Chicago -
By Scott Buckner
The biggest case of identity theft in TV history continued last night with The Riches in an episode that put on display the difficulties women in dresses and high heels face when it’s necessary for them to ride a bike to a prescription-friendly doctor and scale a fence to steal her own Winnebago, and what can happen when a junkie gets put in charge of a buried treasure map.
Posted on March 20, 2007
By Scott Buckner
There are a few adages out there that say you can’t go home again, but if you do go there, they have to take you in. That may be true, but if they do take you in, nobody has to be all that happy about it. That’s pretty much how things shook out for Nick Garrett, the main character in October Road, a new ABC show that premiered Thursday night. It’s a program that really ought to be called What About Nick, since it follows he same sort of roadmap as What About Brian, another contestant in ABC’s festival of overcooked feelings and sincerity.
Posted on March 17, 2007
By Scott Buckner
If it’s Monday night, it must mean we’re in store for another dose of the incredibly bad habits of the Irish. And yowza, did we get a good dose of it last night with FX Network’s premiere of The Riches, which I watched instead of The Black Donnelleys.
I’m not sure whether guys like Robert Young and Michael Landon ever envisioned a nuclear family that travels around the Deep South in a Winnebago, crashing wedding receptions and high school reunions to pick the pockets and gift tables of the citizenry. But they’d probably appreciate that there’s actual love and closeness within this family despite the absence of legal scruples.
Posted on March 13, 2007
By Scott Buckner
OK, I was ready to make complete fun of Friday night’s premiere of Country Music Television’s preview of Karaoke-Dokey. But then – by an odd succession of events fueled by a bottle of Dr. McGillicuddy’s Cherry Schnapps, a leftover Edwardo’s Pizza, sexual intrigue, and a bag of Kruncher’s potato chips – I got caught up unexpectedly in last night’s Comedy Central late-night marathon of The Sarah Silverman Program.
Posted on March 12, 2007
By Scott Buckner
Space. The final frontier. And what a boring-ass final frontier it can be.
I was surfing through the TV listings last night, and I noticed that my satellite provider added the NASA Channel sometime very recently. Since man cannot live on Law & Order reruns alone, and there’s only so much badgering a human being can put up with from mortuary science project Janice Dickinson and her modeling agency, I thought I’d pop in and see what the rocket scientists were up to. The guide only said “commentary,” and I couldn’t imagine what anyone could spend an entire hour commenting about, especially since one of our shuttles didn’t disintegrate or anything during the day.
As broke as NASA claims to be these days, it seems the agency has some extra money in its budget for things like this. I think it’s under the line item description, “Come up with late-night TV programming to bore the crap out of everyone.”
Posted on March 7, 2007
By Scott Buckner
Who needs a whole Soprano family of Italians when we now have the Irish on NBC’s The Black Donnellys doing enough hijackin’, whackin’ and body disposin’ on Monday nights to cover all those mooks across the river in Jersey? And even better – if you can keep up with the show’s pace, because life moves quick in Hell’s Kitchen –they don’t waste a whole mess of our viewing time on people’s family and personal problems because they deal with problems in this neighborhood very simply: by shooting it, killing it, bashing in its head like an over-ripe pumpkin, or chopping its feet off with an ax.
Or, as one of the lads put it, “The only way for two guys to keep a secret is if one of ’em is dead.”
Posted on March 6, 2007
By Scott Buckner
It’s Monday night, undisputedly the worst night of the week for TV watching. So I figure: Screw it – if you can’t beat ’em join ’em. Next thing I know, I’m sitting high atop the nation’s TV programming landfill with ABC’s Wife Swap. It took awhile for the dog with the brandy keg around its neck to lead me back down, but I can tell you this: I have been to the mountain, and if bad TV was bread raining down from the heavens, I’d have enough yeast to give every woman in the Northern Hemisphere a really uncomfortable infection of some sort for months. Or the ability cure every case of the clap that arises during the next 150 years, whichever.
