By Scott Buckner

Let’s say you’re the programming think tank at VH1 and you want to resurrect an ’80s hair band singer, The Bachelor and Flavor of Love all in one breath because, well, actually showing music videos is just so booooooring and you can beat the lifeless carcass of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to death only so many times. So what do you do?
You create Rock of Love with former Poison singer Bret Michaels, that’s what.
I saw the rerun of the premiere episode Sunday morning. I’ve been entertained by Flavor Flav on Flavor and The Surreal Life>, and Bret’s no Flav. He doesn’t have big gold teeth to flash in a pimp smile like Richard Kiel’s titanium-mouthed villain Jaws The Spy Who Loved Me. He doesn’t wear a way-cool Viking helmet. He doesn’t wear a clock around his neck the size of Big Ben on a chain big enough to anchor an aircraft carrier. He’s never schtupped Brigitte Nielsen – at least not admittedly.
Nope. Bret’s just a long-haired dude in a doo-rag “looking for that special someone” to settle down with.

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Posted on July 23, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Back in the day – which in Internet time amounts to maybe two days ago – there was this neat little sports show called The Best Damn Sports Show Period. Granted, I’m not much of a sports freak – or even mildly dispassionate (or hell, even apolitical for Chrissakes) about any televised sports programming, for that matter. Unless maybe it involves race car crashes or women wearing really short uniforms.
At any rate, back in the day, the non-sports guy that I am actually liked Best Damn when Tom Arnold was left to bounce around all willy-nilly to wherever he ended up. And I was pretty enamored by the show in a month or three ago when Best Damn featured Thursday night chick boxing. This is why I was mystified at last night’s Best Damn show, which happened to be airing – without sound – on Comcast SportsNet on the TV sets of the two local gin mills I stopped into for a quick nip before going home at a sensible hour.
Simply put, it was an hour or so without mentioning a damn thing about sports. Instead, I saw Pamela Anderson and magician – oops, illusionist – Hans Klok promoting their Las Vegas show, The Beauty of Magic.

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Posted on July 18, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Each week, we home viewers of Fox-TV’s Hell’s Kitchen learn two lessons about being a successful chef, even though few of us would probably want to become one because there are easier jobs in the world, like rebuilding transmissions: 1) You’ve got to have teamwork in the kitchen, and 2) when it comes to developing and actually delivering a menu, there’s no place for snobbery.
Naturally, the cheftestants on this program spend a lot of time ignoring all that each week, and last night wasn’t any different. Which again made Kitchen the only worthwhile Monday night program.

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Posted on July 17, 2007

By Bethany Lankin

Hang on to your sable-lined lambskin hats historical drama fans! HBO and the BBC have done it again with their latest offering, I, Genghis, a sprawling, scintillating new ten-part series that combines generous helpings of lusty, fur-trimmed tunic-ripping with bloody thirteenth century Mongolian geopolitics.
Writer-producer Michael Hirst (The Tudors, Elizabeth) masterfully balances opulent sets, rich costumes, Machiavellian plotting, and full-frontal nudity with walloping doses of historical veracity, severed limbs, bestiality, and sizzling, goat-milking wenches in woolen undergarments. Last night I watched “Episode Three, The Trouble with Tartars”, and I can tell you, I’m absolutely hooked. If you’re an avid armchair traveler, you’ll find this lavish production really delivers. Exotic locales like Ulaanbaatar, Zuunkharaa, and the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden in Vancouver have never looked sexier!

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Posted on July 12, 2007

By Scott Buckner

What kind of TV watcher am I? I didn’t even know Live Earth was on last weekend. There I was, watching You, Me and Dupree instead because I needed the laughs. I think I was better off because the movie was pretty funny and nobody mentioned the environment once. Besides, if Al Gore can help fund something as big as the Internet, he certainly can figure out a way to make solar power affordable for everyone.
*
Monday night’s viewing on Fox-TV began with a miserable program called On The Lot, where would-be directors try to make the least dopiest short film each week on one of the Universal Studio backlots until all but one is left standing at the end of the season. I found this show by accident because I was doing something else at the time and was too disinterested to change the channel. Christ, how many more shows can there possibly be where contestants get voted off? I know! How about one called Float My Boat, where at-home viewers pick off the crew of cruise ship one by one until just the passengers are left to steer the damn thing back home? Or into an iceberg. Or a reef. Whichever comes first. Now that would be fun.

