On The Eleventh Day Of Christmas

On the eleventh day of Christmas (plus a few hours), my true love (Television) gave to me....eleven Odds and Ends.

This is basically stuff that doesn't fit into any other category. Well there are a couple that could have been stuffed into lists that I did before but hey, this is my blog and I'll put stuff where I want them so there!

1. Jamie Lynn Spears is pregnant: Okay, she's 16 and her mom thinks it's okay if she's living with a 19 year-old guy, and America's national shrink, Dr. Phil thinks that Lynn Spears – who is not only the mother of Jamie-Lynn but also of celebrity train-wreck Britney Spears – is "a great and dedicated mother," who has "her feet squarely and solidly on the ground." But that's not the amazing part of the reaction to Jamie Lynn's pregnancy. The moralists immediately declared her to be an unfit role model for teenage girls and demanding (as these groups do) that her TV show, Zoey 101 be removed from the air. Of course they don't know – or more likely don't care – that the planned final season of the show had already been shot before Spears got pregnant. So there'll be no scenes of a pregnant Zoey (or whatever the character's name is) to corrupt the minds of teenage girls in the USA. For that they'll have to go to school and see the girls in their classes who got pregnant, probably because they haven't had any sex education at school or at home.
   
2. Reality-competition show contestant deaths: Two of them. Rachel Brown, who was a contestant on the second season of Hell's Kitchen was found dead in her home in May 2007, killed by a gunshot wound. The circumstances were under investigation at the time, but as far as I can tell there's been no further determination. She left behind a girlfriend and two cats. Second, Cheryl Kosewicz, the fourth person voted off in the truly awful Pirate Master died on July 27, 2007 – a few days after the show had been cancelled by CBS with the remaining episodes being streamed on the networks InnerTube online service – an apparent suicide. Kosewicz, a 35 year old deputy District Attorney from Sparks, Nevada killed herself two months after her 26 year-old boyfriend. According a post that Kosewicz made on fellow contestant Nessa memir's MySpace webpage about a month before her death, "Truthfully, I've lost the strong Cheryl and I'm just floating around lost. And this frik'n show doesn't help because it was such a contention between Ryan and I and plus its not getting good reviews."
   
3. Sanjaya and Terry Fator: You couldn't get two more different performers. People were stunned and amazed at Sanjaya Malakar's continued presence on American Idol which became a fandom phenomenon for no apparent reason other than he was so bad (I can't comment – I have better things to do than watch American Idol – like just about anything). Or maybe it was the hair. It certainly wasn't any ability as a singer. Meanwhile ventriloquist Terry Fator stunned audiences and the judges on America's Got Talent with his performances which were an amazing mix of ventriloquism, vocal impressions, and actual vocal chops as a singer. In fact about the only person who didn't seem to get the fact that Terry Fator is an amazing performer is comedian Bill Maher who stated in the New Rules segment of his HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher on August 24^th, "New Rule: If your winner is a ventriloquist, then "America Hasn't Got Talent." Besides, if there's one thing Americans have had enough of, it's the guy who puts words in the dummy's mouth. [photo of Bush and Rove shown] Oh, we kid President Bush. It's all with love." After watching his diatribe on medicine on David Letterman's show the other night, I'm beginning to wonder if Maher (who I liked on his show Politically Incorrect) may be proof that "America Hasn't Got Talent." Or maybe it's just the hair (which has looked like it had enough product to start its own beauty salon).
   
4. Don't Hassle the Hoff: Unless of course you're his daughter. A highly controversial video emerged in May showing Hasselhoff in a drunken stupor trying to eat a hamburger. It was shot by his eldestdaughter in an effort to get him to stop drinking by showing him how he looked when he drank. At the time, Hasselhoff was involved in a custody battle for his two teenage daughters. His visitation rights were suspended. However, some six weeks after the video appeared on YouTube, Hasselhoff won "primary physical custody and full legal custody" of his daughters.
   
5. Hugh Laurie didn't host the Emmy's: Ryan Seacrest, who is about the least important person on American Idol was the host of the 2007 Emmys and he performed just about as well as he does on American Idol. The more interesting thing is that Hugh Laurie, the star of the Fox series House was seriously considered for the hosting job by FOX (which broadcast the Emmys in 2007). Laurie is a multi-talented performer who is not only a dramatic actor but also a comedian and an extremely talented musician. Reportedly FOX executives eventually chose Seacrest because they "felt Seacrest would draw a larger TV audience and because viewers might be confused seeing Laurie in an unfamiliar role." Or even his (real) British accent. And knowing the sort of people that FOX executives believe their audience to be – given some of the shows they put on and many of the shows they take off almost as soon as they debut – they might have been right. But the rest of us lost something special.
   
6. Musical Executives: Kevin Reilly was manoeuvred out his job as President of Network Entertainment at NBC (or as it's known by people outside of NBC, "dying for Jeff Zucker's sins") a few weeks after the 2007 Upfronts. It was also about three months after he signed a new three year contract with NBC. His sin was apparently releasing what some described as a "lacklustre" list of new series for the 2007-08 season. Part of the reason for that may have been the fact that he "could do only half the number of pilots of the other Big Four broadcast networks for the 2007-08 season." Reilly, who had been a champion for such series as Friday Night Lights, Heroes, The Office, My Name Is Earl, and 30 Rock, was replaced by former agent and independent producer Ben Silverman whose shows include Ugly Betty, The Office, and such reality shows as Biggest Loser, Nashville Star, Parental Control, Date My Mom, Blow Out, 30 Days and House of Boateng. About a month after being effectively fired at NBC, Kevin Reilly was named President of Network Entertainment at FOX.
   
7. Most overexposed celebrity: Britney Spears of course. She exposed her scalp, she exposed her hoo-ha, and although this happened just a few days ago (in 2008), she exposed her weak grasp on sanity (or something) when she was involved in a confrontation with police that led to her being taken to Cedars-Sinai Hospital in hysterics. It's a sad situation when Kevin Federline is considered a more suitable parent to have custody of a one and a two year-old. Other candidates included Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Anna Nicole Smith's corpse, and O.J. Simpson. And whose fault is this really? Not the celebrities really but the fans who want to know every detail of their lives and the news editors who pander to those fans.
   
8. Dumb network practice: Well one of many anyway – the mid-season hiatus. The practice of shooting only 22 episodes of most series, combined with the probably excessive emphasis on the three major sweeps periods in November, February and May, and the observation on the part of networks that some shows "don't repeat well" has led in recent years to the practice of taking shows off the air for extended periods of time rather than show them in repeats. The theory is that rather than letting the ratings drop (and possibly not recover) for an extended period of time the show would be taken off the air and something else would run its time slot. I think it can safely be called a disaster. It nearly killed Lost which aired a mere six episodes before the series went on an extended planned hiatus – the six episodes were in theory meant to stand alone – while ABC aired 13 episodes of Day Break starring Taye Diggs, which was meant to run until March 2, 2007. There was a minor problem in that ratings for the show tanked and it was pulled in mid December 2006. However Lost still didn't return immediately, it was kept off the air untilthe beginning of February. The practice did kill Jericho (but see the next item) which was replaced by CBS with the first eleven episodes being shown before the end of November and the final eleven starting in mid-February. In the meantime viewers were supposed to watch a reality show called Armed And Famous about a group of "celebrities" who trained as cops. Meanwhile NBC's game show Deal Or No Deal was running new episodes while FOX was rerunning episodes of Bones. People didn't watch Armed And Famous, and when Jericho returned, people didn't watch it. The audience for Jericho dropped by 25% between the first and second half seasons. Obviously the mid-season hiatus won't be a problem in 2008 – the strike has meant that most shows have run all the episodes they have while others will start in the new year and run their complete run uninterrupted, but the question for a lot of people is whether the networks have learned anything from the experience. I doubt it.
   
9. Nuts to you CBS: That was the response of Jericho fans to the announcement that the series would only run one season. They sent over twenty tons of nuts to CBS as well as flooding the network with letters and emails. The nuts were a reference to the last line in the final episode in which Jake Greene, leading the outnumbered and outgunned defenders of Jericho, Kansas against the forces of a larger town responded to a demand to surrender with General McAuliffe's response to the German demand to surrender Bastogne: "Nuts." Commenting on the situation, CBS president Les Moonves said, "You have to tip your hat to their ability to get attention and make some noise." The campaign had a positive result. CBS first announced that they would "provide closure" for fans (something they wouldn't do for most cancelled series) and later announced an eight episode "mini" season to air as a mid-season replacement with the possibility for more episodes if ratings justified it. The campaign also spawned imitators. Fans of Veronica Mars were encouraged to send Mars Bars and/or marshmallows to The CW before June 15, 2007 to get the network to bring the series back as a mid-season replacement. It didn't work despite the fact that 1400 pounds of Mars Bars (which have been discontinued in the US), Almond Snickers Bars, and Marshmallows were sent to the network. United Hollywood is encouraging fans to send pencils to the six major Hollywood moguls – Les Moonves (CBS), Jeffrey Immelt (NBC/Universal), Rupert Murdoch (FOX), Jeffrey L Bewkes (Time-Warner), Robert Iger (Disney), Sumner Redstone (Viacom) – to pressure them to settle the Writers Strike. At present just over 650,000 pencils have been sent to "The Moguls" and just look at the effect it's had.
   
