By Scott Buckner
I’ve finally figured out how to accept the spectacle, the drama, and the constant variety of sports that is The Jerry Springer Show and everything else that is free daytime commercial TV. It’s pretty simple, really: Switch on Chicago’s own WPWR-TV at 9 a.m., imagine you have nothing hopeful to live for, and then just swim in. Because really, The Jerry Springer Show actually can be the shining beacon of your day if you just quit fighting it and give unrelenting unemployment, chronic alcoholism, and clinical depression a chance.
Or sometimes you just end up on the couch on an otherwise fine, sunny day because your back didn’t like your recent decision to drag your 47-year-old body long accustomed to every form of carbohydrate known to man down to the gym. As any medical professional will tell you, the human body will ultimately rebel against things it doesn’t like. Listen to them. They know their business.
Personally, I would find being a guest on Springer disturbing enough, but I can’t think of many things more disturbing than having a mime constantly slinking around my peripheral vision. That’s because a mime is a new (for me, at least) addition that Jerry’s guests and audience have to contend with now. That, and Jerry opening the show by sliding down a firehouse pole. It might actually be a stripper pole, but Jerry doesn’t bump-and-grind his crotch against it, so I’m pretty sure it’s just a plain old firehouse pole.
Now, it would be one thing if I had to contend with the distraction of a stripper, some babe dressed in a Catholic school uniform, or even Zippy The Pinhead constantly slinking around the stage out of the corner of my eye. But a fucking mime? As mimes go, this one’s not even very good. He spends most of the program seemingly signing for the deaf if the deaf were blind and on Qualuudes, pretending to be on the phone, plugging in imaginary electrical plugs, and investigating the astoundingly interesting world of carpet fuzz.
Maybe Mr. Hand was right and the whole world really is on dope.
Another recent development is the show’s surrender to the fact that three seconds into the meeting of any two hostile guests, someone’s getting cold-cocked. So really, why even bother trying to separate two inbred dipshits when you know damn well they’re just going to keep trying to kick each other’s brains out? So now, Jerry’s security staff basically serves as brawl moderators, separating the combatants long enough to give a standing eight count before letting them duke it out until one of them runs out of steam.
There’s even a ring girl now. Really.
Jerry’s Thursday morning show, “Pregnant Gals & A Mime,” also featured what is without a doubt the most creative, funniest thing Jerry ever came up with: The Reverend Shnorr. See for yourself: The Bible and public intoxication can coexist for fun and profit. If someone doesn’t give this guy his own show when Jerry retires, television deserves what it gets.
The show closed with another new-to-me feature: one of the show’s security bouncers interviewing someone from the audience outside the studio. Thursday morning, it was two fairly hot women – in that slightly skanky, three-in-the-morning-closing-time-hot sorta way – from Hobart, Indiana, being interviewed by a security dude who was quickly amused by the word “Hobart.”
Security dude: “Are there ‘hos in Hobart?”
Skanky-hot chick: “Plenty of ’em.”
Note to self: Visit Hobart kinda soon.
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Say what you will about Springer, but that show doesn’t even begin to illustrate all that is wrong with some people in this world. For that we have Montel.
On Thursday, host Montel Williams spent a half-hour struck completely speechless by the story of Crystal, a very sweet young woman who spent her childhood as an incest toy groomed by her drug-selling mom for years of rape and sodomy by her mom’s crazy-fuck sociopath boyfriend.
Thursday’s Springer guests were entertainment. Thursday’s Montel guests were like being chased by a tornado every second of your existence, even in your sleep. If there was anything hopeful involved in a poster child for Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, it was the show’s ongoing plug for the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) at 1-800-656-HOPE, where help and hope are available 24/7.
Sixteen years and 300,000 guests filled with stuff that only surviving the Holocaust could probably measure up to. No wonder why Montel looks like hell.
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Sun-Times ad critic Lewis Lazare is so full of shit. The Geico commercials with The Pips and Peter Frampton are still brilliant, no matter how many times you see them.
“New car smells like sunshine . . . Take a train to happy town – woo-hoo.”
Slays me every damn time.
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Speaking of slay-me commercials, if you tune into WCIU-TV long enough, you’ll eventually see the ad for Yale/Insurance Plus featuring Bill Clinton and George W. Bush drag-racing their limos down the street at night. The two yell smack at each other out the windows, Bill wins the race, and afterward the two walk off camera headed to the Denny’s down the street to swap funny stories about their wives.
I first saw this one when I woke up on the couch at three in the morning a few months ago and hadn’t seen it since, so I wasn’t even sure whether I was dreaming or drunk or it was actually real. Sure enough, there it was again Thursday afternoon during Judge Mathis.
