Grid Effect

A few links to start off this painful, painful morning. Basically I was playing basketball last night and was matched-up with god damn OSU linebacker who preferred to play in the post. Not to brag, but I more than held my own but am paying for it now. Not only am I about five years older than this kid, he has roughly forty pounds of muscle mass on me and is being finely tuned to make an NFL roster. If anything, it was an solemn reminder that I need to stay out of prison.

So I guess it is considered pertinent that David Letterman got hitched in fucking Montana yesterday. Or at some point in recent history. Whatever. I’m too lazy and bored by this whole topic to actually read the article. Oh my goodness, David Letterman married the same woman he’s been dating for twenty-plus years and has a kid with…uh, now she’ll definitely get in the will! How life Altering!

So apparently Dancing With The Stars actually pays their guest “celebrity” participants $200,000 to compete on their half-witted dance show. That’s, like, actual incentive. Most of these “celebrities” are actually “retired” celebrities, and $200,000 grand, while it’s not what they’re accustom to being paid, it’s a good way for someone like Warren Sapp to supplement his income. Tucker Fucking Carlson and whoever else has been voted off first on that show has been paid that much money for about a week worth of dance training and one or two show appearances. In other words, it’s not nearly as degrading as it sounds.

Parks and Recreation is getting destroyed by focus groups. For the uninitiated, that’s the pending Amy Poehler-Rashida Jones vehicle. And really just the Amy Poehler vehicle, Rashida Jones was cast because she had such a good arc on The Office and this way it’s indisputably a female driven comedy, something everyone claims their is a huge market for. Anyways, I don’t find this terribly surprising. For all the love she gets in the media (blogs, news networks, TV critics, etc.), I tend to think of Amy Poehler as about the most overrated comedic actor I’ve ever seen perform. Not that she doesn’t have any redeemable qualities but she is widely regarded as just a notch or two below Tina Fey, and it’s really not even close. At the same time, this country is filled to the brim with retards, and I imagine just about every comedy we like except for It’s Always Sunny would get lampooned in focus groups as well.

Best of luck, ladies. Though we must say that it's not looking promising.

Generally we hate shit like this because it’s so incredibly meaningless, but here are James Gandolfini (Tony Soprano) and Edie Falco (Carmela Soprano) together for the first time since the HBO series’ finale. According to the link, the two who one would have thought were tired of pretending to be married in a public forum, “laughed the night away”. I can only hope that when they finally got home or in private, Carmela threw one of those minature statues at him and he retaliated by punching a hole through the wall in their pool house.

I’ve never watched Battlestar Galactica save for a few choice scenes, and this decision is up their with my avoidance of Breaking Bad as one of my bigger TV viewing regrets. Mostly because unless our pyramid scheme pans out, there’s no way we’re ever going to have enough money to create the free time to actually go back and watch all these episodes. But in this piece from Salon.com, it describes the series finale as “the opposite of David Chase’s famous non-ending of The Sopranos.” Yes, well, every series finale is very much unlike that of The Sopranos, that’s what made it so fucking effective. How are people missing this? Is it considered a success if it mirrors everything else you’ve ever seen? God damn this shit drives me nuts.

Mindy Kaling is saying that The Office has decided to abandon “that’s what she said” for the time being. This is probably a wise move. After five seasons of using a running joke, you really don’t want it to wear out its welcome. Not to say I didn’t like the usage of it, but it seems absurd to put out to pasture because its become “so commonplace”. I guess when they used the joke about three dozen times in season three, that it was just a coincidence every time it came up.

And finally, Roseanne Barr is reportedly piecing together a return to prime time television. Which may not be the wisest move. I enjoyed Roseanne as much as the next pre-teen straight male before it turned into a misguided preach-fest about social issues, but Roseanne Barr is something of a polarizing figure and could really turn into a PR nightmare. Then again, Alec Baldwin thrives on 30 Rock and has taken home multiple awards for his performance, but the series still gets low ratings. No one is going to stop Roseanne from getting a sitcom if she wants one, but is anyone going to be surprised when its off the air after six episodes?

The truth of the matter is — and no one wants to admit it — is that the era of the critically successful traditional sitcom is about dead. The only exception for one that is critically lauded and commercially successful is How I Met Your Mother, and it is a relic. Anyone with a semblance of taste disdain’s Two and A Half Men and according to Nielsen’s their isn’t much of an audience for the quirkier NBC comedies that is widely received by television snobs everywhere. I don’t see Roseanne Barr, whose delivery seems permanently trapped in 1994, changing any of this.

Probably it for today, back with some more links and maybe a nightly preview for tomorrow.