In case you’ve been living on the moon for the past year or two, Wife Swap follows two families with values as mixable as oil and water in a two-week exchange of husbands, children, and lives to discover just what it’s like to live in the other woman’s world. Fourteen days, which is four more than the washed-up celebrities on VH-1’s The Surreal Life have to endure without strangling each other in their sleep. And the wife swapper folks are real people with real lives, so a lot less slack gets cut.
Anyway, here’s the stats on Monday night’s mismatched families with behavioral habits you should be glad you don’t have:
Family 1: The Hamiltons. They live in Ohio. There’s mom Angie, husband Tim, and 14-year-old daughter Chastity. Angie believes all girls (and wives) should be treated like princesses. Literally. She even holds – and participates in – “princess parties” for Chastity and her friends, and believes that princesses (including princess wives) don’t do chores. Or anything much else constructive, either. Shopping, designer labels, manicures, and pedicures totally rule, dude.
Posted on February 27, 2007
By Scott Buckner
ABC continued its tradition of delivering the most astoundingly lame programming into America’s living rooms with a vengeance last night as it presented the 79th Academy Awards. If you come across a bunch of surly co-workers today, cut them a good bit of slack. Not only did the Oscars kill any hope of any of them getting laid at a reasonable hour, but it killed any plans they might have had for watching Tora! Tora! Tora! was on American Movie Classics.
On the bright side, Nielsen ratings history was made when a mass exodus of viewers was noticed emigrating to WTTW. Unfortunately for the folks at Channel 11, it wasn’t a pledge night. They won’t make that mistake next year.
*
The 2007 Oscars. Yeah. The night of 1,000 stars – and 999 showed up in the most hideous dresses anyone could possibly invent. This was a night that totally begged for the astutely rude commentary we’ve come to expect and enjoy in the past from Kathy Griffin on E!’s Live From The Red Carpet pre-show. Instead we got a taste of how much tedium lay ahead with E!’s decision to have Ryan Seacrest do the honors.
The top offender was Penelope Cruz, wearing something that 500 pink poodles were sacrificed to make. Runner-up was little Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine), doing her best to look like a Baskin-Robbins peppermint ice cream cake-topper decoration.
Posted on February 26, 2007
By Scott Buckner
It took me a week or two, but I finally caught up last night to Rules of Engagement on CBS because I was too busy doing something else to notice that the rerun of the always-funny Two And A Half Men ended. If I were the military or the cops, I’d sue CBS for sullying a perfectly good saying that tells all good jackbooters when, where, and how force should be used.
For anyone too uninterested in this show to read the entire account, here’s the condensed version of everything you need to know: David Spade, bad. Patrick Warburton (instantly recognizable to anyone with kids as the voice of Kronk, and as David Puddy from Seinfeld to everyone else), good. Writing, bad. Megyn Price (the hot mom from Grounded For Life), good.
Posted on February 20, 2007
By Scott Buckner
I’m not a major fan of auto racing but as televised sporting events go, when you need to kill a little time in the neighborhood gin mill, NASCAR isn’t too horribly bad. But when a dude goes sliding across the finish line on his roof and on fire like Clint Bowyer did during Fox TV’s coverage of Sunday’s Daytona 500, you can’t help but be either a fan or at least a momentary convert toward what’s otherwise a very boring televised sport. Hell, when dudes in the NBA start laying it up with their heads on fire, I’ll have a more charitable opinion about basketball, too.
Because NASCAR (which stands for “Nahs car, Bubba”) is an inescapable fact every Sunday afternoon between February and November in pretty much every tavern that’s worth a shit along the south suburbs/Indiana border, you pretty much have to figure out a system of dealing with it if you want some human contact to go along with your alcohol. Hence, I’ve discovered that the secret to non-fan NASCAR enjoyment is to show up sometime within the last 50 or so laps. That’s when all the good stuff really happens, because NASCAR’s roots lie in a past filled with moonshine runners and that alone means the closing laps involve some serious pedal to the metal balls to the walls racing you just don’t get anywhere else.
Posted on February 19, 2007