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Posted on July 11, 2007

By Kathryn Ware

John From Cincinnati is one whacked-out show. Theories abound on the Internet as to just what’s going on in this series, HBO’s hopeful successor to The Sopranos. The first two episodes were baffling in a Twin Peaks way, which was unexpected and frustrating. It made me miss Deadwood, creator David Milch’s previous endeavor, all the more. (I have a friend who’s boycotting John From Cincinnati; doubtless he’s not the only one hoping a ratings flop will open the door for Milch and HBO to resuscitate Deadwood. I’m convinced even Zippy the parrot couldn’t bring that series back to life.)
JFC centers on the Yost family of Imperial Beach, California, three generations of former and future surf legends who have seen better days. Mitch (Bruce Greenwood), the patriarch, blew his knee out years ago. His son Butchie (Brian Van Holt) blew his career on drugs. And now Butchie’s teenage son Shaun (Greyson Fletcher) is blowing away the competition, the next superstar surfer in the Yost family. Mitch’s wife, Cissy (Rebecca De Mornay), is angry at the world but she’s doing her best to help Shaun achieve his dream. Mitch however, doesn’t want Shaun to end up like Butchie.
The Yosts are surrounded by an eclectic menagerie, most of whom are shrouded in backstory we’ve yet to discover. JFC has surfing, drug addiction, levitation, a potentially haunted motel room, resurrection (both human and parrot), greedy agents, a drug-dealing guardian angel, a bubble-wrapped circular stairway, and strange visions shared by multiple characters.

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Posted on July 6, 2007

By Scott Buckner

The past two weeks of involuntary unemployment has turned me into a surly TV watcher indeed. And quite frankly, the incessant grind has been screwing with my will and ability to write anything. When the most useful two hours of your day is reduced to arguing with yourself over whether Judge Marilyn Milian of The People’s Court or Judge Maria Lopez of, um, Judge Maria Lopez is the hotter TV-judge babe, spending the other 22 hours sprawled out in an alley with a bottle of Mad Dog and a crack pipe in your lap starts looking like an attractive option.
I’m going with Judge Milian. She’s what actress Marlo Thomas would be if Marlo decided to become a really great dominatrix instead of That Girl”in 1966.

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Posted on July 3, 2007

By Scott Buckner

The most well-known recent season of MTV’s seminal reality show, The Real World, was the season in Las Vegas that made the off-Strip Palms Casino & Resort famous. It was the season the series officially and unapologetically became sponsor to in-your-face spoiled whiny youth indulgence of booze and sex by a cast of boneheads with the exact lack of maturity to gracefully handle the magic but perilous gifts of vice that we have been endowed with by our Creator. Pity.
That was the season, too, that some might say The Real World jumped the shark, though rode the shark might be a more apt phrase. How unlikely, though, that the cast member to emerge with a semblance of celebrity career ahead of her was Trishelle Cannatella, the loose (and that’s not a pejorative) airhead on-call to all horny boys camera range.
Er, how very likely in retrospect, I should say (though she wasn’t the only cast member who went on to pose for Playboy), now that we know just how ready the church-schooled girl from Cut-Off, La., really was to break out.

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Posted on June 28, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Comedian Kathy Griffin has pretty much made a career saying the only people who find her standup material incredibly funny are gay people. I’ve liked Griffin’s humor for a long time (she was the best reason to watch Suddenly Susan) so I spent last night’s mini-marathon of My Life On The D-List on Bravo laughing my ass off. Since she refers to herself “the gaymaker,” I started wondering whether Griffin possesses a mysteriously incredible power to use the power of television to temporarily turn perfectly hetero guys like me to suit her own evil purposes.
No, wait. I the only reason I tuned into D-List was because I ran across Griffin with her pants around her ankles in her Strong Black Woman standup special while channel surfing a few minutes before and thought, “Damn, I’d do her.”

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Posted on June 20, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Welcome every single one of you 150 or so trendy Los Angeles people to the TV-set restaurant featured on Hell’s Kitchen. This evening, I will be your fake-accent maitre d’ and the bloke who rings that funny round vibrating plastic blinky-light thingamajig they give you on weekends at Outback Steakhouse and Applebee’s that tells you your table’s ready. They’re very expensive thingamajigs, so please don’t go kill time next door at Bed, Bath & Beyond and leave them stashed in the towels.
In the meantime, feel welcome to have a seat at our bar for unlimited complimentary drinks. Hopefully soon, food will be the furthest thing from your mind.

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Posted on June 20, 2007