10. Dumb decision department: Okay I'm reaching for content here (it's late and I'm a day behind), but I think that CBS should get some sort of award for dumb decisions related to the way they handled the hour after 60 Minutes and The Amazing Race. Now I'm biased because I am a huge
    Amazing Race fan who only regrets being a Canadian when I see that the show is looking for new contestants. The show has won the Emmy for Outstanding Reality Competition Series since the category was created, and it finally seemed to find a stable time slot last year in the hour following 60 Minutes. So what happens to the show in the 2007-08 season? Why CBS not only replaced the show with Viva Laughlin but also announced that only one series of The Amazing Race would be run this year and that would have fewer episodes than previous seasons. Karma – being a bitch – rewarded CBS with the cancellation of Viva Laughlin after two episodes (only one of them in the time slot), the Writers Strike, and the show has finished in the Nielsen top ten in two of the past four weeks (and one of those weeks the show wasn't on the air because of the Survivor finale). Another season has officially been ordered though there is no indication of when it will air.
    
11. Blog comment that angered me most: Now I really am reaching, but this comment still gets me angry. It's also Amazing Race related. In response to the article I posted on the Racers in the current season of The Amazing Race which featured Kate and Pat, a lesbian couple who are also members of the Episcopal clergy, I got this "lovely" comment from "John 3:16: "Homosexuals posing as and claiming to be God's people?!... Leave it to the pawns at CBS to promote a lifestyle that is offensive and straight from the gates of hell." Except from obvious commercial spam I don't censor comments but I was sure tempted to that time.
    

On The Tenth Day Of Christmas

On the tenth day of Christmas, my true love (Television) gave to me...ten dead people.

Yeah, it's that time in the awards show....sorry....the list of lists that my 12 Days Of Christmas posts really are, to do the obituary montage. Now obviously there were a lot more than ten prominent TV people who left us in calendar 2007, and if you want a far more complete list that I am going to provide, check out TV Squad and my good friend "Tele-Toby's" great blog Inner Toob.

So what am I doing with this list? Basically I have picked out ten people who, for one reason or another, have either had great significance for me in my life as a TV viewer or for one reason or another were (in my oh so humble opinion) towering figures in the history of the medium. I'll try to give some explanation but I will tell you right now, inclusion on this list is extremely arbitrary and is in no particular order.

Charles Lane (January 26, 1905-July 9, 2007): One of the great grouchy old men, whether it was in Frank Capra's movies, working with his good friend Lucille Ball on a number of her films and TV shows, or as the prototypical flint-hearted businessman, Homer Bedloe on the TV series Petticoat Junction, Charles Lane was one of the great character actors. Primarily known on TV for his comedy work he was equally comfortable in dramatic parts, particularly later in life. He was a founding member of both the Screen Actors Guild and the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Honoured at the TVLand Awards on his 100^th birthday, he stated "In case anyone's interested, I'm still available!" Apparently someone called because his last IMDB credit is as the narrator in a 2006 animated short, The Night Before Christmas.

Tom Snyder (May 12, 1936-July 29, 2007): One of my favourite talk show hosts, in part because he was an involving (and involved) conversationalist. You usually got the sense that he was at least interested in his guest and unlike Larry King (who Snyder apparently had some animosity towards) you knew that Tom actually read the books. He could bear right in on a guest when necessary or at other times just let them talk. You could tell when Tom really liked a guest. One of the best things that David Letterman did when he came to CBS from NBC was to put Snyder (who had been replaced by Dave at NBC in 1981) on after him. It was joy to just listen to him talk to people but in the opinion of CBS at least the time for his type of talk show had passed and I at least think that television is the worse for it.

Verity Lambert (November 27, 1935-November 22, 2007): The first woman to become a producer at the BBC, and later headed her own production company, Cinema Verity, she will forever be linked with the first series that she ever produced at the BBC – Doctor Who. In fact she passed away one day before the forty-fourth anniversary of the debut of the series.

Merv Griffin (July 6, 1925-August 12, 2007): Merv Griffin was one of the titanic figures of the Television industry. The former big band singer would have been numbered among the most memorable figures in the history of the medium just for his landmark talk show, which ran mostly in the afternoons, except for an unhappy three year period when his show ran on CBS in the late night time slot opposite Johnny Carson. It was after the CBS debacle that he took his show to syndication with Metromedia where it ran until 1984. For most of this time Merv's own production company was creating game shows, of which the two most famous are Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. Griffin sold his production company to Columbia Pictures Television in 1984 for $250 million, although he continued to dabble in Television, most recently creating the syndicated game show Merv Griffin's Crosswords, which debuted after his death.

William Hutt (May 2, 1920-June 27, 2007): Though probably best (or only) known to American readers for his performance as Charles Kingman in the third season of the series Slings And Arrows, a generation of Canadians were riveted by his performance as Canada's first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, in the 1974 adaptation of Pierre Berton's National Dream. He actually did relatively little film or TV work, but was a fixture at Ontario's Stratford Shakespeare Festival from its beginning in 1953 until 2005. He was recognised as one of Canada's greatest actors of the last half of the 20^th Century.

Charles Nelson Reilly (January 13, 1931-May 27, 2007): Best known on television as one of the regular panellists on Match Game where he regularly crossed wits with Brett Somers (who also passed away in 2007), he was in fact a talented actor, stage director and raconteur. The first time I remember seeing Charles Nelson Reilly on TV was in the TV version of The Ghost And Mrs. Muir as Claymore Gregg, one of three roles for which he was nominated for an Emmy, which preceded his time on Match Game. He developed a close friendship with Burt Reynolds and was a frequent guest director at the actor's dinner theatre in Jupiter, Florida. Reilly showed his dramatic abilities playing Jose Chung in an episode of the X-Files and on its sister show Millenium. Although he was long a gay icon on TV he didn't actually reveal his sexual orientation until his one man stage show Save It for the Stage: The Life of Reilly in the 1990s.

Tom Poston (October 17, 1921-April 30, 2007): A fixture, along with Louis Nye and Don Knotts on the old Steve Allen Show Tom Poston was a serious dramatic actor (he played opposite Jose Ferrer in Cyrano de Bergerac he would come into his own as a comedic actor on television and the movies. He was a regular on a number of game shows of the 1960s including What's My Line. In 1975 he appeared on his friend Bob Newhart's series The Bob Newhart Show along with Suzanne Pleshette, who he would eventually marry in 2001. Later he would be a regular on Newhart as the easily befuddled George Utley. He was in high demand as a supporting actor in both comedic and dramatic roles until shortly before his death.

Bob Carroll Jr. (August 12, 1918-January 27, 2007): Writer and sometimes producer, he forged a professional relationship with Madelyn Pugh that lasted for 50 years. The pair's relationship with Lucille Ball was shorter lived only because Lucy died on them. Along with Jess Oppenheimer they created Ball's 1948 radio series My Favourite Husband, and followed her to TV to write most of the episodes of I Love Lucy. Later they would write for The Desi-Lucy Comedy Hour, The Lucy Show, Here's Lucy and Ball's last series Life With Lucy (an unfortunate project for all involved). They also wrote the story for the Lucille Ball-Henry Fonda movie Yours, Mine and Ours, which was remade in 2006.

Yvonne DeCarlo
(September 1, 1922-January 8, 2007): Although she is best known today for playing Lilly Munster on The Munsters, the actual amount of television work that she did was quite limited. She had been very popular in films playing sexy exotic roles in 'B' movies (like Princess Scheherezade in The Desert Hawk) under contract at Universal. The Munsters was her only series though she did a number of guest appearances including the first episode of Bonanza. She took the role of Lilly Munster to pay the medical expenses of her then husband, Bob Morgan, a stuntman who had been severely injured during the making of the movie How The West Was Won (that was also the reason why John Wayne hired her for another of her better known roles these days, Mrs. Warren in the comedy western McLintock. Not bad for a little girl from Vancover B.C.

