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Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Maybe we're reading

This post on a business website asks, Why does conservative media crush liberal media in terms of viewership?

All they do is pose the question, they don't really try answering it. But here are some suggestions:

♦ Liberals read more than they watch TV.

♦ Liberals spend more time exercising than conservatives do.

♦ Liberals garden and cook more than conservatives do.

♦ Old people do less reading, exercising and gardening than younger people, and tend to park themselves in front of the TV, and they tend to be more conservative.

♦ Younger people, who tend to be more liberal, are less likely to identify with the late-middle-aged personalities on conservative TV.

I mean, what self-respecting thirty-year old would park himself in front of Bill O'Reilly night after night? For fuck's sake!

Labels: media, Republicans, television

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

TV comedian kills them with the truth

In a presentation for companies that sponsor ABC television programming, comedian Jimmy Kimmel, who has a show on the network, decided that the funniest, craziest thing he could say was the truth:

"Everything you're going to hear this week is bullshit. Let's get real here. Let's get Dr. Phil-real here. These new fall shows? We're going to cancel about 90 percent of them. Maybe more."

If ABC is so confident in its new fall shows, he asked, why is it announcing them at the same time it announces the midseason shows that will replace those fall shows? "This show 'Shark Tank' has the word tank right in the title," he said.

More at the NYT coverage of the annual "upfronts" presentations of coming fall television shows. Here's more, more, and more.

technorati: television, Jimmy Kimmel

Labels: Bad Behavior, television

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Comedy reflects dark times -- AP

The recently released comedy "Observe and Report" -- which has sparked extremes of reaction from critics -- reflects the country's dark mood, writes the AP.

You know the good thing about the Great Depression? It was so long that popular culture had time to reflect it instead of just react to it. When we think of films of the 1930s we think mainly of escapist fare -- "The Thin Man" pictures, Busby Berkley and so on, all the way to "Gone with the Wind." The hard times themselves were reflected subtly, in gangster movies and B pictures. Finally, at the end of the decade, a film like "The Grapes of Wrath" (on the dramatic side) or "Sullivan's Travels" (on the comedic side) could directly address the condition of being poor.

Nowadays television reacts more quickly than any other medium. You're already seeing recession-themed stories on prime-time shows.

technorati: films, cinema, economy

Labels: cinema, films, recession, television, zeitgeist

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Focus on the Fundies: Haggard pushes himself back in the spotlight

Ted Haggard, the disgraced megachurch leader whose outing as a meth-snorting Big Gay embarrassed the Christian Right just prior to the 2006 midterm elections, has agreed to promote an HBO documentary about his rise and fall.

The documentary, "The Trials of Ted Haggard," was shot by Alexandra Pelosi, who earlier made an HBO documentary "Friends of God," which also featured Haggard. The film is scheduled to air on HBO next month.

Haggard startled observers earlier this fall by appearing in the pulpit of a rural Illinois megachurch as a "Christian businessman" talking of his rise an fall as a star of the conservative Christian Evangelical movement, and now he's pushing himself into the spotlight on television. It's not enough for him to appear in a documentary; he's so starved for attention that he also signs on to promote the film, which I suspect will show him as a complete lying douchebag. What a media whore!

technorati: Ted Haggard, fundamentalists, Alexandra Pelosi

Labels: films, Focus on the Fundies, religious right, Ted Haggard, television

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Vox populi

I was in the break room at work, where a TV was playing CNN. A slip showed Sen. Ted Stevens leaving an office building as Wolf Blitzer narrated, "One day after being convicted on corruption charges, Alaska Senator Ted Stevens says he wants to get back on the campaign trail."

A janitor was sitting there watching. "A crook, and he wants to campaign!" the guy said. "'Look at me, I just got convicted, vote for me.' He's just a big crook!"

I said something about how I guessed he already had his campaign donations in hand so why not get out there and spend them.

"That's all they're there for," the janitor declared. "Crookery!"

technorati: Republicans, Ted Stevens, CNN

Labels: politics, Republicans, television

Thursday, October 09, 2008

Hospital notes

Cris just spent a few days in a hospital getting orthopedic surgery. She came home today and she's doing well. But while she was there this week, I spent a lot of time up there over four days, and I discovered two things.

