June 2002 Archives

There are really only three proper ways to respond when you're roaming around the Internet and stumble across an article detailing the fortunes of the UPN television network for the upcoming fall season. You can stare at the screen with blank indifference for the nanosecond it takes you to click over to a site the contains information more relevant to your active, on-the-go lifestyle, like Swedish hockey league scores or Melanie Griffith's home page. You can furrow your brow in puzzlement since you could have sworn that you read years ago that UPN had ceased broadcasting. Or you can shrug and say, "This is all very interesting, this article about the UPN's new fall shows, but I don't think my cable company carries Spanish-language stations."

There is, I suppose, a fourth way to respond -- the way a loyal UPN viewer might. But that way involves a lot of grunting and hooting and all sorts of other non-sensical noises that are pretty much indecipherable to sentient human beings. Plus, that would presuppose a loyal UPN viewer actually reads, and if you're talking about someone who's sworn fealty to a network that's given the world Homeboys from Outer Space, Shasta McNasty and The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeifer, that's a mighty tenuous supposition, indeed.

We kid, of course. Plenty of people tune into UPN on a regular basis -- good people, smart people, people who have learned to operate simple tools. Buffy the Vampire Slayer can count among its viewing audience many fine, upstanding members of the community who would perform very well on standardized tests or Jeopardy! Many partisans of Enterprise hold down well-paying jobs that require, at a minimum, a college degree of some sort. Even yours truly has been known to while away many a Thursday evening reveling in the bone-crunching pleasures of WWE Smackdown.

Yes, many well-read, reasonably educated people watch a show or two on UPN. And when those particular shows happen to end, those same well-read, reasonably educated people change the channel, usually in favor of a network that broadcasts less swill.

That's part of UPN's problem. But for UPN, the more persistant dilemma is that seven years into its existence, The Little Network That Couldn't has no more personality, appeal, or distinguishing characteristics than the processed chicken that makes up your typical McNugget. And, barring a sudden infusion of cash from venture capitalists for the express purpose of buying a clue, that sorry situation doesn't figure to change anytime soon.

UPN signed on back in 1995, largely to provide a forum for Star Trek: Voyager. When the Roddenberry estate's latest attempt to keep the residual checks flowing went off the air last year, UPN figured to curl up and die alongside it. Miraculously, the network still draws breath, which would surprise a number of industry pundits, if any of them could be bothered to give two shits about UPN.

If that seems harsh, consider that The WB -- another mini-network that arrived on the scene in 1995 -- now broadcasts six nights a week of network programming. UPN makes do with five nights, if you include its Friday night movie and its two-hour block of wrestling on Thursdays. While UPN has spent the past several years floundering, The WB has managed to make a comfortable living for itself by developing shows that have cultivated a devoted audience of young women and their hen-pecked boyfriends. As a result, it's produced a couple of certifiable hits, several more programs that were able to eek out a respectable run, and many, many bad sitcoms. UPN's current strategy is to try and develop shows that cultivate a devoted audience of young, stupid males. As a result, it's mostly produced many, many bad sitcoms.

Even UPN's few ratings successes are pulling up lame lately. Buffy, which the network managed to filch from its betters at The WB, had a laregly hit-and-miss season, its first on UPN. That a normally stellar show instantly would fall on hard times the moment it made its UPN debut is probably coincdental, but all the same, if a UPN executive offers you a lift on his private plane, I'd consider taking the bus. Smackdown has been treading water creatively for a year now, with its ratings descending accordingly. Meanwhile, Enterprise finds itself at the center of a fierce debate amongst the type of people who fierecely debate these sorts of things, with one side arguing that the show is a worthy successor to the Trek legacy and the other denouncing it as an embarrassement that likely has Gene Roddenberry spinning in his money-lined space casket. This is a debate in which I offer no expertise, opinion or interest, so it shall have to carry on without me. Unless, of course, the Star Trek fans decide to settle their differences with a nice afternoon of blood sport and a few pointed sticks -- in which case I'll wager 40 quatloos on the newcomer.

Bleak times indeed down at UPN -- the kind of times that make normal men close up shop, sell off the office furniture and use the profits to pay for correspondence courses over at the local vocational school where an exiciting career in clerical work, data entry or gun repair awaits. But, if the last seven years have proven anything, the folks in charge of UPN are not normal men. Like a punch-drunk boxer who's too battered and bruised to know when he's licked, the network is soldiering on, formulating a plan it believes will chase all its troubles away and have the viewers who once cruelly snubbed UPN returning to its waiting embrace in droves.