Tammy Faye Messner (March 7, 1942-July 20, 2007): No one personified the excesses of the Evangelical Christian movement of the 1980s more than Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, and in the case of Tammy Faye there was never anyone involved in that situation who was more of an innocent victim. Unlike her husband Jim Bakker she was never tried or even charged of involvement in the financial improprieties that brought down the PTL Club, the organization that they headed. She had always had a far more tolerant attitude towards homosexuals than most evangelical religious figures, and she revealed a sense of humour over her own excesses – mainly makeup and her propensity to weep at the least excuse. She appeared on Larry King Live a number of times during her final illness, the last time the day before she died.

On the Ninth Day Of Christmas

On the ninth day of Christmas my true loved (Television) gave to me – nine shows to look forward to?! (Man you can tell that I'm reaching now!)

Okay, so we're in the middle of a strike which seems like a war to the death, and it's not helped by guys like Jimmy Kimmel who on his first show back came across like that androgynous "Britney" lover (was that a guy? A girl? Did it know? Do I care? – Yeah, so maybe the answer to that last one was NO! but I'm just saying.). In case you didn't see his show Kimmel was upset that the WGA was picketing Conan and Jay's studios (no mention of his show, which may say a whole lot) and the president of the Screen Actors Guild (Alan Rosenberg though Kimmel didn't bother to mention him by name) had called on his members not to appear on their shows. It was so unfair! They don't understand; Jay had been out on the lines, Jay paid his staff when they were out and Conan did too! And those actors are working on movies! Those movies have writers! Actors have to cross picket lines to work on those movies. They should go on Dave and Conan's shows! It's so unfair! Okay, so Kimmel wasn't as crazed as that made it sound (though it would have made a great comedy bit; course that would have required writers because I don't think Jimmy's good enough to figure that one out on his own) but he clearly doesn't get it. Movie projects currently shooting were completed before the strike began. And painful though it may be to the actors their contract doesn't have a clause that says that they aren't allowed to cross picket lines so if their movie is shooting they are contractually obligated – unlike talk show hosts let alone talks show guests – to go to work.

Anyway, we are in this strike to the death but that doesn't mean that there aren't new shows – it just means that a lot of them are going to be a steaming pile of crap. Here are just nine of the shows that we have to look forward to in next four months.

First up there's Celebrity Apprentice (debuts January 3, 2008). The Apprentice, but with famous people! Because you know you've always wanted to see famous people do product placement while raising money for charity. Of course the definition of famous and celebrity is in flux on this one. I mean look at this star studded cast list:

• Gene Simmons of Kiss (but more recently playing straight man to Shannon Tweed and their kids in Gene Simmons' Family Jewels).
  
• Stephen Baldwin (saner than his brother Daniel but not as stable as Alec or Billy – and no relation to Adam).
  
• Lennox Lewis, the last undefeated heavyweight boxing champion of the world (and a darn smart fellow if for no other reason than because he quit while he was ahead and hasn't made any noises about coming back).
  
• Trace Adkins, country singer.
  
• Piers Morgan, newspaper man, talent judge (?) on America's Got Talent (which would have been much better in this time slot than bringing Trump back).
  
• Tito Ortiz, Ultimate Fighting champ (apparently there's real money in that).
• Vincent Pastore, Big Pussy on The Sopranos (the who man found training for Dancing With The Stars to be too strenuous).
  
• Carol Alt, model (and "Hockey Annie" – she was married to Ron Greschner and is now in a "commited relationship" with Alexi Yashin).
  
• Nadia Commenici, Olympic gymnast (Bart Conner's most recent "perfect 10," sorry but I can't say anything snarky about the lady).
  
• Tiffany Fallon, former Playboy Playmate of the Year (married to Joe Don Rooney of Rascal Flats and expecting a baby in May – she also gets a pass on the snarky).
  
• Marilu Henner, actress (and a redheaded dancer – I've been in love with her for decades).
  
• Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth, former Apprentice contestant (Trump is obviously into recycling).

Well, I suppose it's something new to watch while waiting the return of Lost and you can bet there'll be much fun to be had watching egos clashing, but can I really recommend it? Nah.

Passing over the revival of American Gladiators (though admit it, you'll be watching if only because you watched as a kid) we come to Dance War: Bruno vs. Carrie Anne. In which Dancing With The Stars judges Carrie Anne Inaba (with whom I am also in love – I do like dancers) and Bruno Tonioli form dance teams (there are dance teams?) made up of people who can sing and dance. Then the teams compete head to head in various forms of dance each week, with the losing team captain (Bruno or Carrie Anne) forced to cut a member of their team. Naturally the loser is determined by viewer voting. Needless to say this reality-competition show is not an original idea. Production company BBC Worldwide is adapting a BBC show called DanceX which featured dance teams put together by Tonioli and fellow Strictly Come Dancing (the British inspiration for Dancing with the Stars) judge Arlene Phillips. I am so glad this airs on my bowling night so I can probably avoid it.

Something I don't want to avoid is Commanche Moon, what is being described as the final chapter in Larry McMurtry's Lonsome Dove saga (chronologically it's the second story in the series but it was the most recently written). Starring Karl Urban as Woodrow Call and Steve Zahn as Gus McCrae, the cast also includes Val Kilmer, Wes Studi and Adam Beach. The mini-series airs over three nights, January 13, 15 and 16 on CBS. A definite must see as far as I'm concerned.

Cashmere Mafia on ABC debuts on January 6^th before moving to its regular Wednesday time slot. This is yet another one of ABC's "relationship" series, focussing on the lives and loves (I actually typed "lives and lovers" there, which when I think of it is probably equally valid) of four "ambitious and sexy" women who have been friends since business school. The show has an attractive cast with Lucy Liu, Bonnie Sommerville, Miranda Otto, and Francis O'Connor, and it was created by Darren Starr, who produced – among other things – Sex And The City, a show which this bears more than a slight resemblance to. You know minus the nudity and the extremely salty language, because after all this is broadcast TV. For me the problem is that ABC in particular has put out a lot of shows in this vein over the past couple of years – they apparently have a stated policy against new "procedurals" which has mostly held (if you don't count Women's Murder Club as a procedural which I'm kind of undecided about) which is fine if the show works like Brothers & Sisters, Desperate Housewives, and even Men In Trees. Trouble is you keep getting shows like October Road and Big Shots which don't work. I suspect that Cashmere Mafia will be closer to Big Shots than Sex And The City in terms of how well the audience takes to it.

And speaking of Sex And The City the author of the novel on which that show was based is back with another novel that has been turned into a TV series. Lipstick Jungle debuts on February 7^th on NBC and is the adventures of Wendy, Nico and Victory (played by Brooke Shields, Kim Raver, and Lindsay Price respectively) who are three New York's "50 most powerful women" (as defined by the New York Post). Why do I get the sense that Cashmere Mafia and Lipstick Jungle will be about as interchangeable as the words in their names, and probably about as successful.

ABC has an lawyer series called Eli Stone which will air on Thursdays' third hour following Lost! starting on January 31^st. The show has an excellent cast which includes British actor Jonny Lee Miller, Victor Garber, and Natasha Henstridge. Even with this cast I don't have much confidence in this one based entirely on the description given in the show's Wikipedia entry: "Co-written by Marc Guggenheim and Greg Berlanti, the series was described by Berlanti in Variety magazine as 'a Field of Dreams-type drama set in a law firm where a thirty-something attorney begins having larger-than-life visions that compel him to do out-of-the-ordinary things.' Pop Star George Michael will also appear on the show and each episode will be named after a song of his." Yeah, I'm sure the American public would stream to that if there weren't for the writers' strike ...or even with the WGA strike.

FOX may be the network best set up for this strike if only because they've been edging away from the traditional season format for a while with shows being deliberately saved for the second half of the traditional season. And this year scripted shows probably won't get that "two episodes and replaced with a reality series" treatment that has been the standard from FOX in previous years (remember Drive). They'll be stringing new series debuts out over the next four months, presumably based on the number of episodes they were able to get written before the strike. The first of the new dramatic series to debut is also one of the most anticipated, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles which brings the already incredibly tangled Terminator movie franchise to TV. It debuts on January 13^th before moving to its permanent time Monday time on January 14^th. In all honesty I can't say that I'm a huge fan of the Terminator franchise, although I really liked the first film as one of the great "chase" movies of all times. The trouble is that each sequel makes the timeline more convoluted. Still this one stars Summer Glau from Firefly as "Cameron," John Connor's latest Terminator bodyguard. Playing River Tam on Firefly is definite proof of her ass-kicking credentials. Still I'm more than a little dubious of how this show is going to come together.

