August 2000 Archives

Ever heard the word "beating" used to describe an extremely negative experience? Like, say, in regards to cultural crapfest Survivor and the whore-like tendencies the show's entire network has lapsed into while over-promoting it ("Damn, even turning on CBS anymore is just a beating--and why am I watching The Early Show, anyway?").

That was a week ago. Survivor is now but a bad, bad memory, and Bryant Gumbel has since returned to his original pre-Survivor viewing audience of 40 housebound oldsters (actual ratings, rounded up). During the weekend prior to Survivor's last stand, a new syndicated TV show debuted, and anyone who actually saw it can attest to this: The American lexicon now has an unequivocal definition of "beating."

It's called The Cindy Margolis Show, it's on weekends, and I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize for ever criticizing Survivor. Or Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Or any program I've ever accused of sucking. The bar has been raised... lowered... whatever...

See, my TV writing "career" was launched a little over two years ago because ex-basketball player Magic Johnson had this goddawful talk show called The Magic Hour, and it had to be stopped--or at least ridiculed mercilessly. Now, like a long-dormant warrior in some cheesy sci-fi/action series, I've been summoned forth by the powers of good to lay the smackdown on The Cindy Margolis Show, which seems designed for people who find E!'s Wild On... series a little too "thinky." Courage.

Where Johnson was a rich, successful celebrity who was superhumanly nice but showed no discernable talent for speaking out loud, Margolis is a rich, successful celebrity who's superhumanly nice but shows no discernable talent for speaking out loud who just happens to be the sexiest female in the known universe. How hot is she? Besides being The Most Downloaded Woman on the Internet (averaging over 500,000 hits to her website, www.CindyMargolis.com, a month), scientific studies have proven that Margolis can cause sturdy tents to be pitched in even the furthest corners of Confirmed Bachelor Campgrounds. What chance do straight young males--Cindy's target demographic--stand against her King World/CBS-syndicated wiles?

Even though straight young males are generally really, really stupid (witness the continued popularity of Creed), they ain't yet seduced by The Cindy Margolis Show. The kickoff Aug. 19 ratings were dismal (a 1.3 rating covering 91 percent of the country's monitored markets, in layman's terms, sucks), and last weekend's were just south of UPN territory.

Is this concrete proof that Margolis' fans--or, as she calls them, "Cyberbuddies"--would rather hold their mouses with one hand than their remotes? Will Cindy follow The Drudge Report into good-websites-make-bad-TV oblivion? Gird those loins, because Cindy can't be counted out this soon in the game. We're talking weekend syndication, where shows can linger for months and months without an audience--remember Relic Hunter? What? It's still on? Jesus, it's worse than I thought.

There's a reason why this article is nearly over and the actual "show" portion of The Cindy Margolis Show hasn't been laid out for you: I have no freakin' idea what this tawdry trainwreck is about.

I know it's a beach party, taped on Florida's South Beach, with plenty o' hardbodies shaking their groove thangs. Margolis has one talented co-host (DJ Skribble manning the turntables) and one supremely untalented co-host ("comedian" Lance Krall, a slithering geek who has yet to produce a funny nanosecond) doing a good chunk of the talking. This is mostly a smart move because, sweet as she is, Margolis' detached banter is flatter than one of her cheesecake mousepads. Is she a hostess, or a screensaver?

Every show has a different "theme" (last week was a "pajama party," with Margolis and another lingerie bunny pillow-fighting in bed... oh yeah). There's a "Webkini" contest, wherein nubile honeys prance around in bikinis as the Cyberbuddies viewing at home use that one free hand to click on their favorite. Oh, and boobs, boobs, boobs! There are more boobs per TV-screen inch on Cindy than C-Span's coverage of the Republican, Democratic, Reform and Hooters National Conventions combined...

Uh, this straight young male seems to have misplaced his "beating" thesis. This show doesn't sound bad, after all!

If you're anything like me, you're getting impatient for the day when shows like Survivor stop being such wimps and just give the contestants swords and nets so they can fight to the death for the amusement of the viewing audience. What good is it being in the year 2000 if television isn't even as exploitative and violent as what the Roman Empire had? It's not fair, I tell you. Where are my bread and circuses? Actually, come to think of it, I just had some toast, and I saw Cirque du Soleil a couple of weeks ago. But that doesn't solve my basic problem, which is that I hunger for blood sports.

Luckily, Comedy Central is on the case. I tell you, whenever there's someone hungering for blood sports or reruns of Saturday Night Live, there's nothing like Comedy Central to cure what ails you. The prescription in this case is BattleBots, a brilliant show in which robots try to kill each other.

Okay, so they're more like buzzsaws mounted on remote-control cars than eighty-foot-high laser-wielding mechanoids, but it's clearly a step in the right direction.

Starting on Wednesday, the BattleBot tournament begins, in which robots will claw (and spike and saw and hammer) their way through the brackets to become the most dangerous robot or something. Also they have a grand prize called the Golden Nut. But so far I haven't had much of an opportunity to form emotional relationships with the robots themselves, so I don't care about the show-to-show continuity. It's all about the robots drunkenly bumping into each other with sharp pieces of metal.

It's not all great, though. One of the problems is the announcers. They're your standard enthusiastic "hip" play-by-play guys that couldn't get hired by any of ESPN's channels. One of them is Bill Dwyer, who you might remember from a series of commercials for some sports videogames. His costar in those commercials was Matt Vasgersian, who's now a host of Sports Geniuses on Fox Sports. They did such a great job pretending to be sports anchors in commercials that they got real jobs doing it. Well, nearly real jobs. At least they're not announcing Rollerjam -- although my point here is that they should be. Robot fighting is a serious business, and it deserves better announcing.

Of course, the show isn't nonstop carnage, and that's where it becomes particularly clever. If somebody happens to be watching television with you (this doesn't happen to me because I'm a toast-eating, Cirque-going loner), you can point to the interview segments. "See?" you can say. "This isn't a show pandering to my base need for violence! It stars scientists!" You don't have to mention that the scientists are mostly disaffected geeks working in their garages with blow torches.

Anyway, I bet some of the greatest scientific discoveries of the ages came from guys who were avoiding their wives by building killer robots.

My point is, there's a slight (very slight) overlay of intellectualism on top of the sheet metal combat.

There're also some personality profiles in the rare instances that the whirring blades of motorized death were designed by a fourteen-year-old girl. Otherwise, the "competitor" section has things like "Weight: 472 pounds. Primary weapon: Big steel claws." That's Mechadon, who looks really cool. But don't get the idea that all of the robots are huge gleaming chrome death machines. There're also a couple that are just cute as a button. I'm thinking, of course, of Tentoumushi, which was designed by the aforementioned fourteen-year-old girl. Its primary weapon? The dreaded "Smothering Pink Lady Bug!" Yikes!

