. In reality Donald Trump doesn't have that; the people if Trump's apprentices screw up a task it isn't going to make Turmp look any worse to the people he sends them out to. But if the food at Ramsay's restaurant isn't good, it is Ramsay who is going to be hurt. I have to give this show a mild recommendation simply because of Gordon Ramsay's rage and passion.

The Summer Season Part 2

So having gone through Monday and Tuesday's new shows for the 2005 summer season (and having completely missed a couple of Canadian shows - see below) we move on to the rest of the week. (At times like this I wonder if the pains of being an amateur TV critic are adequately compensated for by the fame and fortune. The I remember I don't have fame or fortune.)

Wednesday
Dancing With The Stars (ABC, starting June 1): Six "stars" (the biggest names are probably former heavyweight champ Evander Hollyfield and supermodel Rachel Hunter) participate in a live ballroom dance competition partnered with professional dancers. This international hit under the title Strictly Come Dancing is making it's North American debut and oddly enough looks like it could be fun.

Brat Camp (ABC, starting July 13): Six real life families with out of control teenagers send them to the Sagewalk Wilderness Therapy Camp in hopes of getting back the kids they knew and loved. Another show that originated in Britain.

The Inside (Fox, starting June 8): A drama concerning rookie profiler Rebecca Locke (Rachel Nichols) selected to join the FBI's Violent Crimes Unit in Los Angeles by its Supervisory Special Agent Virgil "Web" Webster (Peter Coyote). Each of the team's five agents has his or her own personal baggage which makes them ideal for their job.

Beauty And The Geek (The WB, starting June 1): Take seven beautiful but not particularly bright women, match them up with seven brilliant but socially inept guys and see them try to rub a little of their skills onto each other. The guys have to try to make their partners smarter while the women have to make their partners a bit more socially graceful. From Executive Producers Ashton Kutcher and Jason Goldberg.

So You Think You Can Dance (Fox, starting July 20): The search for America's best dancer. What makes me think that neither the Waltz nor Ballet will qualify you for this American Idol style competition?

Thursday
The Cut (CBS, starting June 9): Tommy Hilfiger play Donald Trump to a group of 16 style-savy contestants in an effort to find America's next great designer who will get a contract to design for Hilfiger's label.

Hit Me Baby One More Time (NBC, starting June 2): A three episode series in which five "veteran hit-makers" perform one of their old songs and something new, with the winner decided by viewer votes. First week's artists are "Flock of Seagulls", "Arrested Development", CeCe Peniston, "Loverboy", and Tiffany. Based on a British series and hosted by the British host Vernon Kay.

The Law Firm (NBC, starting July 28): Produced by David E. Kelly this "alternative drama" features real lawyers trying real cases with the results binding on the parties involved.

Sunday
Welcome to the Neighborhood (ABC, starting July 10): Seven diverse families compete for one dream house on the perfect suburban cul de sac (called Wisteria Lane ... oops sorry, wrong show). The prospective neighbors get to judge each family and in turn have their own assumptions and prejudices challenged. But no one gets killed by being hit with a blender.

Princes of Malibu (Fox, starting July 10): Brandon and Brody Jenner, the lay-about sons of Bruce Jenner and Linda Thompson are driving their step-father (Canadian) music producer David Foster nuts by living in his house, spending his money and partying day and night. He wants them to take a little responsibility for their lives - like growing up and moving out.

In addition there are new seasons of Average Joe on Tuesday nights, and UPN will have R U The Girl with T-Boz & Chilli, in which the two remaining members of TLC try to find a young singer to join them on a new album and concert tour.

CTV will be debuting the third season of Canadian Idol tonight, and the Canadian sketch comedy series Comedy Inc.will be returning to the line-up on Tuesday. Canwest-Global has Scott Thompson's reality series My Fabulous Gay Wedding starting June 1.

