Television

David Asman is Damn Right

Media Matters and a few liberal bloggers are spreading a gotcha moment for Fox News anchor David Asman, who accidentally revealed his we-ness while interviewing Sen. Trent Lott about the filibuster deal: So, Senator, if we should have done it and if we had the votes to do it in the Senate -- if you guys in the Republican Party did -- then why did you need a compromise? It's funny to see the guy talking like a Republican homer, but anyone who knows Asman's biography doesn't need to be told where ... (read more)

2005/05/26

Dismembering the Eighties

SoapNet airs reruns of the cancelled soap Another World, digging 16-year-old episodes out of the Procter & Gamble archives. They've reached June 1989, and every time I hit this show during a channel surf I can't find my way back out -- it's a hypnotic time capsule of excruciatingly bad '80s fashion. Movies that mock the decade, such as The Wedding Singer and 200 Cigarettes, don't come close to how ridiculous we looked. There may be no more unseemly spectacle than men in feathered mullets, ... (read more)

2005/05/18

You Heard It Here First

Without interviewing me, Jacksonville TV newscast First Coast News reported Thursday that I was selling the domain: While the World Wide Web might not be a priority for Pope Benedict XVI, one local man hopes someone will think it's worth some cash to him. Roger [sic] Cadenhead of St. Augustine registered the domain name BenedictXVI.com along with other potential choices before the Pope selected his name. Cadenhead wants to sell it to the highest bidder. This was news to me. I had been telling ... (read more)

2005/04/25

Fame or Something Like It

I wasn't prepared to be famous for 24 hours, but now that my weblog traffic has subsided to normal levels, I can relate some of the experience. The rest has to be filtered through therapy first. For anyone wondering how I became a television personality as well-known for a day as the Virgin Mary grilled cheese, my friend Matt Haughey has digitized the interview on the Today Show where I talk about BenedictXVI.Com. After the Today Show, I began receiving calls from TV producers. Almost to a ... (read more)

2005/04/24

Crossing Over the Line

On last night's Daily Show, Jon Stewart presented clips from the ongoing, 24-7 obscenity that is cable news coverage of the Terri Schiavo case. The Crooks & Liars weblog offers the five-minute segment in QuickTime and Windows Media formats. To give you an idea of how bad the infotainment cesspool has become, a Fox News morning show invited Crossing Over TV psychic John Edward in studio to talk about it. John Edward: I do believe that the soul, the consciousness, can communicate when they're in ... (read more)

2005/03/25

The Geek Who Saved Christmas

I've been accused this week of being obsessive and creepy over an article I wrote several years ago about Janie Porche, the effusively perky real-life Apple Switch spokesmodel. I know I titled the piece "Stalking Janie Porche," but I'm surprised that these bloggers took that literally. If I said that I was hungry enough to eat a horse, would they report me to PETA? Porche, who now has her own weblog, read the article and sent me a friendly e-mail in response to a visitor's comment that included ... (read more)

2005/03/22

Don't Tune in Tomorrow

On March 31, SoapCity is cancelling a great TV subscription service: commercial-free program downloads. The service, which required Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player, offered shows from the last four weeks for download over the Web, charging $9.95 a month or $1.99 per episode. Digital-rights management expired the files after four weeks. Considering the popularity of TV show DVDs and illegally traded episodes on file-sharing services, it seems like a no-brainer to milk a few more ... (read more)

2005/02/25

Mark Evanier: ... many years ago, around the time I started edging into the TV business, I attended a lecture by a very accomplished, successful producer ... a man with many prestigious credits. He told us that we had to recognize and avoid what he called "The Marley Ideas" -- notions so dreadful that they were dead from the moment of conception. As an example, he told us that one TV network was then considering an idea so terrible, so guaranteed to fail, that everyone involved with it should ... (read more)

2005/02/20

Mark Evanier on Johnny Carson

The comic book and TV writer Mark Evanier writes News From Me, a great pop culture weblog that has been wall-to-wall Johnny Carson for days. He appears to have found every interesting retrospective and trivial tidbit about Carson in the pro and online media, adding some of his own observations: I met Carson three times, I think, plus he called me once on the phone after his retirement to thank me for some information I'd relayed to his secretary. He was always disarmingly gracious. People ... (read more)

2005/01/29