TELL US WHAT YOU REALLY THINK: Not much room today, so here’s a few of my favourite harsh shots across the bows of various leaky TV boats, as committed to print – or web – over the weekend:
First – the indispensable Lisa de Moraes of the Washington Post on the ratings “bonanza” reaped by CNN’s Larry King for his Paris Hilton post-jail interview: “Larry King tripled his audience by lobbing softball questions at a vacant-looking Paris Hilton in her first TV chat since her release from jail early Tuesday.”
“After which, the son of Gloria Vanderbilt more than doubled his usual Anderson Cooper 360° crowd with his neo-ironic performance of a journalist holding his nose and whining about having to analyze King’s interview with the privileged child of a gillionaire. In so doing, Cooper joined all those media columnists who for weeks had been sniffing about journalism embracing tabloid instincts in re the Paris story, only to stick their own greedy snouts into the trough holding the juiciest pop-culture gruel served up in ages.”
Bravo! Next up, MTV.com’s Jim Cantiello’s “open letter” to Paula Abdul, on the occasion of her new reality show, Hey Paula: “Any chance in resetting your public image was shot to hell thanks to the spirit-crushing second episode. Your sleepless trip to New York was so harrowing and trippy it would have sent Hunter S. Thompson to rehab. The firm ‘I’m a warrior’ facade quickly melted away to reveal a babbling, childish, hot mess of a woman who suffered from “insomnia” thanks in part to guzzling venti-sized Starbucks drinks at four in the morning. In a sharp contrast to episode one, you were oblivious to the camera, looking as lost and confused as 50 Cent at the BET Awards.”
Huzzah!! And finally, Rich Heldenfels of the Akron Beacon Journal summing up the end of Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip on his blog: The HeldenFiles Online: “The burdensome, pompous, four-episode arc that ended the series told me two fundamental things. One, that all concerned had decided that no one was watching and the show could say and do anything it wanted. Two, that those episodes constitute Aaron Sorkin’s admission that he wasn’t very good at writing a show about television, so he might as well write about politics again until he was told to stop. And while I still enormously liked some things, including Matthew Perry’s performance, I was way past ready for it to be done.”
And yes, I know it’s a lazy man’s poor excuse for a column, but with so much hate and ill-feeling going around, it would be churlish not to share. See you tomorrow.