The Summer Season: Part 1

Long ago in a galaxy not unlike our own, there were three American broadcast networks, and two stations in Canadian cities ... if you were lucky. In those days (which I vaguely remember) many series ran for 39 weeks and to bridge the gap between the end of one season and the beginning of the next there were 13 week summer series. Most of them weren't all that good but they were scripted comedies or dramas. Later, when the number of episodes of a series decreased to 26 episodes, simply repeated series during the summer months. This was the trend through much of the period between the 1960s and 1980s. There were few summer replacements, and sometimes all you could count on was that the networks would air pilots for series that were picked up for the new season. The advent of sweeps weeks and the reduction of the number of episodes for most series to 22 meant that the networks were showing reruns of that season's shows through much of the years. Networks had to run new episodes during sweeps weeks and because the season usually starts in the second or third week of September it means that many series have used up almost half their new episodes by Christmas, and have at most only five or six of their 22 episode order available for January March and April. Those months and December tend to see a lot of reruns, or miniseries for the increasing number of shows that "don't repeat well". Suddenly new summer programming becomes attractive - if it can be had cheap.

I would like to suggest that the first modern summer season was the summer of 2000, when CBS premiered a couple of new shows for the summer. One had been a big hit internationally called Big Brother. The other was a little show about a group of disparate people dropped off on an island in the Pacific. CBS had big hopes for Big Brother based on all of the publicity, including attacks saying that the show was "degrading" and "junk TV" but it was a mild success, while that other show, something called Survivor, caught the attention of the nation and graduated into the big time by being shown during the regular season. The next year there was more summer programming from all six of the networks. This summer, the networks will be showing 17 hours of new programming (mostly reality shows) as well as burning off previously unseen episodes of two series. Every night except Saturday and Sunday will see new shows. Here's the list which will serve either as a reminder or a warning. (I was going to do this as one post but the list is just too long.

Monday
The Scholar (ABC, starting June 6): Ten high school seniors from across the United States compete for a full ride scholarship to the university of their choice, a prize valued at $250,000. They must demonstrate skills in the areas of academics, creativity, leadership and community service as well as coping with "sudden death oral exams" and defending themselves before an Ivy League admissions committee.

Hell's Kitchen (Fox, starting May 30): British celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, probably best known for his British series Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares comes to Los Angeles to open a new restaurant and find America's newest culinary star from the group of hopefuls that Fox has selected. If you know anything about Ramsay you will expect the series to have a lot of bleeping, because Ramsay knows all the best cuss words, and uses them on his hapless staff.

Rock Star: INXS (CBS, starting July 11): Also seen on Tuesday and Wednesday, this is another Mark Burnett series. A group of aspiring singers will compete to become the new lead singer for the band INXS and will be part of their new album and concert series.

Tuesday
Empire (ABC, starting June 28): This six hour drama is a fictional account of the life of Octavian, the adopted son and designated successor of Julius Caesar, and the disgraced gladiator who is assigned to protect him during his time in exile.

Fire Me Please (CBS starting June 7): A four episode reality series in which contestant try to get fired from their new job as close to, but no later than, 3 p.m. on the day they're hired as possible. Hidden cameras follow their efforts at getting canned.

Big Brother 6 (CBS starting July 7): Also seen Thursdays and Saturdays, the Big Brother house is again filled with 16 exhibitionists from diverse backgrounds who have to live with each other 24/7 for three months under the constant gaze of cameras and people who shell out to watch online, all for a $500,000 prize.

Meet Mister Mom (NBC starting August 2): In which we follow the comedy that ensues when Mom is whisked away to a spa for the week leaving Dad to cope with the kids. There are two families each week with the Dads in direct competition to see who can cope best and being watched on closed circuit TV by the Moms.

Tommy Lee Goes To College (NBC starting August 16): The University of Nebraska Lincoln welcomes new student, Motley Crue founder Tommy Lee in this series which lasts six half hours.

I Want To Be A Hilton (CBS starting June 21): Kathy Hilton, mother of Paris and Nicky, attempts to instruct 14 young contestants on etiquette, haute couture and how to deal with the press. The winner gets a year of living the Hilton style high life.

Britney & Kevin: Chaotic (UPN started May 17): Britney Spears and her husband whatzisface. Ends June 14.