Another FOX series that I'm interested in is New Amsterdam which debuts on February 22^nd. The series was originally on the FOX Fall Schedule but was pull just before it was to premiere. This was seen by some as a sign that the show might not be very good. This sense was heightened when the network shut down production on the series after seven episodes were completed although they indicated that the decision could be reversed, though that seemed highly unlikely to observers. The premise sounds vaguely promising; a 17^th Century Dutch soldier granted immortal life (or at least until he found his "true love") in return for saving the life of a female Native American shaman. He lives his life today as a police detective but when he suffers a heart attack he realises that his "true love" is living right now. The premise seems to have elements of Highlander mixed with vampire shows like Forever Knight, Angel, and Moonlight. It sound like it could be interesting. If anything the fact that FOX executives pulled the plug on it after seven episodes makes it seem even more attractive; these are after all the people who cancelled Firefly, John Doe, Wonderfalls, Tru Calling and Drive but kept The War At Home on for two seasons.

The fact that FOX has a number of scripted series waiting to debut doesn't mean they don't also have a well stocked supply of "unscripted" series. They wouldn't be FOX if they didn't. Besides the juggernaut that is American Idol (debuting January 15^th and 16^th) the big new show is The Moment Of Truth. Hosted by Mark L. Wahlberg it is based on a British show (of course) hosted by Jerry Springer! Before the show contestants are hooked up to a polygraph machine and asked between 50 and 70 questions. Then on the show itself the contestants are again asked 21 of the questions they had previously answered which the player must answer honestly, as determined by the polygraph results. The questions become increasingly personal the more that are asked. One "lie" and the player walks away with nothing, but if they answer all 21 questions correctly they can win $500,000. In other words if the polygraph detected a lie (not necessarily the same thing as actually lying, given the reliability of polygraph machines) and you gave the same answer to a question on the show, you would lose. I'm not sure about this one. I suppose it could work, depending on the questions, given society's fascination with the sleazier side of life, but part of me can't imagine them asking that sort of question. And part of me is glad of that.

So there you are, nine of many shows that you can watch – or not watch – this spring while waiting for this accursed strike to either end or expand.

On The Eighth Day Of Christmas

On the eighth day of Christmas my true love (Television) gave to me – eight female characters I enjoy.

But first check out Mark Evanier's blog News From Me for the story of how he spent part of New Years Eve. Hopefully his sentiment at the end – "'2008 will be a lot better.' For them, it almost has to be. But I sure hope it is for all of us." – will be true for the people he mentions but also for all of us.

Now down to business. I could have done seven female characters I enjoy, but the truth is that I'm a straight guy and I enjoy women. So sue me. It also means my objectivity may be suspect. I may be evaluating some of these characters on how attractive, physically, they seem to me. I know that comes into play for most of them, but I don't honestly believe it totally overrides my critical eye. So here we go, and as usual it is in no particular order.

• Detective Dani Reese (Life): You think it's just because when she lets her hair down Sarah Shahi is one of the most beautiful women on TV? Well, yeah, that's part of it but hardly all of it. Reese is a perfect match for her partner at the same time that she's the constantly frustrated perfect opposite of him. In her own way Reese is as broken as Charlie Crews. She's successfully fighting her addiction to drugs, less successfully fighting her addiction to alcohol, and apparently immersing herself in a new addiction to casual sex. It's pretty plain that even before she became a cop her home life was hardly great, with her father ruling her home life to the point where Dani's mother couldn't speak her native Farsi when he was at home. In the end, Reese admits to a breakthrough in her relationship with Crews – she may not understand him or like him, but she does trust him and he has come to trust her. For both of them, that is a huge step.
  
• Olive Snook (Pushing Daisies): This one is entirely due to my attraction to the actress. I haven't seen Pushing Daisies, but Olive is played by the fabulous Kristin Chenoweth, who played my favourite character from the John Wells period on The West Wing, Annabeth Schott, so that's good enough for me. Don't like it? Tough.
  
• Ellis Samuels (Cane): Okay, I admit it, I have in fact seen the first episode of Rome so that might influence my feelings about Polly Walker, who played Atia of the Julii in that series and who plays Ellis in this. The thing is that Ellis has a complexity to her so that I'm never completely sure where she's coming from. Does she really love Frank? Alex? Both? Neither? Is she a conniving bitch trying to destroy the Duque family, or is she just a pawn in her father, Joe Samuels's, complex game? Or both? Is she her father's accomplice or is she appalled by his actions? At one point he seemed to sell her out to the Federal authorities for a deal in Cuba that Joe had masterminded and she seemed like a genuine victim only to turn out to be a willing partner in a deception that weakened Alex's position with his adoptive father. At the end of the last pre-strike episode the question changed to whether she was an innocent, or Joe's greatest enemy, the one who had him killed at the moment of greatest advantage to her? Perhaps, in some small way, Ellis Samuels is Atia of the Julii for the 21^st Century.
  
• Miranda Bailey (Grey's Anatomy): I like my fellow Canadian Sandra Oh in her role of Christina Yang, but the fact is that Chandra Wilson's character of Miranda Bailey (the Doctor formerly known as The Nazi, and if you saw the recent two part episode you'll know why I added "formerly") is the heart and soul of the show. She's a kick-ass, take no prisoners woman, with neither time nor patience for BS from above or below. The great heart back of the last pre-strike episode of the show is her marriage is disintegrating because her husband (who has presumably been with her through internship and first and second year residency) suddenly can't accept that she isn't the sort of woman who is content to be a stay at home mom. The man is a jackass.
  
• Tami Taylor (Friday Night Lights): Connie Britton may be playing the most credible wife and mother on TV right now. Tami isn't perfect, and her decisions may not always be the best ones (telling Eric to take the Texas Methodist coaching job while she stayed in Dillon and had to cope with her job and her pregnancy and a teenage daughter (and in the season opener her new born second daughter) may have been a high in bad decision making but it's the sort of "Stand By Your Man" thing that a woman like her would do. And yet she's independent and more than willing to tell Eric that he's an idiot when he's being an idiot. As far as her elder daughter goes, she can be tough on Julie and at times just doesn't understand her, but she tries hard and in the end there's a lot of love there. One of the great characters on TV.
  
• Katherine Mayfair (Desperate Housewives): When the character of Katherine was introduced to the public in a press release, well before the current season of the show appeared on the air it was stated or implied that character played by Dana Delany would be Bree's sister though neither would be aware of the fact. So far that hasn't been revealed (yet if indeed that's the direction the writers intend to go in) but it doesn't really matter because in virtually every respect Katherine could be Bree's evil (if fraternal) twin. Both are obsessed with being the perfect hostess and of protecting their families. The difference is that Katherine is ruthless. She's like an iceberg – placid, and even beautiful, on the surface but cold, and hard and you definitely don't want to be on a collision course with her. The secret of her first marriage and how it caused Katherine's daughter Dylan to lose her memory is so huge that she seems almost willing to kill – at least by neglect – over it. (It's not clear if Katherine's Aunt Lillian died by some overt action of Katherine's, but it seems clear that Katherine kept her secluded and essentially ignoring her as she moved towards death.
  
• Nora Walker (Bothers & Sisters): I haven't seen many episodes of this series but in the episodes I have seen it has been abundantly clear that while it may have been intended as a way to bring Callista Flockhart back to TV the real star of the show is Sally Field in the supposedly supporting role of Nora Walker. Now part of this is the fact that even in those Boneva ads I have always thought that Sally Field is terminally cute and sexy as hell, but the fact is the character of Nora is the heart and soul of the family that is the focus of the show. She has been betrayed by her husband, whose death exposed his double life, and yet she drew on wells of strength that she probably never realized she had not only to persevere but to emerge strong and triumphant.
  
• Catherine Willows (CSI): Yes, she is always on my list and as long as Marg Helgenberger and the character are on the series she will always be on this sort of list. Catherine is smart, beautiful, doesn't take crap from anybody, doesn't regret any of the decisions in her life (even the bad ones like her late husband Eddie), and is absolutely comfortable in her sexuality. In all the brouhaha over Grissom being involved with Sara that has extended far beyond revelation of their relationship to viewers of the show, my question has always been why Grissom was so blind as to not hook up with Catherine from day one.

On The Seventh Day Of Christmas

On the seventh day of Christmas my true love (Television) gave to me – seven year end lists (or at least year end lists from seven favourites of mine).