It is possible that I'm overstating the carnage a little. The combat segments are really just a couple of funky-looking metal wheeled things bumping into each other while the breathless announcers enthuse about the action ("He's ripped off the steering unit! That spells doom for KillBot 3000!"). It's not so much what's shown here as the potential that excites me. They've taken a pretty basic concept and added spikes, in much the same way that "Grease" took drag racing and added unconvincing hubcap-shredding spikes. I realize that's not a very useful analogy, but I just happen to like that scene in "Grease," and who's writing this article anyway? I'm all hopped-up on the fightin' robots, and I take guff from no one.

Incidentally, in 200 years, when the robots are in charge and humanity is kept in slave camps, they're going to point back to BattleBots as the reason. All I know is, if I'm a robot from the future, I'm probably not liking the idea of robots fighting to the death for the amusement of human yokels.

It had been a few months since the media geniuses who like to warn of the impending collapse of Western civilization had a good, solid dead horse to beat on. Who was most recently on the chopping block? I believe it was Rick and Darva... or was it Regis?

No matter. This summer the cultural-critic "Kick Me" sign has been taped to the shirt tail of CBS' Survivor, a silly little cross between The Real World and Battle of the Network Stars.

Everybody who cries about the ascent of "reality" shows like Survivor likes to snidely point out that these shows are nothing like reality. They like to point out the irony of a whole nation of television viewers deciding to escape reality by watching someone else's reality.

You can like it or hate it -- that's your right. But Survivor is undoubtedly not a "reality" show, at least not any more than The Price is Right or Jeopardy! is a reality show. Survivor is a game show. A weeks-long, cutthroat battle to be the one who wins a million bucks.

And it's brilliant.

Survivor has captured the nation's attention because it's a fascinating exercise in watching different people joust and connive. Because usually, all that happens behind the scenes at work and you don't get to see it first-hand. Here, it's all out in front of us. The plotting. The alliances. The ones who don't see that they're about to get their hats handed to them.

This summer, everyone has come down hard on Richard Hatch, the corporate trainer who has become the villain of Survivor -- a plotter, a manipulator, the human snake in the jungles of Palau Tiga, Survivor's tropical island.

But, you see, that's just why I love Survivor and I think Richard is fantastic. He's playing the game, and he's playing it to win. He's lying, misleading, pitting his fellow castaways against one another -- all because he's got a gameplaying strategy and he's going to execute it. He's going to go all out to try and win that million bucks, because that's the reason all of them are there.

Besides the plotting, the show's games within the game are fun of a Superstars and Battle of the Network Stars sort. Call me old fashioned, but I enjoy seeing the Survivor competitors outwitting, outplaying, and outlasting one another in various oddball games. And by rewarding immunity (from being voted off the island) to the winner of one of each episode's challenges, the show throws another wrinkle into the game's strategy.

On top of that, everyone loves a mystery. And Survivor's 16 Little Indians premise guarantees that, because it's now the day of the show's last episode and we still don't know who won.

So let's give Survivor its due. It has made this summer of television far more interesting than any previous summer, including 1999's Summer of Regis. It has captured the American television viewing audience in a way that some thought would never, ever happen again.

And, in reality, it's probably a one-trick pony. Because this January, when Survivor 2 premieres, it'll be populated with 16 Richards. No more innocents who have no clear agenda and just want to have a good time. No Seans -- the daffy doc who decided to vote people off in alphabetical order. No, it'll be ugly. They'll all be lying to one another, cheating one another, forming nasty shifting alliances in order to ensure that they won't be voted off the island.

Wait a second. That sounds even better. Count me in.

If you tuned in to watch the Olympic swim trials last Sunday on NBC, you saw yourself a hell of a show. There was Lenny Krayzelburg, Ukrainian immigrant turned American phenom, winning the men's 100-meter backstroke but failing to set a new record and, therefore, earning a gesture of disgust from his father. There was Megan Quann, all of 16 years old, dusting the rest of the field in the women's 100-meter breaststroke. And if it's records you wanted, Ed Moses was there to oblige, setting a new American mark in the 100-meter breaststroke for the men.

Yes, it was great TV, full of high drama, human interest and the thrill of competition. It was also, by the time NBC got around to airing the swim trials, several days old.

Krayzelburg and Quann both won their events Friday -- two days before NBC's plausibly live coverage of the finals. The Ed Moses race had an even longer shelf life. He had earned a spot on the Olympic team Wednesday night, meaning you could have read about the race in Thursday's papers, phoned all your friends about it on Friday and staged a dramatic recreation down at the neighborhood pool Saturday before NBC even aired a second of footage.

And you know what? Get used to it -- because you can expect more of the same when NBC descends upon Sydney for next month's Olympics.

The Peacock Network cracked open an atlas, consulted a wrinkled time-zone-conversion chart and realized, much to its horror, that Australia is roughly 1,000 hours ahead of the U.S. Right there, any interest in trying to cover the Summer Olympics live died faster than the U.S. squad's chances of medaling in team handball. Everything, from the opening ceremonies to the basketball grudge match with Angola to Bob Costas' bon mots, will be live on tape -- pre-recorded, pre-packaged and expertly edited to wring out every last bit of drama.

Which sounds acceptable, until you saw last weekend's swimming coverage.

Since NBC knew who the winners were well in advance of its broadcast, you couldn't help but notice a certain... um... slant. NBC aired a profile on the friendly rivalry between Jenny Thompson and Dara Torres. Hey, Thompson and Torres just finished one-two in the freestyle. Up next was a segment on butterflyer Tom Malchow. Amazing! Malchow won his race, too! And now an up-close-and-personal moment with Gary Hall Jr. Lordy, lordy! He qualified for the Olympics as well! What are the odds that every athlete NBC profiled made the team?

OK, so NBC made the not-at-all unreasonable decision to focus its attention upon the winners. Hell, everyone loves a winner. The problem is, when you rejigger your coverage ex post facto to concentrate only on the top finishers, you're robbing the event of whatever drama you've tried to manufacture. Even if I hadn't read the swimming trial results in the paper for a week leading up to the NBC telecast, I could have predicted who would finish on top in every race -- the Speedo-clad superstars who mysteriously got all the camera time.

That does a great disservice to your audience -- you're only giving them a fraction of the story. It's not just the medalists and their stories that make the Olympics special. There's also the folks who train equally as hard, push themselves just as much and yet come up short. They don't finish on top. Some of them don't even make the Olympic team.

Take the women's 100-meter breaststroke, the race that Megan Quann won. Also swimming in that event was Amanda Beard, a medallist at the 1996 Games who got burnt out on swimming, took a sabbatical and tried to mount a comeback to make the 2000 team. All by the age of 20. She finished eighth in an eight-woman race.

An interesting story, one would think. But not compelling enough for NBC to do anything more than acknowledge Beard's presence in the vicinity of the swimming pool.

NBC's idea of compelling drama, you may recall, was to air Profiler for the past four years.

(Beard, incidentally, went on to make the 2000 Olympic team by finishing in the top two of the 200-meter breaststroke. Not to ruin the surprise ending for those of you who were waiting for NBC to break the news.)

Imagine a network opting to cover any other sporting event this way. Baseball telecasts would only show base hits and key outs -- balls, strikes and foul balls would all get edited out. In hockey, everything but the goals and the fights would wind up on the cutting room floor. And the Super Bowl -- if NBC had its way, the game would be whittled down to about an hour once you cut out all the down time, the pre-game hype and any halftime shows that feature Up With People or Edward James Olmos.