The Bad Girl's Guide (UPN started May 24): A scripted comedy starring Jenny McCarthy, Marcelle Larice, and Christina Moore as three modern "bad girls" (as defined by the Cameron Tuttle book of the same name as a woman who is "sassy, provocative, questions authority and knows what she wants from life and how to get it with style, confidence and humor". I suppose it's like Sex and the City but this time the city is Chicago.

The Battle of Paris

It's been a while since I did a piece on the PTC. They're annoying but there's only so many times that you can rail against them without it becoming rather boring. The trouble they are such an easy target. They are on one hand stupid, and on the other hand reminiscent of school yard bullies who scream that they're being bullied when someone stands up to them. In this post we'll confine ourselves to the stupid part.

The stupid part is relatively easy to illustrate with a recent incident. Having mobilised the hordes in an attempt to force CBS to renew Joan Of Arcadia - an attempt that failed since CBS was uninterested in renewing a show that was #50 in the ratings despite the pleas of the faithful - the PTC turned its righteous wrath on an easier target, CKE Restaurants Inc., the owners of the Hardee's and Carl's Jr. fast food restaurant chains. They charge the chain with "a sneak attack on parents" with their new ads featuring Paris Hilton washing a car and eating a hamburger. I'll let the PTC "E-Lert" signed by Tim Winter, Executive Director of the PTC explain what has their bloomers in a knot:

The vehicle for the sneak attack is a sexually charged, adult erotica TV commercial for the chains' "Six Dollar Burgers" in which actress Paris Hilton, wearing an extremely revealing few square inches of leather, is shown sponging and hosing a car and -- mostly -- herself, complete with erotic play with the hose and the sudsy sponge. It concludes with her taking a big bite of a burger and mouthing the tag line, "That's hot!"

CKE has invested a huge ad budget in running the commercial repeatedly -- in versions for both Carl's Jr. and Hardee's -- including on sports programs that parents and grandparents might understandably assume would be free of sexually offensive content.

And despite an almost immediate nationwide uproar of protest -- led by the Parents Television Council's denunciation of the commercial as "the ultimate example of corporate irresponsibility" -- the company's CEO, Andy Puzder, has defended the commercial on the explicit ground that he says it will help the company make more money.

And he told critics -- like you and me -- to "Get a life." Quote unquote.

Well, we need to tell Mr. Puzder to get a conscience.

He said: "This is an attempt to sell hamburgers." Asked if he would hire Hilton again, Puzder said: "If this ad increases sales, I would choose her again.... It's all about the sales."

In other words, anything that sells hamburgers is OK with Mr. Puzder. Later he writes: The one-million-members-strong Parents Television Council (PTC) is sending this message to CKE Restaurants:

IT IS NOT OK TO FLOOD OUR FAMILIES' "YOUNG GUYS" WITH RAUNCHY SEXUAL IMAGES SO YOUR COMPANY CAN SELL MORE BURGERS!

And if we have any say in it, the price you will pay for this outrageous display of corporate irresponsibility is that you will sell fewer burgers!

Well guess what Mr. Winter, you just helped him sell hamburgers.

Because I'm sure that people who wouldn't have paid much attention to the ads will now because your group has told them that they're dirty. And not only do those people have minds and eyes they also buy burgers. I know that if I were anywhere near a place where there was a Carl's Jr. or a Hardee's I'd spend six bucks on one of those burgers just to spite the PTC. When you look at the ads, you have to ask if the PTC would have been so indignant if it wasn't Paris Hilton in those ads, if it were some no name model not the star of The Simple Life and those notorious amateur sex videos. I doubt it. The PTC cites the fact that the ad has been run on sports programs "that parents and grandparents might understandably assume would be free of sexually offensive content" but it's a fact that the commercial in question is no raunchier than a lot of beer ads that have been a staple of TV sports for decades. And they were costumes that are a lot skimpier than what Hilton is wearing. They are, if I'm not mistaken, called bikinis. In addition the earlier ads for the Carl's Jr. Western Bacon Six Dollar Burger (featuring a "no-name" model riding a mechanical bull in slow motion while eating a burger) is arguably just as sexy. Both ads are on the Carl's Jr. website.