I don't feel particularly like writing today, so I'll let other people do the writing while you lot do the clicking. The year-end list is one of the great traditions in which smart people tell people like us what the best and the worst of the past year was, frequently contradicting our own feelings about things. So this post gives you the links to seven different year end lists related to Television and created by smart people. Let's just see how often they agree with each other let alone us.

Let's start off with a favourite writer at this blog, Allan Sepinwall. His list of the 10 (or 11) best shows on TV starts with The Sopranos (which really shouldn't come as a surprise given how much he's written about the show over the years).

Next, let's look at the 10 best prime-time series as determined by Ed Bark, formerly of the Dallas Morning News. His best series of the year is FX's Damages starring Glenn Close and Ted Danson. One interesting inclusion on his list is Dan Rather Reports on HDNet. Nice if you can get it I suppose.

Brian Stetler, who used to run the TVNewser blog and is now gainfully employed by the New York Times has this list which he calls Eleven Television Trends In 2007's Top Ten Lists, which is in fact a compilation of information from various lists. Of note is that either The Sopranos or Mad Men is considered the best show on TV in 2007 in most lists, and that it is depressingly easy to pick a worst series of the year. While he notes the series that were cancelled quickly (like Viva Laughlin and Anchorwoman) he adds "perhaps even worse are the shows still on the schedule." I think he means the truly bad shows that are still on the schedule.

We have two lists from the Boston Globe. One comes from Joanna Weiss and the Viewer Discretion blog with the other is from the paper's TV critic Matthew Gilbert and comes as a "pretty" slide show. Me, I'd rather have text. For the record they both picked Dexter as the best show on TV though there's some disagreement further down the list.

Maureen Ryan of the Chicago Tribune had a veritable flurry of lists: Best Shows (Mad Men was number one; the rest are in alphabetical order), Worst Shows (to make it a show had to be "...somehow spectacularly, memorably awful. It had to offend the universe and/or make me question my will to carry on as a critic."), Best Documentaries (all but three of them on PBS), Memorable Moments (not covered in her 10 Best list), and finally 2007's Low Points (It included Sanjaya and Melanie Griffith singing – mercifully not together – and the fact that "The CW showed very little class by pulling "Veronica Mars" in favor of "The Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search for the Next Doll," then canceling "Mars" entirely.")

Tim Goodman of the San Francisco Chronicle declares The War to have been the best thing on TV in 2007. The rest of his list is split into dramas and comedies and as he puts it, "I don't confine my lists to a tidy 10. There's always far more greatness than an all-inclusive list of 10 would allow. So even if such a catchall would be easier and do away with the need for a special Program of the Year category, it just wouldn't be fair.

And finally, I was able to find a Canadian TV critic with a top 10 list (bearing in mind that it's getting damned difficult to find Canadian TV critics at all, and our friend Jaime J. Weinman didn't do a top 10 list). It's Rob Salem of the Toronto Star and he not only provides us with a top 10 (Mad Men is number one, followed by Jekyll and Life; The Sopranos doesn't even make the list) but also a bottom five in which Viva Laughlin is number one...but does that means that it's the worst of the worst or the best of the worst. With a list that also includes Cavemen, Carpoolers, Big Shots, and John From Cincinnati it's not entirely obvious.

On The Sixth Day Of Christmas

On the sixth day of Christmas my true love (Television) gave to me – six male characters I enjoy.

I've got to admit I'm really reaching here guys. This is what you get for not starting to plan your 12 Days Of Christmas posts well in advance – like in January. Still I've got to provide content and there are characters that I really like so here they are, in no particular order. Mostly these are characters from shows that I watch regularly – a big handicap really – but I'm willing to name names outside my comfort zone. I can't judge Vic Mackey of The Shield or or the title character in Dexter, but a little out of my comfort zone I can manage. This isn't the reason why this is as late as it is – I'm not feeling that great as I write this to be honest, and sadly that has nothing to do with wine, women or song, on New Year's Eve (dammit). Oh well, when this is posted it'll still be the sixth day of Christmas somewhere right?

• Charley Crews (Life): This one is all about Damian Lewis. I saw him the first time in Band of Brothers and I was tremendously impressed. That increased when I discovered that he wasn't an American but was in fact British. Then I saw him as Charlie Crews and it clicked for me that this guy is a tremendous actor. It's not just the accent although that can be harder than you might think (see Michelle Ryan as proof; there are those who say that she was so occupied with doing an American accent that any acting ability she might have went out the door). Charlie is a character so full of emotional tics that one might doubt his sanity. It is a masterful job of acting.
  
• Joseph Konstantin (Moonlight): I admit that I gave Moonlight a bad review, but I watch it every week and it's growing on me. I still say that there's room for a film noir style series about a vampire private detective because this show ain't it, but the series definitely has something. One of the things it has is Jason Dohring as Josef, the friend and mentor of the lead character Nick St. John. I was initially disappointed by the fact that Dohring had replaced Rade Sherbedgia in the role, because I've generally liked Sherbedgia's work in the past and thought that casting Dohring was primarily a case of trying to make the show "young and pretty." However I think that Dohring works better in the part than Sherbedgia ever could have and it's because he's young. Josef's life – at least so far as we are privy to it – is amoral and even decadent, something that he shows every time he takes a presumably non-lethal drink from some sweet and willing young thing. The vampires in Moonlight aren't monsters, they are quintessentially amoral and decadent. And let's face it, amoral and decadent work best on someone who's young. Imagine a man in his fifty's nibbling on the veins of that same sweet and willing young thing and the scene comes across as creepy, and possibly even monstrous.
  
• Alex Vega (Cane): Another winner for Jimmy Smits. The essence of Alex Vega is that he is a good man forced by circumstances to do bad things or at least make dubious choices. He is a good family man but at the same time he can order a man killed. Everything he does is for the benefit of his family, both his wife and children and for the family which adopted him. He's a hard man formed by harsh circumstances, and there seems to be a point in one of the last episodes of the season where he comes to realize that he is part of the Duque family and not entirely out of love but because he's willing and able to do the hard things, and the realization is in a way devastating to him.
  
• Eric Taylor (Friday Night Lights): Well I didn't say they had to be new characters now did I? The thing about Eric is that while he seems eminently cable in his work milieu, dealing with a team of teenage boys, his family situation which is dominated by females (his wife and daughter) often leaves him flummoxed. And yet it all seems natural and real. Eric isn't TV's stereotypical "superdad" but neither is he the equally stereotypical "dad as idiot." Eric is doing the best that he can.
  
• Lt. Provenza (The Closer): I have been watching every episode of The Closer that I can and besides Kyra Sedgwick my favourite actor on this show is G.W. Bailey as Lt. Provenza. Bailey is one of those actors who has been around forever, primarily in comedies, such as the Police Academy movies and the TV series M*A*S*H. I can't help but think that that experience in comedy makes his portrayal of Provenza sharper. At times the Lieutenant is comic relief along with his colleague Lt. Flynn (played by Anthony Dennison, who has mostly made his name as a dramatic actor) but when the scene calls for it he can be quite effective dramatically. And in The Closer at least he manages to convey everything a manner so low key that it is amazing. He is able to convey more with an eyeroll or a grunt than many actors can with a line or two of dialog.
  
• Jack Donaghy (30 Rock): Well it was him or Earl the Angel from Saving Grace and while I have to admit that I've seen a bit more of Leon Rippy's performance as the enigmatic Earl who is trying to bring redemption to the totally out of control Grace Hanadarko and I love it, but in the end I have to give it to Donaghy. Why? Well the big reason is that he's played by Alec Baldwin, and I've always had a huge admiration for his versatility as an actor even in total crap like The Shadow. As for the Donaghy character, he is the essential character in 30 Rock. It's nearly impossible to imagine what the show would be like without Baldwin's character. He's slightly mad but it's madness mixed with power, and I have a suspicion he is a caricature of so many network "suits" who have been involved in shows that Tina Fey (and series co-executive producer Lorne Michaels) have known over the years.

On The Fifth Day Of Christmas

On the Fifth day of Christmas my true love (Television) gave to me...Five Naughty Shows! (As defined by the Parents Television Council of course.)

Naughty shows. There are a lot of naughty shows on TV, whether it's sex, language, violence or bad writing (sorry Writers Guild but it's not as if everything your members create is necessarily brilliant – there are a number of scripted shows that I'd pass up for a reality show like The Amazing Race...or even Big Brother). And the truth, which no one at the Parents Television Council will ever admit, is that bad writing (and bad acting and bad direction, but mostly bad writing) trumps sex, language, and violence for making a show bad. The critics – the real ones as opposed to amateurs like me – laud a show like Dexter because of the writing and the acting and the directing. But of course the PTC doesn't care about the quality of stories. The PTC are a bunch of bean counters who enumerate the number of incidents of sexual content, expletives (deleted or not) and acts of violence. And it is of course the PTC which defines what constitutes a "violent act" or a "sexual encounter" or even tells us what an expletive is.