Yes, UPN has unveiled a new logo.

The old logo, the one with the circle and the triangle and the square? Les Moonves didn't like it. And since CBS now runs the show at UPN thanks to the twin miracles of deregulation and watered-down cross-ownership rules, the network decided that the of all its problems -- the scattershot programming, the creatively adrift hit shows, the lack of any history of developing watchable programs -- the logo had to go.

It's clear thinking like that which has the attractive 18-to-45-year-old demographic flocking to you in no time.

Assuming the new logo doesn't make you change the channel to your local UPN affiliate and bury your remote in a shallow grave out back, the network also has three new shows it hopes will do the trick. First up is Half and Half, which joins UPN's two-hour block of Monday night sitcoms that target African-American audiences. That a network would devote an entire evening of programming to a group of people long underrepresented and otherwise ignored by the TV industry would be laudable if most of the shows -- the otherwise decent Girlfriends, excepted -- didn't blow. Will Half and Half follow suit? I couldn't honestly say. But considering that the program centers around two half-sisters, as different as night and day, who, after an estranged childhood, become adult neighbors in the same hip, happening San Francisco apartment, you don't need a Magic 8-Ball to tell you that all signs point to yes.

Following Buffy on Tuesdays, there's Haunted, which stars Matthew Fox, most recently the dour, no-fun Salinger on Party of Five. Fox plays a private investigator who, after a near-death experience, is able to solve crimes with supernatural help. Presumably, he sees dead people. He's aided in his crime-fighting by a gang of quick-witted high school chums and a stuffy librarian named Giles who...

I seem to have mixed up my notes.

UPN's final new entry this fall is The Twilight Zone, the classic anthology series that CBS tried to revive with little success in the late 1980s. UPN hopes to fare better by offering what it calls a "modernized incarnation" -- which I take to mean "plenty of cursing and partial nudity" -- hosted by Forest Whitaker, who as we all know is very popular with the young people these days.

What tales of otherwordly creepiness does the new Twilight Zone have to offer? My guess is an episode about a group of TV executives who make a Faustian bargain to keep their penny-ante network on the air.

Doesn't sound very spooky? Obviously, you don't watch much UPN.

Our good friends at Fox -- the folks who put the "rash" in "trash TV" -- graced our airwaves with another installment of Celebrity Boxing last week. Maybe you missed it. Maybe you caught every minute of it and have only now finished scrubbing yourself clean. We try not to judge here.

On the off chance that you watch network TV solely for the Proust documentaries and superb opera simulcasts, Celebrity Boxing assembles stars of long-forgotten sitcoms, one-time tabloid fodder and other C-Listers who share the common trait of having 14:59 showing on the ol' Fame Clock readout. Having brought to gather a roomful of celebrities -- provided your list of people worth celebrating includes Darva Conger, Joey Buttafuoco, the wrestler formerly known as Chyna and the guy who played Screech -- the evening proceeds as you might imagine: the celebrities beat the stuffing out of one another, the crowd howls for blood, and the Emperor tosses loaves of bread to the multitudes. Meanwhile, off in the distance, the Visigoth hordes draw a few miles closer.

And in the end, everyone goes home happy. The celebrities get a few more precious moments in the spotlight and a nice fat check to ensure that they'll be able to live in the manner to which they're accustomed. The viewing audience gets to sate its bloodlust and realize a long-held though seldomly expressed desire to watch Screech pummel the life out of Arnold Horshack. And Fox executives get to enjoy solid TV ratings without having to struggle to think up complex things like characters, stories and original ideas.

Of particular interest in this installment of Celebrity Boxing was the bout between Manute Bol -- a 7-foot-6 native of Sudan who managed to string together a 10-year pro basketball career -- and former NFL player William "The Refrigerator" Perry, a confrontation doubtlessly arranged by Fox for the comic potential of watching a really tall guy fight a really fat guy. Or, at least, it would have been funny if you weren't in the least bit familiar with the particulars of Bol's post-NBA life. To summarize, the fair chunk of change that Bol earned playing pro basketball is long gone, given away mostly to family members in a society where the definition of "family" expands beyond "my wife, the kids, grandma, grandpa and that uncle nobody likes to talk about" to include "everyone within shouting distance, plus all of their friends." Bol's wife split for the U.S. with four of his kids -- about a year ago, he had to sell his furniture to be able to afford a plane ticket to go see them for the first time in four years. Oh, and Bol, who suffers from rheumatism which he can't afford to treat, also happened to back the wrong horse in the Sudanese civil war, which we can assume, carries far greater consequences than voting for the losing candidate in a city council election.

