MISCELLANEOUS MISCELLANY: NOTES FOR A DREARY HUMP DAY

In lieu of anything really pushing my buttons today, here are a bunch of random notes I’ve been collecting over the past couple days:

• If like me you’re not blogging from Park City but are still curious what’s going on at Sundance, you might want to tune in to Festival Dailies on The Sundance Channel every night this week at 9 PM (and repeated several times until the next episode premieres). Hosted for some reason by Jay Mohr (I guess Last Comic Standing really bumped-up his indie cred), the half-hour show is a decent little companion to the festival for the home viewer, without being so inside about what’s actually going on there that you can’t follow it. I’ve only seen Monday’s episode during which we got to know a few of the filmmakers and competition films, while also experiencing life at the fest. Plus, every night there’s “A Conversation with Alan Cumming,” where the British actor sits down with festival participants for a little chat. Monday featured the director and two stars (including Naomi Watts as the titular role) of competition film Ellie Parker. The only curious thing about Sundance Channel’s lineup is that in previous years they also broadcast the closing awards ceremony which I believe will be happening this Saturday 1/29. However, looking at the schedule, I don’t see it listed. Am I just missing it, or it there no ceremony for the home viewer this year? I know it’s not very exciting, but it was still mildly interesting to watch.

• Anyone else see this headline this past weekend: “Madden Was Intended to Star in Towel Scene”? That’s right: ABC originally wanted to keep everything in-house by using their own announcer John Madden rather than Eagles wide-receiver Terrell Owens in the little Monday Night Football bit which put everyone in an uproar. When I wrote about the stupidity of the uproar after I finally saw the televised sketch, I said that I didn’t believe there would have been any controversy had the player in question been a white quarterback like Peyton Manning or Brett Favre. John Madden?!? People would have loved it, and the only complaint ABC or the NFL might have received would have been from the Parents Television Council (or whatever their name is) who are responsible for 99% of all the FCC complaints regarding anything already. (And I’m only barely exaggerating.) Continuing to show his creativity places him above it all, Desperate Housewives series creator Marc Cherry has the money quote in this story: “I didn’t want to upset people. I didn’t realize that ‘Monday Night Football’ was such a family viewing experience. I wouldn’t let my 5-year-old watch beer commercials with big-busted cheerleaders, but that’s just me.” Nice!

• In what should only be described as the result of Viacom co-president and CBS head Les Moonves doing too many shrooms on his honeymoon with Julie Chen, Survivor All-Star love-birds (and winners) Amber and Rob are going to do their best to ruin the next version of The Amazing Race. Seriously, the reality show crossover contestants never were and still aren’t a good idea, unless it involves The Surreal Life. It was a bad idea when Big Brother’s Allison went on TAR with her battered and abused boyfriend Donnie, and it’s not like Rob and Amber are really so compelling. They weren’t even the favorite people from Survivor, what with CBS having to manufacture a second prize in order to compensate Rupert. But actually going to CBS’s best reality show isn’t all. Apparently, they’ve also signed a deal to televise their pending nuptials on the network as well. Hell, even Donald Trump managed to avoid that little bit of narcissism (shockingly). Does anyone really care about Rob & Amber anymore?

• NBC has announced that the Americanized version of the brilliant BBC series The Office will premiere on March 22 at 9:30 PM right after Scrubs. The good: stepping in for Ricky Gervais is the potentially just-as-funny Steve Carell, and the man in charge of adapting the series is Greg Daniels who wrote for the late-great HBO Daily Show predecessor, Not Necessarily the News as well as Seinfeld and The Simpsons. He also co-created King of the Hill with Mike Judge. The guy knows from funny. The bad: Americanizations rarely do well, and NBC’s recent track record flat-out sucks. (Yes, both Three’s Company and All in the Family were very successful Americanizations, but they’re both exceptions as far as I’m concerned.) Coupling last season was absolutely awful, and I fear that the humor in The Office is so straight, deadpan, sarcastic and subversive that there’s no way NBC would believe such an exact translation would appeal to American audiences. Maybe I’m just being cynical – it’s been known to happen – but I fear that this show won’t just be bad, but utterly unwatchable.

• This news has been a long time coming, but ABC has decided to cancel life as we know it. TV Guide quotes network head Steve McPherson at the Television Critics Association presentation saying, “We feel like we’ve failed in terms of getting that show an audience. We really want to make sure we’ve exhausted every possibility before we officially say it’s gone. But it’s not looking good.” What a cop-out. The show has had two time-slots: Thursdays at 9 PM, before being moved to Thursdays at 8 PM. Other than Wednesday nights, it couldn’t have had a more difficult job getting to audiences, even if it’s demo isn’t the primary target for CSI and The Apprentice at 9 PM. Moving it up to 8 PM doesn’t help since that pits it directly against Joey and The O.C., which is the show’s target demo. The sad part is, the show isn’t all that bad – other than the horrific acting by Kelly Osbourne. (Yes, that Kelly Osbourne!) It’s no My So-Called Life, to which critics unfavorably compared it before this TV season, but a few ridiculous plotlines aside, it’s a pretty good show with a (mostly) talented young cast. So McPherson is right that ABC has “failed,” but they sure as hell haven’t “exhausted every possibility” by putting it in two time slots that basically signaled death from the very beginning.

• In other cancellation news, and heading back to CBS, the awful Center of the Universe (one of the most tragic wastes of talent on TV today), is being put out of its misery. However, far more upsetting is that it will be replaced by the return of the almost-as-bad Yes, Dear, another show with writing that doesn’t do justice to its lesser known but very talented cast.

• And last but not least, did anyone watch Jay Leno’s little tribute episode of The Tonight Show Monday night in honor of Johnny Carson. Leaving aside any potential truth to the well-known rumors that the two didn’t really like each other (or at least Carson was not a huge fan of Leno), was anyone else struck by how uncomfortable Leno looked during his monologue. It was like he was trying to be emotional and serious and somber, and either he just doesn’t know how or he was overacting. I don’t know, but it felt very false to me. Then, by the way, on last night’s show, not one word whatsoever about the previous night’s program, at least not during the monologue. Instead, it was business as usual, and crappy business at that. He was telling jokes about the East Coast digging out from under multiple-feet of snow. Maybe it’s just me, but considering the largest part of the blizzard blew through Saturday night, in today’s day and age wasn’t that old news? To give The Tonight Show a little bit of credit, at least they cancelled their original guests for Monday night. I don’t think some sad words about the death of Carson would have been quite that effective had the monologue ended with, “And we’ll be right back with Paris Hilton!” Yes, poor Paris was bumped from the lead guest slot. Hopefully that’s just the beginning of erasing her from our TV screens. If you want to help out, don’t tune in to The Simple Life: Interns which premieres tonight on Fox.