(Oh and by the way, it's a cloth bathing suit of the type that most members of the PTC couldn't hope to afford.)

Eddie Albert 1906-2005

Eddie Albert passed away of pneumonia on Thursday, a few weeks after his 99th birthday, in was announced on Friday evening. According to his son Edward Albert, Eddie Albert had suffered from Alzheimer's Disease for the past 10 years.

Eddie Albert's life was an eventful one, both inside show business and outside of it. Before World War II he provided intelligence information on German activities in Mexico while working for the Escalante Brothers Circus as a trapeze artist. During World War II he served in the US Navy as a beachmaster and salvage expert. During the Tarawa landings he rescued a number of wounded soldiers from the beaches in the small unarmoured boat he was provided with for salvage operations. For this he was awarded the Bronze Star. He was later assigned to a unit making training films and after the war he took this experience and used it to form a company producing educational films. He was involved as an activist for a number of causes, notably malnutrition - he travelled to the Congo to discuss the issue with Albert Schweitzer in the 1950s - and refugees. However he is most readily identified with the environmental movement. He became an activist in publicising the effects of DDT which led to the eventual ban on its use in the United States. He was also involved in conservation activities, being the chairman of the Boy Scouts of America's tree planting and conservation programs.

Eddie Albert's career in t he entertainment industry began in the 1930s. He started as a singer in night clubs and on the radio. Indeed he dropped his family name - Heimberger - because radio announcers constantly mispronounced it as "Hamburger". He later appeared on Broadway starring in Brother Rat. When the play was made into a movie he was brought to Hollywood to appear in it, and the sequel Brother Rat and a Baby, opposite Ronald Reagan. He went back to Broadway from time to time, including replacing Robert Preston as Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man. In his Hollywood career he appeared in over 100 theatrical and TV movies. Among his most important roles were Roman Holiday in 1953 and The Heartbreak Kid in 1972. He earned Oscar nominations for both roles. Other major roles included Ali Hakim in the movie version of Oklahoma, the cowardly officer in Attack!, and the prison warden in the original version of The Longest Yard, a character he reportedly modelled on Richard Nixon. Robert Aldrich, the director of The Longest Yard as well as Attack said of him, "There's no actor working today who can be as truly malignant as Eddie Albert. He plays heavies exactly the way they are in real life. Slick and sophisticated." He was also a veteran television performer. In fact his first television performance occurred in 1936 when he participated in the first private TV broadcast by NBC to its radio licensees in New York. He made a number of guest appearances on dramatic anthology series such as Studio One in the 1950s and was active in TV movies and miniseries as late as 1995 (and did voice work for animated series as late as 1997).

Eddie Albert is best remembered for one series of course and that is Green Acres. He had rejected a number of other series - notably Father Knows Best - the role of Oliver Wendell Douglas, the Wall Street lawyer who decided to escape the rat race by becoming a farmer, appealed to the man who turned his front lawn into a cornfield and grew his own vegetables in a backyard greenhouse. At the time the series was regarded as just another rural comedy on a network which was famous (or infamous, depending on what you thought of the shows) for rural comedies. Today it is regarded as gem of surrealist comedy. Douglas might have seemed sane but in the context of the community where he lived - where pigs were treated as children and the show credits were sometimes read by the characters - he was the odd man out. Even though he did several other TV series including Falcon Crest, General Hospital and Switch (I used the only picture I could find online related to that series), it is Green Acresfor which he is and probably always will be remembered.

The Best New Show On TV

With due respect to shows like Desperate Housewives and Lost, the best new show on American broadcast television in the 2004-2005 season has undoubtedly been House, or to give it its full title House M.D. (That incidentally is how it appears in the main title, with the M.D. so tiny that unless you are particularly observant you'd never notice it.) It may also provide definitive proof that the Parents Television Council is right about the V-Chip, but I'll get into the reason I say that shortly.