Okay, so maybe last one would be pretty cool. Bad example.

NBC's response to this, of course, is that the Olympics aren't a sporting event, a curious designation given the presence of athletes, competition, groin pulls, and Gatorade. What NBC means is that unlike other sporting events that appeal to a more specific audience -- beer-swilling males -- the Olympics are seen by a wider demographic. Namely, housewives, grandmothers and adolescent girls who turned on the TV expecting to see that hunky Croatian doctor on ER, not the goddamned Greco-Roman wrestling finals.

Given that audience, NBC reasons, the Olympics can't be presented the way you might broadcast a Cubs-Marlins showdown. You have to package the event, adding music and sound effects and over-produced feature segments on how the athletes overcame illness and tragedy and unhappy home lives to compete. That, NBC has decided, is what the womenfolk want.

Why we haven't seen women march en masse to NBC every time some suit starts talking about the pea-sized, easily manipulated brains of females is beyond my comprehension.

But all this is shouting into the storm. All the bellyaching in the world won't change the fact that NBC will present the Olympics the way it's always planned to -- on tape, pro-American and with enough maudlin human interest stories to melt even the hardest of hearts. (In a five-minute span at last week's swim trials, for example, NBC's hyperventilating announcer enthused that the winning swimmers had "conquered their demons.") Winners will be featured at the expense of losers. Events that fit neatly in between the commercial breaks will get air time. And the little things that make sports great -- the strategy, the backstory, the tension of the early rounds -- will get left out of the final cut.

Because that makes for great TV. Lousy coverage, but great TV.

The great thing about television is that it brings programs from around the world into my home. And your home, I guess, but what do I care about that?

There are programs from Britain, there are programs from Japan, there are programs from Uruguay, there are programs from wherever the World's Strongest Man competition is this year. There are programs from all over.

And, in the case of Strip Poker, there are programs beamed direct to my living room from the brain of Satan himself. It's a game show, in much the same way that the Spanish Inquisition was a game show, except that the audience at the Inquisition got to enjoy itself. A Strip Poker audience just gets dumber and dumber until flies start flying in their gaping mouths. And then the flies get too dumb to fly out, and what you're left with is an audience of slack-jawed buffoons, their drooling mouths packed with drooling flies.

It's on that bastion of programming excellence, USA, which has been starved for quality drama ever since Rhonda Shear left. If she's left, that is. For all I know, she's still hosting Up All Night. I wouldn't know, because one of the few points of pride I have is that if I am, in fact, awake all night, I'm probably not watching USA.

The show starts with the Strip Poker logo, which is in one of those jazzy hipster bowling-shirt type of fonts, and then there's this montage of people in their underwear. These people are all attractive, which makes me suspect they recruit real-life strippers to be contestants. And if they do, what's in it for the contestants? I mean, the stripping is supposed to be some kind of penalty, but if the contestants are taking their clothes off every day... never mind. There'll be plenty of time for investigation, bitter reprisals, and maudlin weeping later on. Our hostess is greeting us:

"Welcome to Strip Poker. Get ready for a hot game of five-card Stud. Men against women, and the losers strip!" It's not often you see a show introduced by the exact words that were spoken at the pitch meeting. Ah, who am I kidding? The pitch meeting probably went like this:

"Bob, I've got a crappy idea for a show. Can we have mostly-naked college students being forced to remove clothing?"

"Okay, but if we run your idea this year, I get to run Fraternity Haze-O-Rama! next year."

The hostess ("Jennifer") has the important job of turning over cards. The host is named "Graham Elwood." Sure he is. He looks exactly like the fresh-faced, well-scrubbed contestants.

First, two cards appear (like a ten of clubs and a nine of spades). Then, either the ladies or the fellas get asked a question about the other sex. The girls would be asked about G.I. Joe, and the guys would get asked about nail polish. The winner gets fifty dollars and choice of the card. After five cards, the loser team takes off an article of clothing. Repeat.

It's interesting to watch the show decree what constitutes "male" and "female" behavior. Apparently, knowledge of Alice in Wonderland is girly. It's also interesting to watch the contestants not know nothin' about poker. Every time I've watched the show, the people who got to pick the card have gone for a straight instead of a pair. Which is odd, what with the last two cards being face down. In other words, there's no way to force the last, vital card. These kids today. There's a reason the phrase "drawing to an inside straight" is synonymous with, um, whatever it's synonymous with.

Once a team is told to strip, it's handled in the most tasteful way possible: The audience (which we don't ever see, so I expect it's a recording) starts chanting "Take it off! Take it off!" along with the host and the other team. The stripping team takes clothing off with a smile and dances for the next twenty seconds while the cameraman staggers back and forth like he's on ESPN2 or something. The losing team doesn't seem all that put out by it. I'm not demanding tears or anything (we'll save that for Haze-O-Rama, which I've just realized would get better ratings if it were prefixed with "Sorority" instead of "Fraternity"), but they could at least pretend they're not used to getting naked in public.

In the second round, everything's the same, including the questions ("For a hundred dollars, not only is this wrestler Stone Cold, he also borrowed his name from the Six Million Dollar Man. Who is he?"), but there's stripping after every question. The WobblyCam is revealing the rafters of the abandoned Los Angeles warehouse they shot this turkey in.

By now, you're asking, "Monty, do the questions on this show suggest a gender bias in any way? That is, does the phrasing of any of the questions reveal, perhaps, whether they were written by men or women?" Let me answer you this way: "For one hundred dollars, what fashion magazine is a girl's name that rhymes with 'inane?'"

The answer, by the way, is Jane, which none of the four people in the game knew. Although the card-turner girl knew that it's Jane Pratt who used to edit Sassy. At this point, I'd also like to suggest that if the competitors wish to appear fresh-faced and virginal, perhaps they should not be wearing pink vinyl hotpants as their underthings.

I'd also like to say that the card-turning girl is no match for the person who used to turn the cards on Card Sharks. I can't do that, because A) she's actually quite good at her demanding job, and B) I have no idea who did it on Card Sharks. It's just the only other show I can think of that had a card-turning girl.

The show ends with the Lightning Round. Of course it does! ALL game shows end with Lightning Rounds! The competitors blow whistles and blurt out answers, and the losers take off clothing. I bet that comes as a surprise. This show is part of the new game show boom, of course, because it combines exhibitionism with a penalty for the losers.

Before the Lightning Round, I should point out that there are "new" episodes of Strip Poker aired on local channels in three cities. Whoo! The show so bad it could only get halfway onto USA!

At the end of the Lightning Round, all the competitors are down to their underwear. Well, they all wear three or four layers of underwear, but they appear to be down to the last couple of layers. And the losing team is required to come down to the center of the stage and "go all the way", which for basic cable means "go down to the last layer of underwear and gyrate."

But is that fair? Of course not! So the other team joins them, and both teams get sort-of-naked. And gyrate. I don't see any tattoos or piercings, so I guess they're not really strippers. Not experienced ones, anyway.