But hey -- it's a tall guy fighting a fat guy. So relax. Smiles, everybody, smiles.

We mention this not to cast gratuitous aspersions on Celebrity Boxing or anybody who watched or even -- and sorry for the language here, Reverend -- the twisted fucks who think up reality programming for Fox. No, the only reason to give Celebrity Boxing anything more than a moment's notice is because it perfectly encapsulates the Fox philosophy -- when in doubt, there's no brow like low-brow. Fox can schedule as many quality shows as the next network, it can take the boldest programming risks, it can win the most fervid critical accolades. But at the end of the day, it's still the network that brought back Temptation Island for a second season.

It's like the old allegory about the scorpion and the frog. Briefly: the scorpion wheedles a ride across a river from the frog by promising not to sting him, but halfway across the river, the scorpion stings him anyway, explaining, "It's my nature," as all who hear the tale stroke their chins and nod at the profundity of the story. Only in the Fox version, the scorpion and the frog ride across the river on a boat filled with swinging, sexy singles, and the scorpion pre-empts Family Guy to showcase "Glutton Bowl."

And the damnedest thing is, it wasn't supposed to be like this. Last year about this time, Fox looked like the one broadcast network that wasn't staggering around the room after suffering one too many blows to the head, courtesy of cable. Unlike NBC and its desperately frantic attempts to keep running Friends through the Xerox machine until one of the smudgy, blurry copies captured any sort of an audience, unlike CBS and its strategy of playing it safe by airing inoffensive, middle-of-the road entertainment aimed at our nation's senior citizens and their parents, unlike ABC and its gutsy-yet-foolhardy decision to actually repel viewers, Fox appeared to have a clue. Fill the schedule with enough smart, funny and occasionally inventive programming, and nobody's going to make too much of a stink that you're still airing Cops on Saturday night.

This was going to be Fox's year, the 2001-2002 TV season. This was going to be the year the network finally shed its reputation as The Fart-and-Belch Channel. This was going to be the year that it moved up from the kid's table and held its own with the adults. This was going to be the year that Fox buttoned up its shirt and wore a tie -- and not a clip-on, either, but a real, genuine silk tie it picked up on sale at Nordstrom's. Fox would finally air shows you could watch without having to close the shades and don an elaborate set of disguises, just to keep the neighbors in the dark. And a choir of children in clean, white dresses would stand in a wheat field singing joyous hallelujahs.

That was the plan, anyhow, give or take a chorus of children.

Fox debuted four legitimately good new shows this fall -- The Tick, The Bernie Mac Show, Undeclared and 24 -- all of which immediately jumped to head of the TV class. It brought back another oft-neglected show, the hilarious Family Guy which proves that there's nothing wrong with bawdy humor so long as it's actually funny. And it still had in its lineup the brilliant Futurama, voted best half-hour show of the last season by your know-it-all pals here at TeeVee.

So, given this formidable lineup, how did Fox fare? Let's go to the videotape, Rupert.

* The Tick: Canceled almost as soon as it premiered.

* Undeclared: Premiered. Pre-empted for baseball. Returned to the schedule under cover of darkness. Aired out of chronological order. Pre-empted some more, as if on a whim. Abruptly halted. Ultimately canceled.

* Family Guy: See what happened to Undeclared, only without as much loving care from Fox.

* Futurama: Pre-empted for football. Production halted. Returned to next year's schedule, presumably so Fox can either burn off the remaining episodes or delight in our tortured screams as we watch another great show get tossed aside. Probably a little bit of both.

* The Bernie Mac Show: Mercifully, still on the air.

* 24: Also returning to the lineup next fall.