"House" is Dr. Gregory House and he's unusual, both for a TV doctor and a real doctor. Most TV doctors are (and have always been) surgeons or worked in emergency rooms. They look sharp in their white lab coats and heroic in their surgical greens. House is the head of the "Department of Diagnostic Medicine" at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital (based on the University Medical Center in Princeton). He usually looks worse than an unmade bed in a rumpled sports coat, an open collared shirt and running shoes. He doesn't do surgery and wouldn't wear a lab coat to save his job. He is, in fact an unlikely protagonist; an ill-tempered, sarcastic, misanthrope with a disdain for the mundane and a love for solving puzzles. He'd rather watch soap operas, and has to be threatened to get him to do time in t he hospital's clinic. He's walks with a cane thanks to a misdiagnosed embolism in his leg which destroyed much of the muscle tissue while leaving him in great pain. He's addicted to Vicodin, a fact that he admits, but refuses to enter a rehab program because his addiction has not impaired his ability to do his job. In the hands of the wrong actor the character could be such a turn-off that it would drive viewers away. In the hands of British actor Hugh Laurie (probably best known as a comedian, for his work in Blackadder and earlier in Jeeves and Wooster with his friend Stephen Fry) House's bad qualities are tempered with a dark humour and a basic humanity in addition to his brilliance as a diagnostician which, if it does nothing else arouses our sympathy.

The roots of House are apparent - if somewhat obscurely - in his name. The character is based very much on Sherlock Holmes (whose name can be pronounced "homes" - Holmes=House) which is only fitting since Arthur Conan Doyle based Holmes on one of his instructors at the Edinburgh Medical School, Dr. Joseph Bell. Bell had the ability, exhibited by Holmes and by House, of being able to tell things about a person based simply on looking at him or her. In one notable exchange in the series House tells a man, whose skin has turned orange in colour, that his wife is having an affair "because you're orange, you moron, and she hasn't noticed it." It goes further however. Holmes believed implicitly that everybody lies, or at least withholds the truth; House believes that everybody lies and finding out what the lies are and why they are lying is an important clue in the diagnostic process. His diagnostic process goes back even further to Edgar Allan Poe's character August Dupin. Dupin said (and this is often, wrongly, ascribed to Sherlock Holmes) "eliminate the impossible and whatever remains, regardless of how improbable, is the answer." House's diagnostic technique is to look at the symptoms and determine what could cause them, and then eliminate them as the cause. Sometimes this is done by asking questions, sometimes through investigation, and sometimes through experimentation. It is the latter that leads to the greatest conflict. House will order a course of treatment which will cure one possible cause of the patient's illness but be either ineffective or dangerous to another possibility. In this manner he collects and analyses data which leads to the answer. (Incidentally the cases are apparently based on real case files, although the way the details of the actual case are not necessarily recreated) Surrounding Dr. House are his team: Dr. Eric Foreman (Omar Epps), a neurologist, Dr. Robert Chase (Jesse Spencer), an intensivist (a doctor specialising in iintensive care), and Dr. Allison Cameron (Jennifer Morrison), an immunologist. As well there's his best (well only) friend, Dr. James Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard), an oncologist, and hospital administrator, Dr. Lisa Cuddy (Lisa Edelstein). They are all specialists and so tend to see illnesses from their own viewpoint. Cameron is an immunologist so she tends to focus on infections as the principal case of problems rather to the exclusion of everything else. Similarly Foreman looks for neurological causes. House on the other hand looks beyond the boundaries of specialties to all possible causes.

House has had an interesting history as a series. Debuting in November 2004, following Fox's post season baseball coverage, the show had a major ratings improvement on its lead-in The Billionaire Rebel: Richard Branson's Quest for the Best, increasing the estimated audience from 5.35 million for Branson to 7 million. This still put the show in fourth place however. Viewership slumped by almost a million in the second week of the series. Although it remained mired in fourth place through the rest of the run of Billionaire Rebel, it continued to expand on the audience for that show by up to 87% at one point. Once American Idol became the lead-in for House in February 2005, ratings for the show took off. From being mired in fourth with the Branson series as its lead, House soared into first place when it followed Idol. The February 1, 2005 episode had 12.89 million viewers, and the February 8 episode had over 14 million. In other words the viewership doubled based entirely on having a popular show as a lead-in rather than a show that no one is interested in. This leads me to the obvious conclusion that the V-Chip can't possibly work: people are either too lazy or too dumb to change channels from hour to hour, so how can they be expected to master something as complicated as the V-Chip. (Before anyone complains, I am being sarcastic.)