So there you go. a game show starring people who are not exactly members of Mensa (in fact, the best guess the four yahoos I was watching could come up with was that Mensa was a club for people who were extremely "male"), taking off their clothes. And they get nearly as naked at the end as the people on Survivor are all the time.

I therefore advise the populace of America to not waste its time watching Strip Poker. Did you know Bravo is showing Moonlighting reruns?

Never let it be said that we here at TeeVee avoid doing our duty.

Last week, the word came down from on high: it was time for us to get into the reality television game. And what better way to do it, the big shots said, then to marry off Lisa Schmeiser to one of the other Vidiots? And better yet, the grande frommages opined, we can have our faithful TeeVee readers vote on which Vidiot would marry Lisa.

So we set up the poll and headed to Vegas, not knowing what cruel fate you on the Internet would force upon us. Would Knauss, Rywalt, or Snell be forced to take a second wife, putting themselves at odds with the U.S. government (and their first wives), but at the same time ingratiating themselves to several polygamist Mormon sects? There was definitely a bit of trepidation as the married men stepped off the plane and into the hundred-degree-plus desert heat.

But in the other corner were some Vidiots more excited by the plan given to us by our feared leaders. Boychuk, Wrenn, Robinson all strode into the lobby at the Tropicana hotel with glints in their eyes and bouquets of flowers in their hands, ready to woo Miss Schmeiser if the Internet should order it.

Being a Vidiot is a lonely life, you see.

Ensconced in a luxury suite in the pyramid-shaped Luxor hotel, incomparable character actor Dennis Boutsikaris waited for the call in case you, the TeeVee viewers, chose our token celebrity contestant over the Vidiots proper. Dennis enjoyed an all-expenses-paid weekend in Vegas on us, but in the end we had no use for him.

Friday night, we huddled in secret to observe how the balloting was progressing. And more than that, we shared stories -- humorous anecdotes that can only be shared when a large contingent of Vidiots meet in person. (Usually, due to constitutional concerns, no more than four Vidiots can be present in the same place at one time.) It turns out, several of us had spotted the elusive Peter Ko, who was lurking on the periphery of the Tropicana and threatening to crash the wedding as a write-in candidate.

At this point, we began to regret leaving Ko's name off the ballot. Because though he may only visit us occasionally these days, it's better to include Ko than risk inciting the Wrath of Pete. One shot of the patented Ko right hook and we're down on the carpet. It's good to keep Pete happy.

All the while, a frightened Philip Michaels sat in the corner, trembling in fear. Not as outgoing as the other Vidiots, the reclusive Michaels prefers to spend the bulk of his time in a darkened room writing the comedy pieces that have earned him the love and respect of Internet oddballs the world over.

The idea of potentially getting married had thrown Michaels for a loop, sure. But even more frightening was the prospect that our fair-skinned savant would have to emerge from his cave and stand in the searing Las Vegas sun for the wedding ceremony.

That's because, sparing no expense, the cruel overlords of TeeVee had rented a lovely garden just off the Strip for the nuptials. Always ones with an eye for saving a few bucks, our masters had clearly gotten a discount by planning a wedding outdoors. In the daytime. In August. In Las Vegas.

As we drank our Jim Beam and shot at our hotel televisions Elvis-style, Lisa moved in separate circles. We were all awaiting our fate, but Lisa's had been sealed by the memo sent down by the bastards upstairs. She didn't want to lose her cushy job at TeeVee, and secretly had already begun to consider the residuals paid to Dennis Boutsikaris every time his episode of The X-Files aired. So Lisa hit the town, searching Las Vegas for a wedding dress and partying down with her posse of girlfriends who had flown in (on their own dimes -- thanks for nothing, generous TeeVee bosses) to say goodbye to their friend's days as a single woman.

Finally, the mandated day arrived. We all assembled at the appointed location. All except Boutsikaris, who apparently had gotten hold of some bad fish at the Mirage's all-you-can-eat buffet. Boychuk was psyched, decked out in tuxedo and ready to walk down the aisle.

Lisa with prospective grooms: (L-R) Michaels, Ko, Wrenn, Snell, Boychuk, and Robinson.

And then the word came down: the readers had spoken. Lisa Schmeiser was to walk down the aisle with... Lisa Schmeiser?

Very funny, kids. Suggesting that Lisa marry herself, just so you could get -- as one of our readers put it -- "some hot girl-on-girl action." But after a brief delay to check with our legal experts, we discovered that even in the lax state of Nevada (where several species of great apes are allowed to run for high state office) you are not yet allowed to marry yourself. Although apparently Nevada voters will be considering such a measure on this November's ballot.

With that ruling, it was clear that Lisa would end up marrying whoever finished behind her in our Internet poll. And much to Boychuk's dismay, his was not the name called. Instead, it was the name of our own peculiar genius, our reclusive-yet-prolific whipping boy. White smoke shot up the chimney. Philip Michaels' name had been placed in nomination.

We found Phil in the bathroom, rocking back and forth and singing quietly to himself. He bolted when we saw us, but the tranquilizer in our blow-dart takes hold surprisingly fast. Before Phil knew it, he was walking down the aisle -- propped up by Boychuk and Ko -- to meet his fate.

And is it really that horrible a fate? Sure, it didn't work out for Darva Conger and Rick Rockwell. But Phil and Lisa already have a lot in common. They both share the bond of the Vidiot. They're both agreeable, affable sorts. Neither have any visible scars (physical ones, anyway). Neither has done any hard time. They have all 10 of their fingers and toes.

We're pretty sure they'll make a good go of it. And if not, there's always Boychuk, who is still demanding a recount.

And so ends the first -- and given that we've got no other female Vidiots, the last -- TeeVee wedding. What have we wrought? Imagine the power of the combined Michaels-Schmeiser bloc. Together, they've written 200 TeeVee pieces and another 40 Station Breaks. It boggles the mind.

Do you suppose someone will buy them a TV set as a wedding present?

Congratulations, Lisa and Phil!

-- from your pals, the Vidiots.

Additional contributions to this article by: Jason Snell.

To: Jason Snell, Editor of TeeVee

From: Edmund T. Spearling, Publisher & Chairman, TeeVee Enterprises LLC

Re: Your Dropping the Ball

The other day I was sifting through my mail when I came across a letter -- one of the thousands I receive, read and respond to each week as chairman and CEO of the twelfth most-profitable TV commentary and content site -- from reader LucidTrip@webtv.net. This letter, succinct as it is powerful, spells out the major problem I, and the rest of the TeeVee executive board, have with your performance of late.

You are all idiots.

Indeed, LucidTrip@webtv.net has said a mouthful. You are all idiots. Michaels, Knauss, that ridiculous Polack who writes from time to time -- idiots all.

But you, Snell -- you are the grand idiot to whom all the other idiots must bow down and pay homage.

Harsh? Perhaps. But I've never liked you. I've made no secret of that. Maybe it's that high-pitched laugh of yours that brings meetings to a grinding halt. Maybe it's your horrible haircut. Maybe it's the way you mispronounce words like "statistics" and "nuclear." For the last goddamned time, it's nuke-le-ar, not nuke-you-lur, you rube.