(And really, if ever there was a series that wouldn't have suffered one iota from a "one-season-and-out" fate, it's 24. By the end of its 24-episode-in-real-time run, the show featured enough plot complications, twists of fate, reversals of fortune, and various other creative machinations to make a V.C. Andrews story look like a Dick-and-Jane reader -- something that's going to be mighty hard to sustain for another year, never mind over a multi-season lifespan. Fox sensed this might be a problem, so the network momentarily toyed with the idea of scrapping 24's each-episode-is-a-single-hour-in-a-single-day conceit -- the show's one distinguishing feature. That's sort of like taking ER and moving it to an auto repair shop. Not that NBC shouldn't mull over the idea.)

So let's review: Six great shows. Three of them canceled. One of them probably canceled. Another one alive and well, though, really, for how long? And one more back for a second season, thanks to the vagaries of fate and the healing power of a Peabody Award.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to next fall when Fox cancels more shows I like.

Look, I'm not one to tell Rupert Murdoch and his minions their business. They've made plenty of money without the benefit of my sage counsel and advice, and they'll probably keep making money long after Carrot Top beats an overmatched Gallagher to within an inch of his life in "Celebrity Boxing XIV." And I'm not one to launch letter-writing campaigns or spend some of my hard-earned ducats for a full-page "Save Our Show" ad in Variety every time a program I like gets canceled. If a show can't find an audience -- even a show I happen to like -- well, them's the breaks.

But let's say for a moment that you're a TV network with a critically acclaimed show that sports a devoted, albeit small, following. For the sake of the argument, we'll call the show Undeclared. Now let's say you're unhappy with that show's ratings, so you yank it off the air and put on another program. And that program doesn't do any better, ratings-wise. In fact, maybe it does a little worse. Now, at this point, maybe it dawns on you that the low ratings may not, in fact, have anything to do with the show. Maybe it's the time slot. Maybe it's the way you promoted and nurtured the program. Maybe it's you.

Because Fox wants to put on good programming, it honestly does. You don't fill your schedule with the likes of The Tick or Undeclared or Futurama if you're content to go the NBC route and keep broadcasting the same old crap. Of course, if you're really serious about this quality programming thing, you don't go and cancel the likes of The Tick and Undeclared and Futurama when they don't immediately draw ER-sized audiences. That's sort of like donating millions of dollars to charity, then putting a stop payment on the check, and wondering later why you got passed over for Philanthropist of the Year.

"Quality show don't necessarily explode overnight particularly on a network that has served up its fair share of lower-brow entertainment," said Sandy Grushow, the man who does Rupert Murdoch's biding over at Fox, according to the Washington Post's fabulous Lisa de Moraes. "It's going to take a while for people to find [Fox's quality programs.]"

Yeah, well, people will find them a lot easier if you don't keep canceling them, Sand-Man.

So we move to the portion of the program where we look at the new programming Fox has lined up for the fall season. Or, as it's known in the Michaels household, who in the hell cares? It's not like I can seriously expect Fox to come up with six more shows I want to watch. And even if it did, it already waxed three of the programs I liked to watch last fall, with a fourth one in its crosshairs. Why should I waste my time taking an interest in any of the new shows if, assuming they're any good to begin with, when Fox will just toss them out with the melon rinds and coffee grinds come this time next year.

But they don't pay me the big bucks around here to throw in the towel. They don't pay me at all, as a matter of fact, which is probably something I should bring up with someone. But the thing is, I'm supposed to be talking about Fox's fall lineup, and that's exactly what I'm going to do, even if I can't see much of a point to it.

After all, maybe Oliver Beene, which kicks off Fox's new all-comedy lineup on Sundays (at least until Futurama returns after football season), will be an unparalleled delight. Maybe viewers will delight in the wry adventures of an 11-year-old and his eccentric family and friends in 1962 as narrated by the disembodied voice of the grown-up protagonist. Or maybe Fox will pull the series after being served with a cease-and-desist order by the creators of The Wonder Years.

Or maybe we'll hand over our collective heart to The Grubbs, (9:30 on Sundays) a comedy about a family of blue-color underachievers headed by Randy Quaid and the attractive teacher who decides to make something out of Randy's slack-jawed yokel of a son. Or -- more than likely -- we won't.

Perhaps we'll enjoy Cedric the Entertainer Presents -- not that big a stretch since the Wednesday's at 9:30 p.m. variety show stars Cedric the Entertainer, who along with Bernie Mac was the best thing about The Original Kings of Comedy concert film. And won't the fact that we enjoy it make things especially painful when Fox pre-empts the show so it can broadcast "Bachelorettes in Toledo" next sweeps?