In describing House as the best new show of the season, I am primarily concerned with the quality of the acting and the writing, both of which are excellent. Hugh Laurie does a masterful job playing the emotionally scarred Dr. House, who finds meaning in his work, and whose personal relationships are next to non-existant. There's no real need for external conflict, although the producers introduced some in the form of Chi McBride's character Edward Vogler. I am convinced that Vogler, a billionaire entrepreneur who buys his way into control of the hospital board and takes an immediate dislike to House because he's not "cost efficient", was introduced as a result of the early ratings. Vogler was intended to make House seem more sympathetic by being a nearly all powerful antagonist. By the time he was introduced however the crisis had ended. Viewers had begun to watch the show and they found the combination of the medical puzzles, House's outward irascibility and internal pain eminently easy to identify with. Credit belongs to the writers for crafting both an intriguing character but also to Hugh Laurie for making the character human and far more multidimensional than many characters on TV shows. All too often all we see of a character is him doing his job, with little detail of his life or personality beyond that. It is commendable.

(I'm getting a bit behind thanks to Sweeps and just the fact that it's May and there's a lot of stuff to do now that the snow is off the ground. I should have written this review of House earlier, but there was a lawn to mow before it started raining. I hope to have a review of Lost posted tomorrow.)

TV on DVD - May 24, 2005

I've been having a couple of delays over the past few days but here is this week's list of TV shows on DVD. A bumper crop as you can see.

Airwolf: Season 1
- An absolute classic. Jan Michael Vincent stars as Stringfellow Hawke, the pilot of the hottest helicopter on TV (because everyone who counts knows that Airvwolf could kick Blue Thunder's ass). Donald Bellisario's casting of supporting roles made this show worth while since I never cared much for Vincent as an actor. Alex Cord was impressive as String's government contact "Archangel" who was always immaculately dressed in white, right down to his eyepatch, and of course there was Ernest Borgnine doing his befuddled sidekick routine. An absolute gem.

Baa Baa Black Sheep: Volume 1
- This is one of the few series that my younger brother was ever totally fanatical over. I never got into it largely for one reason - I could not stand Robert Conrad. Still the show did have a pretty interesting list of supporting cast members including Dan Blocker's son Dirk, Conrad's half brother Larry Manetti, and John Laroquette.

Super Friends: Season 2
- Prime super-hero cheese with Superman, Batman, Robin (voice by Casey Kasem!), Wonder Woman, and that fish guy - oh yeah, Aquaman. This is the season with Wendy and Marvin and Wonder Dog.

The Andy Griffith Show: The Complete Second Season
- By the second season of the The Andy Griffith Show, most of the elements were in place and settled, although Andy's girlfriend Helen Crump wouldn't be added for a while, and there was no Gomer Pyle yet. What's really interesting in this season is some of the guest stars, including Jean Hagen (who played Danny Thomas's first wife in Make Room For Daddy from which The Andy Griffith Show had been spun-off), Andy Clyde, Buddy Ebsen, Alan Hale Jr., Barbara Eden, Sterling Holloway, and both Rance and Clint Howard (Ron Howard's father and younger brother - even then getting work because of Ron). No Howard Morris (Ernest T. Bass) yet though. They don't make this sort of gentle series - humorous rather than joky - anymore

Batman: Training For Power: V1 Season 1
- This is the current Batman animated feature and includes the voice of the late Frank Gorshin as Hugo Strange. I haven't gotten around to seeing this yet, so I won't comment.

Batman - The Animated Series: Volume 3
- This on the other hand I have seen and enjoyed greatly. Artistically the look they were going for was along the lines of the 1940s Superman cartoons done by Fleischers, but using a cheaper process and more limited animation. The result was not only extremely attractive but as much in keeping with the tone of the comic books as you could get for the audience.