I've been able to overlook these faults because of TeeVee's phenomenal profitability. Your decision not to pay the writers anything? Brilliant. The bold move of picking a dot-org domain instead of the more highly-visible dot-com real estate? Fiendishly clever.

Maybe these successes went to your head, Snell. Because lately, you've been ignoring all my sage advice and counsel -- as if no idea is a good idea unless it's generated in that strangely-coiffed little noggin of yours.

I wanted to invest in NBC Internet; you shot that idea down. I said, "Keep an eye on David Spade's uproarious cartoon, Sammy. It's sure to be the hit of the summer." You just rolled your eyes and mocked me behind my back to your underlings.

And I wanted TeeVee to be all over this reality programming thing like stink on an ape. A fad, you said. It'll never last, you said.

Well, let's take a look at this reality TV fad, Mr. Soothsayer. Survivor is a runaway monster hit, with every man, woman and child in this country advancing some crackpot theory about who the surviving contestant will be. (My money is on devious fatboy Richard!) Big Brother has generated tremendous press for CBS -- most of it negative, but you know what they say about publicity. Even Making the Band has captured our nation's imagination by staking out territory once thought taboo by network television -- a rock band staffed entirely by adorable little boys!

So I have to ask, Mr. Snell: Where's our reality show tie-in?

Have you invited any of the Survivor contestants to join your staff? Have you tried to land an interview with that enchanting stripper who raised temperatures in the Big Brother house? Have you even bothered to set up a Web cam in the TeeVee offices so that our own Web site can tap into the voyeuristic ethos that has America in its clutches?

No, no, and no. Because you are remarkably dim.

Oh, I know you've tried. Last spring, Collier and Wrenn tried to auction themselves to any woman who would have them. Not surprisingly, few would. You got a grand total of zero entries, Snell -- an embarrassing figure I attribute as much to your marketing savvy as the general unattractiveness of Collier and Wrenn.

Thank God we fired Collier.

Well, Snell, we're going to try this again. We're going to have ourselves a wedding, a real wedding, a Vidiot wedding. And this time, I'm handling the planning, so nothing will go awry.

We've got that woman on staff, right? Lisa Schmeiser? Well, tell her to go pick out a wedding gown: she's getting hitched.

And the lucky groom is... one of the Vidiots.

We'll put up an online poll. Online polls are great traffic generators. And we'll have our readers pick which Vidiot -- Michaels, Wrenn, Knauss, Boychuk, Rywalt, even you -- Lisa will be forced to spend the rest of her life with in wedded bliss. We can even add a celebrity to the mix, if you want.

I understand Dennis Boutsikaris is available.

We'll go all-out with this one, no half-measures here. We'll do the wedding in Las Vegas, Nevada -- home of quickie, no-questions-asked marriages and virtual lawlessness. We'll rent out a nice facility -- I hear the Circus Circus is nice. And we'll spare no expense on food and beverages -- $9.95 prime rib buffet for everybody!

Now, I can already hear the objections rattling around in your pea-brain, Snell. We can't do that! you're probably whining. It's immoral! It's indecent! It's quite possibly illegal! Well, running rum in from Canada during the 1920s was a little on the shady side. But that's how the Kennedys amassed their fortune. And you don't hear anyone speaking ill of the Kennedys now, do you?

I mean, apart from Ted.

Let me try and address your concerns one by one.

What if Lisa doesn't want to get married?

A good, solid question. Let me answer that with a question of my own: What if Lisa likes getting a paycheck? What if Lisa would like to stay employed? What if Lisa buttons her lip and does what she's told?

I think that will put everything into perspective.

Some of the Vidiots are already married. Shouldn't they be excluded from this stunt?

By all means, no. That's where some of the best drama will come into play.

Pretend for a second you're Mrs. Knauss. Imagine how you'd feel seeing your husband of five years forced into a marriage of convenience with another woman. Can you imagine the shame, the anger, the bloodlust for horrible revenge? So can I... and our TeeVee cameras will be there to capture every last Springer-esque outrage. Why, if Rywalt gets picked, there's a chance his wife will become so enraged, she'll smash a chair over anyone she can get her mitts on -- she's from Philadelphia, you know.

But isn't that bigamy?

I'll say. And you know what bigamy is? A surefire ratings bonanza. Just ask the Mormons.

I'll explain this once more so that it sinks through that thick, mop-hair-lined skull of yours. Marrying off Lisa Moonie-style could be the best thing to ever happen to TeeVee. Do you think any other Web site would try a stunt like this? TVTattle wouldn't. TV Barn wouldn't. Hell, at Salon, they've long since resigned themselves to dying alone and unloved. We can raise the bar by setting a new low!

Besides, if this doesn't work, I'm locking all of you in a camera-equipped house. And sealing off the air vents.

(See the poll results.)

Additional contributions to this article by: Philip Michaels.

Schoolchildren may not understand this, but your friends at the ol' TeeVee Mailbag just hate summer. For some, the months of June, July, and August are a godsend -- an unending series of backyard cookouts and lazy afternoons, a stress-free zone off-limits to the likes of homework, books, and all their teachers' dirty looks. But for us, it's three months of one indignity after another.

The mercury rises, and our Mailbag office -- untouched by the miracle of air conditioning -- begins to smell like a monkey house. Network TV takes a three-month powder, leaving a barren landscape of failed sitcom pilots, Harry Hamlin movies, and Will & Grace reruns that we couldn't be bothered to watch the first two or three times around. Everyone else at TeeVee goes on vacation, forcing us to fill in where needed. Fix the copier, fill in for the janitor, run down to the liquor store and pick up Boychuk's... um... office supplies.

All told, it puts us in a sour mood, worse than that time our request for an autographed headshot of Rue McClanahan came back stamped "Return to Sender." The sun shines brightly in a cloudless sky, and all we can do is shake our fists at the heavens and plot our revenge. The laughter of children from a nearby playground wafts by, and it stings like an ice pick in our spines. Ballgames are being played, sunbathers are frolicking on sandy shores, ice cream is being scooped and served by rosy-cheeked Good Humor men. And what are we doing? Spending our summer in a kiln-like office sorting through your mail.

Eddie Cochran was right. There really is no cure for the summertime blues. And now, because of that, Eddie Cochran is dead.

Think about it, won't you?

Normally, we're able to tackle our jobs with the utmost professionalism. Mail comes in, we sort through it, write some sort of witty rejoinder, and then it's off to happy hour at The Fireside for whiskey sours and Buffalo wings. We answer the burning questions, modestly acknowledge the heartfelt compliments, and the rest -- well, the rest we shower with abuse and scorn and public mockery to ensure that you'll never write us again.

A simple job. And we're just simple enough to handle it.

But this summer, combing through your letters and coming up with the scintillating quip has been nothing less than an ordeal. It's trying to get blood from a turnip. It's like pulling teeth. It's like trying to come up with a sitcom for Tony Danza that's both a ratings smash and a critical success. Sure, it can be done in theory, but in practice, you might as try splitting the atom with kitchen utensils.

Take this letter from Judging Amy advocate Jody Wilson:

i have only one dream...to just BE in a scene with tyne daly. i'm 67,have done bits in two dozen films here in florida...i know this is stupid and worthless..it's just my dream.i'm sag,aftra and equity and i'd PAY to do this FREE !!!! (i know ..here's another nut) and judging amy is a fine series...so there!!!!!!

If acting with Tyne Daly is your only dream, then you must... um... So you're in SAG, are you? Well, that's just... ah... heh... You'd pay to do it for free, huh? Gee, that's...

See? We've got nothing here.

After all, what has this poor woman done to deserve our scorn? All she wants to do is act with Tyne Daly. Isn't that the birthright of any 67-year-old Floridian who's done bit parts in two dozen films? And why shouldn't she declare her intentions to everyone -- embarrassed relatives, indifferent neighbors, startled passersby -- without fearing society's cold rebuke? What kind of monsters would make fun of such a woman?

Well, us, under normal circumstances. But in these lazy, crazy, hazy days of summer, we can't seem to work up the energy.

But then, maybe we've been wasting our lives. That's the hypothesis of Vanessa, the self-described Webmistress of the Dr. Dave Shrine. Apparently, Vanessa was taken aback by our decision to designate fish-faced mook Erik Palladino as the worst actor on television last year. Vanessa took time out of carving crude figurines of Erik Palladino from snack foods to write:

I'm sorry that you find scenes featuring Erik Palladino an "invitation to channel surf" but I think you are among the minority not the majority. Most people I have talked to think that Erik Palladino is a fantastic actor who portrays his multidimensional character, Dr. Dave Malucci, with incredible talent. After reading the misguided rant on your page I tried to think what would make you think that Erik was "boring".

The only thing I could come up with is that you're jealous of someone like Erik who gets to do what he loves, is good at it, gets paid a lot of money for it, and has the body of an Adonis. That, of course, is understandable because all you all day is write webpages that try so desperatly to be funny but fail at every single punchline.

You're right on two counts. First off, we are jealous of Erik Palladino. He probably gets to take summers off; we're stuck at the office reviewing back episodes of his hackwork. How'd we get the ass-end of this deal?

And second, we could be doing better things with our lives than sitting around and writing Web pages that desperately try to be funny. Come to think of it, we should be using our time and energy to better society... and ourselves. We should be using the Web to do something worthwhile and important and pro-active.

We've got it! We'll devote our time and energy to building a Web site heralding the work of the worst actor on television, using pictures and fan fiction to fuel an admiration bordering on obsession. And then we'll take to the Internet to hunt down our enemies -- and the enemies of our beloved hack actor! -- blasting them and their petty jealousies with the kind of zeal that usually lands you on the losing end of a restraining order.

Oh wait... that job's already taken.

But we definitely need to find new jobs. Because if we're supposed to be keeping our finger on the pulse of the TV universe, then Lisa Henderson has inadvertently exposed us as frauds.

You're probably aware that there is a media blitz currently underway to protest the imminent cancellation of the USA cable show, La Femme Nikita.

Lisa, believe us when we say we had no idea La Femme Nikita was still on the air. Tell us more about your original and sure-to-be successful Internet campaign on behalf of... um... what was the name of the show you're trying to save again?

Fans from 50 countries are writing, e-mailing, faxing, phoning and doing whatever is necessary to get the attention of USA Network and Warner Bros. TV. Sponsors are being contacted, radio and TV stations notified, executives at both Warner Bros and USA Network are being bombarded with pleas for a 5th season.

Dedicated fans have also begun a "Money from the Heart" campaign to save this outstanding show, with letters being sent to Mr. Chao, Pres. Programming-USA Network and Mr. Peter Roth, Pres. WB. One dollar bills are being enclosed in each letter with the option of either using it for their finances (as the negotiations stalemate is a 'money' issue) or donating it to one of the charities supported by the cast of LFN.

Hey, we've got a better idea. Just send those dollar bills to us. We'll make sure it gets to the folks who canceled... um... it's Xena, right?

Remote controls, tvs, etc. are also being mailed with messages such as "...won't need these anymore without La Femme Nikita on TV!"

Well, count us in. Any excuse to mail away our TV sets is good enough for us. And when the cause involved is saving a basic cable TV show from cancellation, well, then junking hundreds of dollars worth of audio-visual equipment seems a small price to pay.

We get the TV back if La Femme Nikita stays canceled, right Lisa?

Lisa?

All that's depressing enough, but this summer has also seen the departure of a valued member of the TeeVee family. He was there from the beginning, working with us side by side to build a great Web site with a unique point of view. For years, his work went unappreciated. It's only now, after he's gone, that his absence has been keenly felt.

Yes, Jerry the Snack Guy -- the man responsible for restocking the vending machines in our employee lounge -- has gone on to bigger and better things. We wish him all the best in whatever he does.

Oh, and Collier left, too.

Guess which departure eagle-eyed reader Robin Kenwood noticed?

I know you're going to be bombarded with "Please Don't Leave" emails, and this is no exception. Well, no, if you've found something you'd prefer doing, then you certainly should do so.

However, I just wanted to thank you for your wonderful writing, sense of humor, and insight. I enjoy all the writers at teevee, but must admit a preference for you. I've just loved your stuff and I'm saddened that it will be no more.

Are you going to write elsewhere? If so, could you have one of the remaining guys slip it in to one of their essays?

God, I'm gonna hate missing my Collier fix. I doubt I am alone in this.

No, Robin. Reader Andy from England feels much the same way.

how come you've lost Mr Collier? Of all your writers (yes, even including that Phillip Michaels guy) he was the best. One of those stalwarts that kept Teeveers from across the Atlantic, who wanted to know the hip put-downs for the excrescence that we import from your side before they even aired, logged on. (Excuse the long sentence, I know your attention spans aren't what they were.) So how comes you lost him?

Well, Andy, we're happy to tell you, even though it's clear you don't care for the rest of our work. (Although would it kill you to spell Michaels' name properly? That raving egomaniac has been sobbing for weeks because you butchered his first name.) James Collier left TeeVee because James Collier never really existed.

You see, we invented the character of James to liven things up here at TeeVee. He was our sassy character, the guy who would say anything no matter how outrageous. Why, when James was on the scene, anything could happen... and usually did!

Over the years, many different people played the part of James. The part was most recently held by Glenn Paulsen, who can now be seen playing the part of El Guapo in the road company production of "The Fantastiks," appearing next week in Flagstaff, Arizona.

But don't you fret, fans. The part of Collier has proven to be so popular with our audience that our crack staff of TeeVee writers are busy creating a host of wacky characters to step into the void. And we guarantee you'll find their antics to be just as madcap, zany, and revenue-generating as Collier's schtick.

In the next few weeks, you'll be meeting:

• Mr. Jensen, TeeVee's cranky handyman!
• Hector Suarez, a street-smart orphan whose sharp tongue will keep you in stitches!
• Amanda Blaustein, a women's studies professor who'll bring down the house with her theories on the post-feminist ethos of Mama's Family!
• Tran Nguyen, a mathematician with a genius-level IQ who just can't get enough of The New Hollywood Squares!
• Col. Buford, the ghost of a Confederate soldier that only Wrenn can see!
• and last but not least, Pete Ko, a wily Chinaman who...

Hmmmm? What's that, Snell? Oh.

Skip that last one.

At any rate, we're sure that you'll grow to love the kooky new additions to our TeeVee cast of characters just as much as we do.

And if not, well, misery loves company.

Additional contributions to this article by: Philip Michaels.

Well, whaddaya know. The world is still here. Brimstone has yet to fall from the sky, there have been no reports of oceans boiling, and the dollar is still worth more than the ruble.

Of course, it's only been a week since Dennis Miller made his Monday Night Football debut, but as of now things are looking pretty un-Armageddonish. So come on out, all you sports talk radio listeners. You've been holed up in those abandoned Y2K bunkers for weeks now -- it'll be nice to climb out and mouth-breathe some fresh air for a change.

Ever since Miller was introduced as one part of the new MNF crew, football fans the world over have treated the acerbic comedian as either sports broadcasting's Second Coming or Second Horseman. There are those who believe he'll inject a much-needed spark into a booth that has grown as stale as an open pack of Red Vines at a "Rocky and Bullwinkle" matinee.

In the other camp are the ones who think football is a serious business. To them, Miller is nothing more than a cackling Hollywood joke boy whose sole athletic experience is arm-wrestling Tom Arnold for the last batch of porcini mushrooms. As far as they're concerned, he wouldn't know a pro-right 23 BOB counter even if Kevin Gogan crackbacked him.

The latter group are the ones now emerging from their shelters. These are the guys who named their sons Sam, Mike, and Willie to give them a head start on becoming linebackers. The people who care, who actually feel personally insulted, that Big Rick from Sherman Oaks had the temerity to tell Romey the Chargers' O-line has been looking pretty weak.

I am not one of those people. Don't get me wrong -- I'm as big a football fan as there is. I can rattle off the pathetic details of Gino Toretta's NFL career. I know the subtle differences between the Red Gun and the Run-and-Shoot and am happy to explain the intricacies of the 46 defense. During the summer, I will even watch the CFL or, God forbid, Arena Football in order to get my pigskin fix.

Yet I think Dennis Miller is a brilliant addition to the Monday Night lineup. Was Miller's debut perfect? Not even close. He seemed alternately nervous and overwhelmed by his new job, remarking that he felt like he had gotten the job because of some strange "Who Wants to Be a Football Announcer" game show. He tried too hard for some of his jokes, at times forcing them as if was worried that he was on some sort of laugh quota. He misspoke a couple of times, including saying that Drew Bledsoe had been sacked 56 times the previous night. He even cut off Al Michaels once or twice, which is as big a boo-boo as one can make in the presence of Mr. Michaels.

Then again, football announcing is not easy. Speaking from personal experience, talking on-air about a game for three hours is much, much harder than it looks. This isn't like sitting at home, screaming about the play selection between handfuls of Doritos. Considering this was his first shot, Miller did just fine. He didn't talk back to the director or producer when they talked to him on the headset; he didn't swear; and he got along fine with his boothmates. Miller actually did an excellent job of pitching to Dan Fouts, setting up the analyst with tactics and strategy questions the former quarterback could easily expound on.

At the very least, the man can string together more than four words into a meaningful, pleasant-sounding sentence. After two years of Boomer Esiason, that's saying a lot.

Most importantly, Dennis Miller was funny, which is why he was hired in the first place. Given the truly awful depths to which the action on the field descended, the comedian's lines about Cantonese food and buying BLTs with fur pelts were the only reason most of us Niner fans didn't shoot out our TV screens.

Sure, I have a certain bias here -- I believe Miller is one of the two or three funniest individuals on the face of the planet -- but there was no doubt he showed flashes of the brilliance that has marked his career from Saturday Night Live on to his own HBO talk show. He was tossing out references that have probably never been used in the history of prime-time, let alone sports television. I can still remember a half-dozen of his best lines from the game. The only words I remembered five days after a Boomer Esiason broadcast were "I woogyshish nehrapidil smoody plit." I believe he was trying to explain Miami's passing attack.

For those of you who think the intermingling of sports and comedy is tantamount to heresy, have you not been watching SportsCenter for the past decade? Save for a very few exceptions, the entire ESPN anchor lineup is nothing but wanna-be Dennis Millers: same sarcastic demeanor, same cooler-than-thou delivery, same puns, same obscure references. The only difference is that no one on SportsCenter is funny.

How can one attack Monday Night Football for hiring a brilliant, accomplished comedian when one already spends hours in front of the TV lapping up Browns-Bengals highlights dispensed by some hack jokester who'd be lucky to open for Carrot Top down at the Airport Ramada Chuckle Hut?

One of the other Vidiots recently declared Miller's presence on Monday Night Football a travesty. He did so not because he's a big sports fan but because he doesn't think Miller is all that funny. There's not really any way to argue that: if you don't think he's funny, then there's nothing in the Monday Night Football gig that will change your mind. I can say only one thing to those people: you poor souls. The surgical procedure that excised your sense of humor must have been terribly painful.

For the rest of us, though, Miller's work in the booth can only get better. He'll never be able to explain how it feels to run a two-minute drill to win the Super Bowl (then again, neither could Boomer), but he's the only one in sports broadcasting who could compare Brett Favre to Larry Storch. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is just good TV.

That's it, I'm outta here. Screw you colonials, I'm turning redcoat and jumping the pond back to merry ol' England, home of bangers, mash, and the best TV on the planet.

Oh sure, British television benefits from the cool accents, unflappable demeanors, and the top sportscasters in the world, but it goes deeper than that. The Brits just know good TV. They pick up all the good American programs like Letterman and Buffy and produce some of the most intriguing shows around.

Who Wants to be a Millionaire started in the UK and, unlike its watered-down, everyone's-a-winner American cousin, it's actually tough to win the jackpot over there. Noblemen who miss a question below the 25,000 pound level are demoted to peasants and anyone who misses the 100 pounder is taken outside and shot.

Yet for the true measure of just how superior the British television folk are to the Yanks who produce drivel like Oh Grow Up just take a look at Junkyard Wars, an English import that airs Wednesday nights on The Learning Channel.

The coolest series to hit basic cable since South Park, Junkyard Wars looks like it was pulled straight out of a Tim Allen wet dream. Two teams of four people each are dropped in the middle of a huge scrap heap and given enough tools to build a 747. Which they just might have to do, since Junkyard Wars is a game show like no other. The teams are given 10 hours to build some complex object out of scratch, using nothing but what they find in the heap.

There's nothing like it on American TV. One recent show featured a team of bikers versus some Royal Navy officers. It didn't take long for the episode to hook viewers: the bikers were named Bowser, Babs, and Lurch.

Forget beautiful people, what I want on television is a biker gang with names out of a Raymond Chandler novel.

The bikers' team was named The Bodgers, "bodger" being one of the many British words that sound great but have no meaning to us heathen colonials. The Bodgers' opponents were The Navy Blues, Royal Navy engineering officers that figured to be in good shape for the contest considering the goal was to build an amphibious vehicle. In order to claim victory, the contraption had to carry the entire team and win a race over a course that started on land, wound through a small lake and ended up back in the dirt.

There is a famous acronym in military circles: KISS. It stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid and is the guiding principle for many of history's greatest battlefield victories.

It's a good thing Britain hasn't fought a war in a while.

The Navy Blues decided to build a boat with wheels, which would move via an airplane propeller, much like those fan boats used by inbred banjo players to traverse the Everglades. To power the propeller, they'd use one of the numerous junkyard engines available in the scrap heap. The engine they chose was a very un-KISS-like fuel-injected Ford that was powerful but hard to remove from its car.

In their Neanderthal zest to get at the motor, The Blues ended up destroying the electronic black box that controlled the engine. It wasn't until four hours before deadline that they realized they couldn't fix it.

With time running out, the team managed to locate another power plant, get it working and mount it on the frame they had constructed inside the hull. The only problem was that none of them bothered measuring the new motor. Had they done so, they would have realized it was way too small for their propeller, which would now spend half of its spin underwater.

There wasn't enough time to remount the engine so the Navy Blues had no choice but to cut each blade of their propeller in half. It was now so small it would have trouble powering a propeller beanie, let alone an amphibious vehicle with four passengers. Not only was the vehicle underpowered, the whole misadventure had taken so long the team had no time to devote to other considerations. You know, minor stuff. Like steering.

Let me remind you, these are the people in charge of Britain's nuclear submarines.

The civilian Bodgers, on the other hand, stuck to the KISS philosophy like career soldiers. Or like career soldiers are supposed to. There was no fooling around with propellers or fuel-injected engines for the Bodgers. No sir, their plan was the very essence of KISS:

Step 1: Find a Land Rover.

Step 2: Tie oil drums to it.

The race was over two seconds after it started. The Bodgers' Land Rover floated precariously but had no trouble moving forward. They sprinted through the course and broke the tape in fine form.

The Navy Blues, on the other hand, were lucky the race started on the down-sloped bank of the lake or they'd never have made it into the water. Not that they were much better off in the lake. The weakened propeller couldn't have blown out the candles on a birthday cake and once they finally did build up a little momentum, their total lack of steering doomed them to circling aimlessly, drifting and helpless, much like UPN before WWF Smackdown. They would have done a lot better just swimming across holding skateboards.

Later that night, two different teams competed in a cannon-building contest. Yes, that's right, a cannon. Try something like that in the States and you'd have Rosie O'Donnell handcuffing herself to a tree. Yet in Britain, not only do television shows feature demonstrations on how to build a working, large-bore, high-velocity projectile weapon, the producers distribute military-grade explosives to contestants like they're handing out Pop Rocks. England is so cool.

Once again, a military team took on a bunch of civilians, and this time it wasn't even down-and-dirty bikers but pansy-ass chemical engineers. What do desk jockey chemical engineers know about cannons? Who better to build a weapon big enough to take down Al Roker than a team of hardcore, kill-'em-all-and-let-God-sort-'em-out Army officers?

Well, pansy-ass chemical engineers, apparently. Is was a different tune, but the same song as before: the chemists stuck to the KISS principle, the Army guys did not.

The result? The biggest laugh of this past television season. In two out of the three firings, the Army's projectile got stuck inside the cannon. Instead of whistling their finely-machined, highly-lethal projectile 200 yards down the battlefield, the detonation blasted the entire barrel all of about four feet downrange.

Wile E. Coyote couldn't have done it any better himself. You can just imagine Saddam Hussein, surely a regular TLC viewer, hurling his passion fruit daiquiri at the TV and screaming: "I got beat by these losers?"

So maybe the Royal Military isn't all that great at designing, building and operating machines of war. How about we make a deal? You British keep sending us quality television and we'll keep saving your ass once the shooting starts.

They tell you at the Junior Showbiz Academy to always go out with a big number. Even Tony Danza knows that. In past years, we've ended our awards process in different ways. The first year, we promoted a grab bag of made-up awards. (As opposed to the high-quality, not-made-up awards you get two weeks a year from this group of ingrates who runs this snide little Web site.)

The second year, we dumped a load of slop on you -- namely Brooke Shields and Jon Seda. Interesting way to end a show -- sort of the "send in the clowns" approach. "And now, more crap!"

Last year we learned our lesson. And that's why we ended on an up note, highlighting the best series of that year before thanking the bandleader, putting in a plug for the casino, asking you to tip your waitress, and sending you home in a cab.

This year, whether through careful planning or a general exhaustion and confusion caused by posting two straight weeks of awards write-ups (combined with several Vidiots ping-ponging across the continent on business trips), we're ending up where we started -- a nice, circular approach.

We started it all off so very long ago with the award for Best Hour Show, and here we are again for Best New Show. The name's the same, and the argument is the same -- Freaks and Geeks was the highlight of the year, and now it's gone. But we remember it fondly.

This is not to say we came to this decision easily. This was the toughest category for us to choose. Rarely are there so many solid rookie series -- not just Freaks and Best Half-Hour Show co-winner Malcolm in the Middle, but The West Wing and the delightful, genre-bending (and now cancelled) Now and Again. Heck, some of us even liked Harsh Realm -- for the three weeks it was on the air.

In the end, it came down to Freaks and Malcolm, and the hour-long tale of high school students in 1980s Michigan won out.

One of the reasons we liked Freaks and Geeks so much? Its ensemble cast. We can sing the praises of Linda Cardellini -- in fact, we gave her an award. But the rest of the cast was also superb.

Still, one cast member stood out from the crowd. And in the most shocking upset the TeeVee Awards has ever known, two Vidiots with a dream skillfully coerced the group into recognizing Martin Starr, who played tall, geeky Bill Haverchuck, as the Best Actor in an Hour-long Series for the 1999-2000 season.

Martin Starr?, you ask yourself. Perhaps you Vidiots mistyped "Martin Sheen." That's it. Martin Sheen! Martin Sheen is your winner!

But we're serious. Martin Starr took the part of Bill and hit a grand slam. Bill is a fully realized character thanks to Starr, who took great material and made it even better. Bill could've been a much simpler character, but Starr made him complex -- hinting at incredible depth that lesser actors might not have bothered to instill in a tall, skinny geek with glasses who's deathly allergic to peanuts.

We love everything about Bill Haverchuck, and a lot of that has to do with the amazing facial expressions and slick comedic timing of Martin Starr.

Sure, Martin Sheen was great on The West Wing -- we'd prefer Jeb Bartlett to either of the two major-party candidates we've got on the ballot this fall. Sheen took what was to be a marginal role and grabbed the spotlight.

But we didn't give the award to him. We gave it to that guy from Freaks and Geeks.

Because if we've learned anything from our days on the stage in Laughlin, Nevada, it's that there's no better finisher than a surprise ending. And this is ours.

Good night, everyone! Drive home safely!

Additional contributions to this article by: Jason Snell.