So what is my methodology in defining these five shows that the PTC seems to consider the naughtiest on TV? Well, in this particular case being a bean counter is an appropriate technique. The PTC currently has four weekly – or mostly weekly – columns on their site that I regularly take apart in my "Who does the PTC hate this week" pieces. They are: Broadcast Worst of the Week, Cable Worst of the Week, Misrated, and TV Trends. My technique is to simply count up the number of times that the PTC has mentioned shows in different weeks in these columns. For example, if Family Guy was mentioned as being horrible in these columns on two different weeks it gets two points, but if (as actually happened more than once) Family Guy was mentioned in two different columns in one week it only got one point. There are a couple of faults in this methodology of course. For one thing, only Broadcast Worst of the Week (originally called Television's Worst of the Week) has run through the year. For another thing there were weeks in which I didn't record anything, not because the PTC didn't have anything to complain about but because I didn't write a piece. And last (and least in terms of methodology) the TV Trends columns tend to mention a number of shows. That one at least I'm willing to live with.

So what are the five worst shows as defined by the PTC? In something approaching reverse order they are:

• American Dad: Three mentions mostly for sexual content. In recent columns they protested the inclusion of a child molester as a character and managed to condemn the show for using homosexual stereotypes but at the same time criticized the show for depicting the main character's attempts at experimentation with homosexual activity.
  
• My Name Is Earl: Three mentions. Sexual content surrounding Joy's promiscuity and Catalina's work as a stripper of course but the main thing seems to be that the show doesn't do what they want it to. They want the show to be about personal redemption and doing good deeds. On the other hand the show has become about what some people would describe as "trailer trash." The trouble is that Earl, his family and friends have always been "trailer trash" and Earl's list has rarely been anything other than an excuse to show Earl's world.
  
• The Family Guy: Four mentions. As usual, sexuality is at the forefront, what with Lois having had numerous sexual encounters before her marriage to Peter. They are also disturbed by Stuey's repeated attempts at (or fantasies about) killing his mother, and Brian (the alcoholic talking dog) and his fantasies. In one incident Brian seemed to have a sadistic sexual reaction to means in which Stuey would try to kill Lois slowly.
  
• Nip/Tuck: Five mentions. Ostensibly the show the PTC hated the most. As usual the big argument was sex and nudity but a major contention this season was the presence of Eden, an 18 year old patient about whom one of the doctors had sexual fantasies and then sexual encounters with. The PTC contended that the depiction of one of these encounters would "validate" the sexual activities of pedophiles (the doctor was in his early 40s) undoubtedly forgetting that in every state in the United States an 18 year old has passed the age of majority and can have sex with whoever he or she wishes.
  
• Rescue Me: I've only got two notes for this one, but I know that the PTC has this show on their hit list and I just know that there were a lot of mentions in the weeks where I wasn't writing about the PTC. They loathe this show. They hate it for the repeated use of swearing, they hate it for the repeated sexual situations including an act of sexual violence – or was it something that started as rape and became consensual? – and they hated it for violence, real or supposed.
  

There are a lot of runners up, and a lot of that has to do with the way in which the PTC counts acts. The depiction of an autopsy, or indeed a dead body at the scene of a crime, is called a violent act. A brief (under five seconds) shot of the side of a stripper's breast (in a recent episode of Las Vegas) is so vilely sexual that the PTC actually had their minions in the Central and Mountain time zones initiate an obscenity complaint to the FCC. They claimed that at the end of an episode of Private Practice Addison "holding the showerhead preparing to masturbate." Except you know, she wasn't. But of course the PTC is so often all about the innuendo rather than the reality of the thing.

On The Fourth Day Of Christmas

On the Fourth day of Christmas my true love gave to me....Four Reality-Competition Show Stars. (Well five really but two of these are so joined in the public imagination that they can safely be counted as one.) Okay, admittedly these are people from shows that I watch and I don't really focus on shows like Project Runway, America's Next Top Model, or American Idol, but do you really want to be reminded of Sanjaya?

Yau-Man Chan: Everybody's favourite loser on Survivor: Fiji. Yau-Man was smart, enthusiastic, agile, and beloved by his fellow competitors. He opened a sealed wooden box when brawnier members of his tribe failed through the simple expedient of dropping it on its corner. His childhood in Borneo gave him some knowledge of the jungle. He almost single handedly won an immunity challenge for his team by applying physics – by way of "unorthodox" techniques – to a challenge involving traditional Fijian weapons. He not only managed to tell his alliance that he had one of the hidden Immunity Idols when forced by two other players, he managed to build on his alliance by revealing that his belongings had been searched. He read his opponents so well that he knew the exact time to play his Immunity Idol – if he hadn't played it at just the right time he'd have been eliminated by a 4-2 vote. His one misstep involved the "car curse." In a Reward Challenge he won a new truck. He immediately decided to use it as a bargaining chip, offering it to cheerleading coach "Dreamz" in return for a promise that if "Dreamz" won the immunity challenge in the final four he wouldn't vote for Yau-Man. "Dreamz" took the truck and then broke his promise, with Yau-Man finishing fourth. The "car curse" turned out to be doubly powerful – "Dreamz" not only didn't win the million dollar first prize, neither he nor Cassandra (the other player who faced the final jury vote) got a single vote.

Dick Donato: "Evel" was by turns abusive, arrogant, tender, mocking and strategically brilliant during his time on Big Brother 8. The California National Organization for Women called for his removal from the show because of remarks he made about a female competitor, and online petitions circulated for and against him. And yet there was usually method in his supposed madness because when it came down to it, Dick's primary objective was not to win the half million dollar prize for himself but to win it for his daughter Danielle who was also a contestant. He was the first person in the history of the American version of Big Brother to have been able to used the Power of Veto to save himself and instead use it on the other nominee – his daughter Danielle (she later returned the favour). And although he tended to be less than successful at challenges his determination a marathon task that didn't work as planned (part of the mechanism for the challenge broke down early in the challenge leaving the two remaining contestants to hold onto a rope while being drenched in water) was only a prelude to his success in the remaining two parts of the final Head of Household competition. This in turn allowed him to go to the final two with his daughter, as he had planned. The quality of his game play (combined with his popularity with the public in a season where phone voting controlled one player) allowed him to win the season.

"Jeric" (Jessica Hughbanks & Eric Stein): You know you have something when you have two reality-competition players whose connection is so deep that they grow a compound name, and their fans petition for their inclusion in The Amazing Race. That happened to "Romber" (Rob & Amber from Survivor: All Stars, and one of the best teams ever to appear on The Amazing Race in my opinion) and it happened to Jessica & Eric. Admittedly they didn't win Big Brother 8, or even finish in the final four, but they had amazing chemistry together and their romantic relationship blossomed on the show. Admittedly things were complicated for Eric due to the whole "America's Player" thing, which allowed viewers at home to determine who Eric would vote for and some of his other actions – on his own Eric probably wouldn't have made some of the voting decisions that were made for him – but somehow they worked through it. True, Eric's first kiss with Jessica had been voted on by the fans, and it was their choice that he give his (supposed) childhood "woobie" to her but there was a definite connection there. Even their evictions from the house had an almost Romeo & Juliet quality to it – in a double eviction episode Eric was removed from the show just minutes after Erica. Since their appearance on Big Brother they are apparently still together, if in a rather long distance relationship at the moment. More to the point they were such fan favourites that when Eric made a comment about how he'd like to be on The Amazing Race, fans started a petition to get the couple on the show.

Julia Williams: Reality TV fans are a fickle lot, and nothing showed that more than the reaction to Julia. She became a fan favourite on the third season of Hell's Kitchen due to her underdog status. While most of the other competitors had experience in fine dining establishments, Julia was a short order cook for the Waffle House chain. The abuse started almost immediately, when she was relegated to chopping apples during dinner service. It was only after one of the "better trained" members of her team repeatedly failed to fry quail eggs that she let her frustration go. Even then, some members of her team wanted to eliminate her because she "worked at the (expletive) Waffle House." She was nominated later for "not knowing proper culinary terms," something so absurd that Ramsay voided the nomination. Julia's performance continued to improve, and when Ramsay was finally forced to fire her, he not only praised her performance on the show but even offered to pay for her to attend culinary school. She was most assuredly the fan's favourite at this point in the show. And then came the series finale. The final two were "Rock", an executive chef from Virginia, and Bonnie, a self-described nanny an personal chef from Los Angeles. The relationship between Julia and Bonnie had never been good – Bonnie was one of the people who thought Julia should have been fired in the first episode – and Julia seemed resentful that Bonnie in particular was there and she wasn't. The fans – some of them at least – turned on her. She was pouting; she wasn't sufficiently grateful for Ramsay paying her way to culinary school. Worst of all, she was a "sore loser" and may even have used her attitude to keep Bonnie from winning. Even I felt that if it were a real restaurant rather than the finale of a reality competition, Bonnie would have been justified in firing Julia's ass – after service was over. Still, no one can deny that at least for most of what was really a lacklustre season for the show, Julia was the one the fans were behind.