Chappelle's Show: Season Two - Uncensored!
- I've never heard of it, although it has been on the Comedy Network here in Canada. Indeed the first time I heard of Dave Chappelle in any context was in relation to his recent mental health problems.

Everybody Loves Raymond: Series Finale
- In a shameless attempt to wring the last dime out of the fans - or to give the public what it wants, depending how you spin it - Warners and HBO have released the series finale of Everybody Loves Raymond in an affordable one disc set.

Fat Actress
- Haven't seen this show and in all honesty would rather have my wisdom teeth pulled than sit down and watch it, so this is just an observation. Did you ever notice that Kirstie Alley started packing on the pounds after Parker Stevenson stopped giving her "the big one" (and does anyone remember the Emmy speech where that line came from - she thanked her husband Parker for giving her "the big one").

Garfield: Fantasies
- Not sure, but I believe that this is a collection of stand-alone specials featuring Garfield rather than part of the Garfield And Friends TV series.

Law And Order: Third Year
- This third season of Law & Order saw the arrival of Jerry Orbach into the cast, replacing Paul Sorvino (who was embarking on one of his periodic attempts to establish himself as an opera singer) who in turn had replaced George Dzundza from the original cast. It is entirely fitting that Orbach, who was on the series longer than any other actor with the exception of Steven Hill, is honoured on this DVD with a profile and tribute.

M*A*S*H Season 8
- Another case where an item is available from Amazon in the United States but not in Canada. I will be very embarrassed when it shows up at London Drugs, won't I. By this point the series had fallen into its "profound and important" period. The only major alteration in the cast is the departure of Radar, who was the only member of the original movie cast to make the transition to the TV series. (Season 2 of Have Gun Will Travel has finally shown up on their site however).

Nick Jr. Favorites, Vol. 1
- A sampler from a variety of Nickelodeon kids series, including Dora the Explorer, Blue's Clues, and Max & Ruby. Probably worth it if you have small kids around the house, although my 2 1/2 year-old nephew prefers his Thomas the Tank Engine videos.

Nick Picks: V1
- Another Nickelodeon sampler, this time for a slightly older audience. Includes episodes of All Grown Up, Fairly Odd Parents, Jimmy Neutron, and of course SpongeBob Squarepants.

NewsRadio: The Complete First & Second Seasons
- Arguably one of the best comedies of the 1990s, NewsRadio featured stand-out performances from Dave Foley, Stephen Root, Khandi Alexander and Maura Tierney, as well as being a major break for Vicki Lewis, Joe Rogan and Andy Dick. It was however the presence of Phil Hartman as newsman and colossal ego Bill McNeal that made the show worth watching, and his death that signaled it's end even though the network tried to replace him with Jon Lovitz. The first season was only seven episodes long which is why both the first and second seasons are on this set.

Samurai Jack: Season Two
- A Cartoon Network series that I'm not really familiar with. Okay, a Cartoon Network series that I'm not familiar with at all. There's also a set that includes both Season One and Season Two.

Speed Racer: V3
- I never really watched Speed Racer. Can't remember who much chance I had to see it, but the whole Japanese Anime style of it didn't do it for me. There are two versions of the disc, with the collector's version having the rounded top. Since the prices for both versions are equal, if you can get the collectible version, do so.

Spongebob Squarepants: Fear Of A Krabby Patty
- Eight episodes of SpongeBob - three of them listed as "bonus material." If it's going to be on the disc and it's an episode, why not just say so. (Clearly I've seen so little of SpongeBob that I have to get picky about extras. Sorry.)

Voyage to the Planets and Beyond
- What is apparently a highly detailed and entertaining documentary (with dramatic "imaginings") about a manned voyage around the Solar System aboard the mile-long spaceship Pegasus. Narrated by David Suchet, the program explores the complexity of space flight (such as "slingshot maneuvers) and the qualities of various planets. Among the special features is a documentary on real space probes that are currently exploring the planets. Listed in the IMDB as Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets.