By Scott Buckner

I have this theory about how TV shows which aren’t spinoffs of something else are developed. It goes something like this: A guy comes up with a brilliant idea and spends a year or three (even longer if he has a day job or a relationship) developing and refining the concept, the characters, the treatments, an actual script, and whatever-else have you for the pilot show. It’s hilarious, the network suits love it, so they all sign a deal and tell him to go home and come up with a dozen more scripts.
Soon enough, it dawns on him what has just happened. So he sits back, stares blankly at his shoes and says, “Oh, shit. Now what?”
I think that’s what happened with The Knights of Prosperity, the show about a bumbling crew of people so sick of their stations in life that they dream up a plan to rob Mick Jagger and/or his apartment. They’re not yet entirely clear which, so neither am I. I missed the show last week, so I thought maybe Natasha Julius was woozy from her two-week juice fast to comment so harshly about Knights in the Beachwood’s mid-season review, but you clearly don’t need animal protein to see that this show has quickly turned into a disappointingly unfunny show just like everything else that passes for comedy on ABC.

Read More

Posted on January 18, 2007

By The Beachwood TV Desk

Lost and Jericho are gone for now and they’ve been replaced by mid-season shows that don’t have many obvious synergies with their predecessors. A pair of comedies are on in place of an ultradramatic show about grim, grim survival. Meanwhile, a time slot where viewers have come to accept nuclear armageddon is now all about a gun-toting midget.
The first in a planned series of TV reviews as the “mid-season” unfolds until, like, March.

Read More

Posted on January 17, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Just when you think you’ve gotten over the fear of flying, driving over suspension bridges, nuclear power, and riding in submarines, The History Channel airs Modern Marvels: Engineering Disasters. Here, we get an astonishingly simple explanation of how Engineering Disasters happen in the first place: Say you’re zooming your way home 12,000 feet over Iowa and there are 473 little things going wrong at once. If those 473 things are just happening all willy-nilly, the worst that will probably happen is you’ll end up taking a shuttle bus home from Gary. But if they all go wrong in a very particular order, you can pretty much count on a front row seat to the asphalt ballet.

Read More

Posted on January 17, 2007

By Scott Buckner

When I was a kid, Mystery Date was a board game popular with the neighborhood girls. The object, if I recall, was to see whether you wound up with The Dreamboat or The Dud when you opened the white door. Monday night, Lifetime Television brought something like this to television with Gay, Straight or Taken?
Nobody has ever told anyone at Lifetime that women have already been playing this game for ages in drinking establishments throughout the industrialized world, so now we’ve got this show. As we might imagine, they aren’t any better at guesstimating who might be gay, straight or taken on television than they are in real life.

Read More

Posted on January 16, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Bears kinda sucked and the Seahawks kinda sucked, but the Bears kinda sucked less. Bears kickers Brad Maynard and Robbie Gould did not suck. That’s the only relevant observations necessary for anyone whose Sunday afternoons don’t revolve around football.
*
IN THIS EDITION:
– At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul
– Bad Girls Club
– Dirt
– The Surreal Life: Fame Games
*
The high point of my weekend watching was Friday night’s At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul, a 1963 black and white Brazilian horror flick on the Independent Film Channel. I’m not big on subtitled movies because I tend to miss something important in the acting while I’m busy with the subtitles, but it was almost midnight and I’d never seen how Brazilians go about swiping souls. I also hung around because it’s been a long time since I’d seen anything not presented by a major corporation uncut and commercial-free. This probably means IFC will have its own soul stolen within the year, too.

Read More

Posted on January 15, 2007

By ML Van Valkenburgh

Okay, I’ll admit that I’m one of the suckers whose been drawn into the inevitably tear-jerking, feel-good, pay-it-forward mojo of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. I watch it reasonably religiously, probably because (a) it’s cathartic and (b) it gives me hope that some day something really cool, like a bus full of people with lots of money and good intentions, will pull up at my door, send me on vacation, and build me a stunning home while I’m away. Ty and his gang are living proof that such things happen.
Unfortunately, it’s not going to happen to me. At least not this season. See, this year, they’re doing it a little differently, and they’re doing one home in each state. And on Sunday night, well, they were right here in Chicago, in Lawndale, “giving a family a second chance.”

Read More

Posted on January 15, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Sometimes television is inventive. Most times, though, it’s perfectly happy to just invent new ways to eat its young. So the cannibalizaton of American Idol continued Thursday night with an installment on Bravo of Grease: You’re The One That I Want!.
I didn’t like Grease when it was a movie because two things on my list of Things I Really Don’t Like Because They’re Stupid are musicals and ’50s music. I’m no fan of American Idol either because, well, I got sick of hearing about it long ago. But it’s not that I didn’t like this snoozer because it’s a ripoff of a program I don’t particularly like. Ripping off TV shows is a long-honored tradition in American TV, and it’s the only reason we got our own versions of the original British Who’s Line Is It Anyway and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. No, I didn’t like it much because whoever came up with this show is a total failure at ripping stuff off right. The reason Whose Line and Millionaire went over so well is because the Americans hosting the shows were far more interesting than those in England.
In America, personality spells success. Which is why one of the first things Millionaire did when Meredith Viera took over from Regis Philbin was head into the tank.

Read More

Posted on January 12, 2007

By The Beachwood Niche Advertising Affairs Desk

Hello. I’m the Tribune.
And I’m the Sun-Times.
We suck and we don’t know why.

Read More

Posted on January 11, 2007

By Scott Buckner

If there was a contest right now for Biggest Fucking Genius Of The Universe Ever, I believe I know who the undisputed champ would be. No, not Stephen Hawking. Jeez, even the clinically insane can come up with concepts not a single breathing human being could possibly grasp. Bert and Ernie could do it with crayons. No, the true BFGOTUE would, collectively, be the think tank at VH1 that came up with Tuesday night’s The Surreal Life Fame Games: Welcome to Celebrity Island.
The genius here is not the game itself, but rather that VH1 has found yet another way to keep the same bunch of celebrity driftwood off the dole.

Read More

Posted on January 10, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Monday night is the only night in which TV puts me to sleep. Truly. Not just to sleep, but barely after nine o’clock Old People Early asleep, so I’m up at the crack of fucking dawn the next morning with nothing to do but look out my window for opportunities to stick my nose in my neighbors’ business.
I just moved to a new neighborhood. I have seen my neighbors. I really don’t want to know what they’re doing.
Someone in charge of Monday night TV programming needs to please stop this before I need a hip replaced or start talking about goiters or something.
The wooze-inducing culprits last night were The New Adventures of Old Christine and CSI: Miami – I was more or less defaulted into watching CBS because I had already seen the Mythbusters guys try to replicate an Archimedes Mirror to harness the reflective power of the sun, possibly to incinerate Rachael Ray.

Read More

Posted on January 9, 2007