On The Third Day Of Christmas

On the third day of Christmas my true love (Television) gave to me....three cancelled series (before the strike).

How bad does a show have to be in order to be cancelled in a year in which the normal laws of supply and demand in the Television industry have been overturned? Usually supply of new shows far outstrips demand. There are always new pilots and people with ideas for new series so that if a show underperforms it is out the door. This trend reached an absurd height in recent years with a number of shows getting axed after four or five episodes. In in some cases that was a long run; 3 Lbs was pulled after two episodes while the late (and not overly lamented) game show The Rich List got one episode on FOX to fail to prove itself.

The WGA strike has changed the Hollywood dynamic considerably though. The supply of new scripted programming is finite, so demand for any series is outstripping supply. The net result is that virtually every show ordered by the five networks either have run or will run all of the episodes that were produced before the strike regardless of ratings. This is the sort of thing that viewers say they want – to see shows get a fair chance to build an audience and develop storylines. This was not a season when you could say that you weren't going to watch a new show out of fear that it would be cancelled just as you were getting cancelled. Now what happened after they shown their final pre-strike episodes is a different story. The networks did order "back nines" for a number of series, but the value of these "back nines" is questionable at best if the networks and studios maintain their current attitude toward the Writers Guild. Still, a lot of shows that would have been pulled for bad ratings after three or four episodes (I'm thinking Big Shots and probably Cavemen here) actually got a chance to show their stuff, such as it was.

Ah but the three series I mentioned, shows so awesome in the fullness of their awfulness that not even a writers strike could save them. They were Nashville the FOX "docu-soap" about aspiring musicians in the Country Music industry, Online Nation a series that ran videos from Internet sources like YouTube on network TV, and Viva Laughlin which was CBS's "musical dramedy" based on the BBC series Blackpool. Let's look at these shows briefly (as briefly as possible) and try to figure out why they were so bad that even in a year where content was in such short supply they weren't considered worth keeping.

Nashville was a reality TV/soap opera, presumably from the same mould as a show like Laguna Beach or The Hills. The show featured a variety of unknowns in various stages of trying to break into the music industry (the most recognizable name was a last name, Bradshaw – Rachel Bradshaw is the daughter of former Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback and FOX football commentator Terry Bradshaw), but was full of the usual sort of soap opera nonsense that made you wonder just how "real" this "reality" was. Or as Matt Roush of TV Guide put it, "As on the MTV shows, just about everything in Nashville looks about as genuine as a feminine-hygiene commercial." Glenn Garvin in the Miami Herald added, "The show's dialogue feels scripted, its frequent hookups and breakups abrupt and phony, and its scenes from the music business out and out fraudulent." In my book, there's something to be said for the concept of following young people trying to break into Country Music, but it's something that could be done far better in a real night time soap – in other words a scripted drama. The series had the worst ratings for any FOX series airing in its Friday time slot in the 2006-07 season, including repeats: 2.72 million viewers for the first episode (1.31 million in the 18-49 demographic), and that dropped for the second episode (2.14 million viewers total).

Online Nation also died from excruciatingly bad ratings, which on The CW is saying a lot. It was the lowest rated CW show ever (and I have to suspect that includes ratings for shows on UPN and The WB as well) with the final episode drawing a 0.4/1 rating, meaning that only about 500,000 people saw it. I think it was inevitable. The show drew its material from Internet sources like YouTube, and I suppose was intended to be something like America's Funniest Home Videos for the Internet Generation. There's just one flaw in this logic of course: those who want to see this sort of stuff are going to find it online all by themselves, while those who have no interest in finding it online aren't going to have any interest in watching it just because it's on the big screen in the living room. No critic even bothered to review it.

The only scripted series to be cancelled before the strike was CBS's Viva Laughlin and it is less a surprise that it was cancelled than that it was ever approved in the first place. It seems that nobody at CBS remembered Cop Rock (and for all its numerous faults Cop Rock at least featured original musical numbers). The "musical" part of this "musical dramedy" came across more like badly done karaoke, with the voices of the actors on the show often being drowned out by the original artists. But that's wasn't the worst part of the show. As Tricia Olszewski of Pop Matters put it, "The biggest surprise about Viva Laughlin, CBS's new "mystery drama with music," is that the singing and dancing isn't the worst thing about it." She was right too. The plot was muddled, the actors took the material far too seriously and worst of all Melanie Griffith was in it. Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times wrote, "Viva Laughlin on CBS may well be the worst new show of the season, but is it the worst show in the history of television? It certainly comes close in a category that includes Beverly Hills Buntz in 1987 (Dennis Franz in a short-lived spinoff of Hill Street Blues), the self-explanatory Manimal in 1983 or last year's one-episode wonder, Emily's Reasons Why Not. Viva Laughlin is not even in the same league as Cop Rock, a 1990 experimental series created by Steven Bochco that leavened a gritty police drama with Broadway musical moments: cops and criminals breaking into song and dance. Viva Laughlin also features musical outbursts and is far worse." The fact is though, that if there was even the slightest hint of an audience actually watching this thing it would probably still be on TV. The debut on a Thursday pulled an adequate 8.83 million viewers with a 2.4/7 rating in the 18-49 demographic; adequate until you remember that the show lost almost half the viewers who had tuned in an hour earlier to watch CSI. When the show debuted in its regular time slot – Sunday night following 60 Minutes – it lost 40% of the audience of its lead-in (60 Minutes: 11.14 million; Viva Laughlin: 6.77 million), and dropped 20% of its own audience between the first and second half hours (and almost 30% in the 18-49 demographic). And this was the show that was replacing the supposedly weak Amazing Race (which the year before had drawn an audience of 10.89 million in the same time slot).

It undoubtedly takes a lot of bad to get a show cancelled with haste in the year of the Writers Guild Strike, but unlike previous years it seems obvious that none of these shows were cancelled in undue haste. In fact, with the possible exception of Nashville it was the approval of these series rather than the cancellation that was done with undue haste.

On The Second Day Of Christmas

On the second day of Christmas, my true love (Television) gave to me....Two singing shows debuting within 24 hours.

Who can forget the hilarity that ensued when The Singing Bee and Don't Forget The Lyrics debuted within days of each other? Okay, okay, who can remember the hilarity that ensued when The Singing Bee and Don't Forget The Lyrics debuted within days of each other? I wasn't sure America thought there was a need for one show where people filled in the missing lyrics to songs and NBC and FOX gave them two. Still there must be something to the format because both shows are still on. Of course that little business of the Writers Strike may have something to do with at least one of these shows still being on, maybe both.

The whole story began with the NBC upfronts in May 2007 when the network announced that The Singing Bee would be given the first hour slot on Friday nights, temporarily replacing 1 vs. 100. The show was described as one where people would give the correct lyrics to popular songs in order to win big prizes. The format would be along the lines of the Scripps-Howard Spelling Bee – hence the title. At the time there was no similar show announced from FOX either for their Fall schedule or their Summer schedule. This would change.

FOX revealed in mid-June that they would have a new summer show called Don't Forget The Lyrics in which contestants would have to correctly sing the lyrics to win big prizes. The series would debut on July 11, 2007 and would be hosted by Wayne Brady. Needless to say NBC was livid. On the other hand it wasn't the first time that FOX had taken one of their ideas and tried to put a look-alike series on the air. In November 2004 Fox sprang The Next Great Champ starring Oscar de la Hoya and produced by the Dutch multinational Endemol on an unsuspecting (and largely disinterested) public, about four months ahead of NBC's much hyped The Contender hosted by Sugar Ray Leonard and Sylvester Stallone, which was produced by Mark Burnett of Survivor fame. At that time NBC couldn't respond quickly but this time they could. Swiftly hiring former N'Sync singer Joey Fatone as host, they announced that their show would debut on July 10^th, the day before Don't Forget The Lyrics, and to make the similarities between the two shows even more apparent, the premiere episode was aired on the 11^th, starting a half hour before the debut of the ABC series.

Of course, the shows were quite different. From an originality standpoint, Don't Forget The Lyrics did not impress. If anything it bore a very strong resemblance to the game show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, with some modifications. Instead of multiple choice trivia questions, the contestants on Don't Forget The Lyrics had to pick a type of song and after a period of singing karaoke style (with the words put up on a screen) they had to sing the next group of words correctly to win the money at that level. Like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire prizes went up as songs were done correctly while contestants risked losing it all if they got the line of the song wrong (although there was a "Millionaire") style plateau at $25,000. Finally players on Don't Forget The Lyrics had three different "Helps" (aka "Lifelines") that they could use throughout the game.

By contrast The Singing Bee seemed like a far more creative concept. There are several rounds in which contestants are removed until only one contestant is left standing. That contestant participates in "The Final Countdown" in which a player has to remember the correct lyrics for seven songs, each worth $5,000. If the contestant gets all seven right they win $50,000. Between the qualifying sing-off and the Final Countdown, the contestants can face one of at least five different challenges. And it's all presided over by Joey Fatone, who (on those very rare occasions when I watch either of these two shows) has always seemed to be having more fun as a host than Wayne Brady does.

After all the controversy surrounding the one-upsmanship by the networks which led to The Singing Bee being the second highest rated show that week the it debuted (behind Baseball's All-Star Game) the show turned out to be a less than stellar performer in the ratings, pulling a 1.7 rating the Tuesday before it was pulled from line-up. It returned on December 21^st, going head to head with a rerun of Don't Forget The Lyrics – it got creamed, finishing in fifth place, while the Don't Forget The Lyrics rerun tied for first in the 18-49 demographic even though it finished fourth in total viewers.

(Hey, these pieces can't all be winners.)

On The First Day Of Christmas...

On the first day of Christmas, my true love (Television) gave to me....An end to this cycle of strikes.

Yeah I said cycle. It obviously started with the Writers Guild strike and both the Directors Guild and the Screen Actors Guild are going to be in a position to strike at the end of June.

Really I am currently full of fear and dread about the Writers Guild strike. It came on me suddenly when I read something on Christmas Eve from Nikki Finke. Nikki has long been adamant on the side of the writers to the point where a Disney/ABC seminar on the strike referred to her as "Tokyo Rose". (She felt insulted by the comparison, but I for one think she should wear it as a symbol of pride; she is feared so much by the "moguls" that they feel obliged to denigrate her.) So it was with a certain amount of shock that I read the following in Deadline Hollywood Dateline in an article about an attempt by Jeffrey Katzenberger:

But the fact that it was unsuccessful dramatically points up disturbing realities, I have learned: that the CEOs are deeply entrenched in their desire to punish the WGA for daring to defy them by striking and to bully the writers into submission on every issue, and that the writers are sadly misguided to believe they have any leverage left. I'm told the moguls are determined to write off not just the rest of this TV season (including the Back 9 of scripted series), but also pilot season and the 2008/2009 schedule as well. Indeed, network orders for reality TV shows are pouring into the agencies right now. The studios and networks also are intent on changing the way they do TV development so they can stop spending hundreds of millions of dollars in order to see just a few new shows succeed. As for advertising, the CEOs seem determined to do away with the upfront business and instead make their money from the scatter market. I'm sorry to break this disappointing development right before Christmas, but I pledged to stay objective in my reporting and I can't ignore this major news development. The truth often hurts. But don't blame the messenger.

She adds:

I am now convinced that the 8 Big Media moguls pretty much have a vice-like grip on how this strike will get settled. And virtually no amount of external pressure will force their hand. I know from my many years of reporting on labor negotiations in the U.S. and abroad that, in any new contract negotiation, there is one watershed moment when the union and the companies can move the flag down the field in a meaningful way before ego, rhetoric, and the passage of time get the better of everyone involved. Has that moment come and gone? I honestly don't know, but if it hasn't, then it's soon -- very soon.

And that's coming from someone who is generally regarded as a friend to the Guild, or at least a more honest reporter than the "trades" which after all make their money from advertising from the studios. I don't know about you guys but for me, as a supporter of the Writers Guild, that's really scary stuff. Over my years of observing labour negotiations it has always seemed that the one thing that has let to strike settlements has been the realization on the part of industry that they can't go on without a skilled and trained labour force, and that the corporate bottom line will not sustain a long labour dispute. The Big 8, as Nikki Finke, calls them and particularly the TV network executives seem unconstrained by this. Not having to pay those pesky writers and going with "unscripted" reality shows might actually help make the fourth quarter financial statement look rosier than it would without the writers. And we as fans of good (or even just adequate) scripted television are relegated to the sidelines and no amount of sending pencils to the networks or the studios is going to change that. What will have an influence – and probably a very major influence – is if first quarter (and probably second quarter) revenues for the networks take a nosedive. And that means that American TV viewers (because we simple Canadians have no influence at all on American ratings) will have to reject the pap that the networks are going to be offering. Worst of all, if the Directors Guild settles a contract before the Writers Guild then that becomes the model for the rest of the industry. And the Directors Guild has a long history of being "friendly" to the producers; being a good little union that hardly ever strikes.

I really hate that the first of these pieces is such a downer.

Merry Christmas To All

I kind of scrapped a couple of the pieces I thought about working on under the pressure of getting things done for Christmas (on Christmas Eve no less) and besides I decided that one of them wasn't terribly appropriate. I mean did you really want me to write about the PTC's belief that Television is "anti-religion" on Christmas Eve? Well even if you did, I didn't. I'll shoe horn that in during my Twelve Days of Christmas pieces (which I haven't even started getting ideas for – yipes!). In the meantime....

In the meantime I've got what most of you might consider a hoary old chestnut but there's a story attached. Those of us of a certain age remember holiday specials that were full of songs and comedy. That's just one of the reasons why I enjoyed Clash Of The Choirs; even with its reality competition base it was a throwback to that sort of show. But, of course, I digress. There are people in their late teens who probably remember Bob Hope's annual Christmas shows – I'm not talking about the USO tours here (the last of those was 1990 before the start of the Gulf War) because Hope and his crew were on the road for Christmas and the shows would air shortly after he returned. In those specials Hope would sing Silver Bells which he first performed in 1951's Lemon Drop Kid, and there were the usual pretty girls, the All-America College Football team, and comedy sketches. By his last years on the air, what Hope was doing became increasingly irrelevant and really rather sad.

Those of us of an even greater age – like mine – remember someone who was even more associated with Christmas than Bob Hope. That was Bing Crosby. Crosby's association with Christmas probably started with the now rarely seen 1942 movie Holiday Inn. He sang Irving Berlin's iconic White Christmas in that movie, a song which later became the focus of Crosby's most successful film White Christmas. Crosby did numerous Christmas specials for TV starting in 1957, a number of these appeared during the time he was one of the rotating hosts of ABC's Hollywood Palace variety series, which ran from 1964 to 1970.

However it is his last special in 1977 that is particularly memorable. The program was taped in London in September of that year and featured the model and actress Twiggy, and singer David Bowie. Crosby reportedly had never heard of Bowie and was encouraged to have him on the show by his children, while Bowie agreed to do it because he knew his mother liked Crosby's music. Crosby wanted to do a duet with Bowie on the song The Little Drummer Boy, however Bowie apparently had some qualms about doing a pure duet (he hated the song) and asked if there was something else he could sing. Ian Fraser, Larry Grossman and Buz Kohan, who was one of the script writers for the special, wrote an original song, Peace On Earth to be sung as part of a medley. In fact it turned into a bit of a blend so that the two songs actually become one. A month after filming the special Bing Crosby died at age 74, after playing a round of golf in Spain. As a result he never knew just how successful his collaboration with Bowie was. The song first appeared on a bootleg with the Bowie song Heroes. In 1982 RCA gave the song an official release – it rose to #3 on the UK charts that year. The Bowie-Crosby duet was also ranked by TV Guide as one of the 25 most memorable musical moments of 20^th Century television.

I remember seeing the special at the time, and the Bowie-Crosby performance was electrifying, once they got down to it. Amazingly the blending of their voices was perfect with Crosby's baritone a perfect complement for Bowie's tenor. They come together beautifully in the segments of the medley where they both are singing the same lines and the orchestration suits the power of the merged songs. Best of all, it takes a song which I otherwise cannot abide (the Little Drummer Boy) and not only makes it work but turns it into something almost magical.

(I'd like to thank my good buddy Sam Johnson for choosing this song as part of his e-card this year. If nothing else it inspired me.)