The celebrity impersonators are dead-on enough while oozing the perfect amount of cheese that a low-budget commercial like this demands. If anything, whoever came up with the concept deserves a raise just for not having either George or Bill in a bird suit laying a giant egg on the top of some uninsured chick’s car.
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I can’t think of anything more frustrating than being Tyra Banks. Imagine the heartbreak of being a woman with a talk show who so wants to be Oprah but never will.
I think it might be because Oprah doesn’t squeal like a girl at a pajama party or slip into that annoying Valley Girl dialect.
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For those who never get sick of game shows, WPWR-TV clocks in with Temptation: The New Sale of the Century, a show that might as well be called Win Ugly, Overpriced Crap That Even QVC Wouldn’t Bother With.
Oh, wait a minute. You don’t even have to go on the show! You can go here and actually buy the same ugly, overpriced crap contestants win at a staggering 60 percent discount. Is there anyone else who sees a correlation between the rise of Internet shopping and the demise of Bob Barker?
Temptation is certainly a fast-moving game show, thanks mainly to host Rossi Morreale, who speaks at roughly twice the speed of sound and looks a lot like Michael J. Fox if Michael J. Fox was a lot taller, still fit into his Family Ties wardrobe, and was fathered by the dude from Sugar Ray. How I managed to go through life with the idea that game shows were places where careers went to die, I’ll never know.
Like its merchandise-based game show brethren, the mental effort needed to compete in Temptation isn’t terribly high. The most challenging obstacles faced by contestants on Thursday was knowing the difference between Ben Stiller and Ben Affleck movies, and the location of various bones in your body. Also like it’s merchandise-based game show brethren, Temptation has overpriced crap being pointed to by anonymous models who you imagine would be an obscenely good time if you had huge mounds of cocaine at your disposal.
The twist to Temptation is that it doesn’t deal in real money. Instead, the winning contestant goes to Shopper’s Paradise to win Temptation Dollars, a measure of fake currency which uses the yearly raises given to most American workers as its value model. That’s why not even Wal-Mart shoppers can buy a $6,178 trip to Jamaica for $368, a $13,890 piano for $603, or a $35,590 Jaguar X for the insanely low price of $936.
Forget all that business about democracy and freedom. This is why America is the number one destination among every Third Worlder looking to break free of the shackles of starvation, oppression, and hopelessly awful music. You know, if everyone in the Al-Qaeda network could walk off the Temptation stage with a brand new fridge and a Jag after 20 minutes, the War on Terror would be over.
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If it’s unrepentantly annoying, it must be The Insider. Today, the unrepentantly annoying Steven Cojocaru is – I kid you not – breathlessly jumping around the stage blowing a big bubbly gasket over the upcoming movie version of Sex and the City like it’s The Second Coming Of Christ.
In response, I find myself sitting there wishing someone would just shove him into a gunny sack with a bunch of cats and a brick and dump the whole mess into a farmer’s pond.
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There’s a difference between unrepentantly annoying and relentlessly annoying. That’s why whoever came up with the “so prehistoric” commercials for Comcast ought to be tied by the ankles to the bumper of a truck going on a very long trip.
Why? Kids don’t talk like that. The last kid who did was Waldo in the Our Gang shorts. He ended up in a gunny sack with a bunch of cats and a brick at the bottom of a farmer’s pond.
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The most unexpectedly unusual moment of TV viewing on Thursday came during an afternoon edition of The People’s Court. The plaintiff and defendant, embroiled in a nasty mosquito-filled koi pond die-off case, enter the courtroom to the show’s signature dramatic music as usual, but there’s no announcer to provide the public introductions of the defendant and plaintiff.
The crawler running across the bottom of the screen blames the Writer’s Guild strike. Really.
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WPWR has its own candidate competing with WCIU’s daylong stable of small claims TV court judges: Judge Cristina Perez of Cristina’s Court, who will never fuel as many wet dreams as Judge Marilyn Milian, and isn’t as outwardly annoyed with obvious bullshit as Judge Mathis. Matter of fact, I doubt we’ll ever see a day where Judge Cristina will get as fed up as we’re all waiting for Judge Mathis to get over the endless stream of fools and slouches parading before him and scream, “What is wrong with you people?! Are you all fucking stupid*or what?!”
So what’s Judge Cristina got going for her? She’s got the hugest, scariest-looking bailiff daytime court TV has ever seen. She’s got Bailiff Cam. She doesn’t blink at the mention of porn. And she doesn’t mind sitting in a golf cart wearing golf shoes and drinking beer while her husband plays.
And yeah, dammit – she does make you feel like she cares.
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I know I’m way behind the curve, but in which season did someone turn the Scrubs theme song into such a plodding piece of shit?
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Posted on March 1, 2008