One, the day nurses were invariably awesome; the night nurses were mostly mediocre. Makes sense: the day shift is more desirable, so the best nurses choose it. The main distinction between the great nurses and the mediocre ones was that the latter are more inflexible and tend to cite rules and policies when you ask them a question, while the good ones actually answer your question and know the science behind whatever you're talking about.

Two: due to the much worse condition of the other patient in the room, I now can say with some experience just what TV programs brain-damaged people like to watch:

Jerry Springer

Nancy Grace

Glenn Beck

Und so weiter. Poor thing, it wasn't her fault some drunk ran into her car. Now she's stuck watching Nancy Grace.

Labels: health care, nurses, television

Monday, September 29, 2008

Sign of the apocalypse: Dentist chair TV's programming is Disney, ads

This definitely falls into the Kill Me First category: a new device you wear like eyeglasses allows you to watch television in the dentist's chair while being worked on. Sounds good, you say? The only programming is:
ð Disney programs
ð Dental health messages
ð Advertising.

It's paid, of course, by the latter.

Personally I'd rather listen to the drill.

technorati: advertising, television, technology

Labels: advertising, signs of the apocalypse, television

Sunday, January 20, 2008

'Who are you calling Cootie Queen, you lint licker?!'

I'm going to show how low-class I truly am with this post, but... You know how TV commercials sometimes stick in your mind, and you want to know more about them, and it's not like you can look them up on imdb.com or anything.

This is the commercial I was obsessed with:

http://www.splendad.com/ads/show/863-Orbit-Euphemisms

That actress who plays the gum-chewing mistress is so hilarious that I wanted to know who it was. Fortunately, thanks to Google, with a little patience you can find out just about anything. Her name is Jesse Meriwether, and she is from New Orleans.

I also found another commercial she was in, unfortunately without dialogue from her: http://www.boardsmag.com/screeningroom/commercials/1753/

Labels: commercials, television

Saturday, January 12, 2008

The case of the productive blond

Courtesy MediaBistro, here is some of the worst, most entertaining writing I've seen. It's in a blog post by a former TV producer, who writes about his tortured relationships with Fox News fuhrer Roger Ailes, a blond assistant, his agent, his wife, and other characters. Despite the quality of the writing, it has all the ingredients for a Bonfire-of-the-Vanities style novel and/or memoir.

Some choice phrases:

My wife Gina was emailing strange men in foreign countries on the computer, a habit she seemed unwilling to break. I was fantasizing about the 23 year old blond, who that day walked into the elevator facing me, threw her shoulders back, projecting toward me her extraordinary breasts, stared at me, and backed up against the opposite wall, putting a sexual no-man's-land between us.
...
She was blond and productive. Regardless, on the last day of production, the blond knocked on my door and asked if we could talk.
...
I had lived at 1060 Park Avenue for 30 years. My adult life had played out on that stage. I loved it. I walked out along Park and wept. Everything was intolerable. But that which could not be changed had to be accepted. And I had to have the courage to change that which I could change. I moved to my mother's.

technorati: Republicans, television, New York

Labels: Fox News, New York, Republicans, television

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Tough guy

MSNBC presenter Keith Olbermann, who became better known last year after launching a series of bitterly critical commentary of Bush administration officials, suffered a ruptured appendix on Wednesday but still went on the air the next evening to anchor coverage of Bush's Iraq war speech, before undergoing appendectomy surgery. (Courtesy Publisher's Marketplace)

technorati: Keith Olbermann

Labels: television

Friday, August 24, 2007

In tune with the zeitgeist

Have you seen "Man Men," the television series on the cable channel AMC? It's the big new thang this summer. The entire staff of the New York Times' Arts and Culture department is creaming over it; now that "The Sopranos" is over, they have to have something to lionize, and naturally the focus of their fandom is something as close as possible to the culture of the New York Times itself: white, waspy, privileged, and set in Manhattan. Yesterday's article-of-the-week, A Return To That Drop-Dead Year, 1960, beatifies the show's attention to period detail.

None of this is lost on me, as my (unpublished) novel Make Nice is also set in 1960. As Cris as I were watching last night's "Mad Men" episode, I muttered, "If my novel had been published this year, I would have looked like a fucking genius" for anticipating the interest in that watershed year. Oh well.

technorati: 1960, Mad Men, New York Times

Labels: 1960, television, zeitgeist