There's always a possibility that America could embrace Firefly -- well, I won't, since it's sci-fi, and I think I've made my feelings known about that -- but the rest of America could. The show, which airs at 8 p.m., is created by Joss Whedon, who has a nice little program called Buffy the Vampire Slayer to his credit. Hopefully, Fox executives will let him down easy when they cut his legs out from under him.

John Doe follows Firefly on Fridays, and I think we'll turn the proceedings over to Fox at this point:

From director Mimi Leder (Deep Impact "The Peacemaker," "Deep Impact") and writers Brandon Camp and Mike Thompson, comes the story of John Doe, a mysterious man who rises from the primordial waters of an isolated island, possessing knowledge of literally everything in the world, yet having no memory of who -- or even what -- he is. Doe quickly finds his way to Seattle, where he befriends the police and uses his special gift to help them solve "impossible" crimes each week, while continuing his unending quest to uncover who he is and where he came from. Despite his considerable charm, Doe (Dominic Purcell) is an emotional island unto himself. Want to know the population of Peru in 1853? How many blue cars there are in the state of Washington? Or better yet, predict which horse will win every race at the track based on knowing all the variables? Doe has all the answers. But what is he like? Family man or loner? Hero or villain? What is truly in his soul? Doe doesn't have a clue.

Him and me both. If you're able to make heads or tails of that paragraph, please write Philip Michaels, care of TeeVee, and explain it. Hurry, before Fox cancels the show.

On Wednesday at 9 p.m., perhaps the sound you hear will be the American viewing public simultaneously switching the TV over to Fox to watch Fastlane, a program certain to impress with its... no, I'm sorry. I can't continue the charade. Fastlane is going to be a silly cop show. It stars Peter Facinelli and Bill Bellamy as undercover cops who drive fast cars and wear fancy clothes and somehow manage to fit solving crimes into their busy schedule. Incidentally, the tough-as-nails commanding officer? Played by Tiffani Amber Thiessen. Tiffani Amber Thiessen, for crying out loud. My brain can't even comprehend this information, let alone make a joke about it.

I've just discovered that Tiffani Thiessen has dropped the "Amber" from her sobriquet, a development as alarming to me as the revelation that the 90210 alum will be playing a tough-as-nails police officer. Damnit, Snell, I've left explicit instructions that I am to be kept abreast of every Tiffani Thiessen-related news item. Next thing you know, you'll be telling me she had a recurring part on Just Shoot Me last season.

Really? Man, we should send her a card or something.

We also don't have to wait until next fall to figure out how girls club is going to shake down. Since this is a David E. Kelley show, we can expect it to follow the well-worn path trod by so many of the tousle-haired little creep's other programs -- engagingly quirky beginning followed by irritatingly quirky middle culminating in an insufferably quirky ending once the misogynistic drip losses interest in his creation. Or maybe Kelley will save himself and us a lot of trouble this time around by making the show insufferable from the get-go. Considering the cast is headed by Gretchen Moll -- now in her fourth consecutive year as "The Next Big Thing About to Hit Hollywood" -- Kelley's off to a bang up start.

girls club, incidentally, is about three female lawyers who live and work together in San Francisco. Considering what's happened to the actresses in Kelley's other programs, the female cast members of girls club would be well advised to start their perilous weight loss now.

Fox has some midseason replacements lined up -- a prudent course of action when your stock and trade is turfing shows before their time. This winter, Fox will replace its Thursday night movie with 30 Seconds to Fame, sort of a Star Search without Ed McMahon; Meet the Marks, which is from our old TeeVee pal Jeff Eastin; and Septuplets, a drama about 7 sisters who live at an upscale, family-run hotel and turn 16... which sounds like a hell of a nice idea for a show, actually.

Maybe some of these shows strike your fancy. Maybe none of them do. Or maybe you'll pay attention to them, get involved with them, spend time watching them -- and Fox will pull the rug out from under you. So why bother watching?

That's the danger of haphazardly pulling the plug on shows, you see. You end alienating your audience. And then they don't tune in -- not for the new sitcoms, not for the new dramas, not even for "Bachelorettes in Alaska" or Celebrity Boxing.

Unless the next installment features some 'roided up monster kicking Rupert Murdoch's ass. Then, I'm there.