November 2002 Archives

Who Wants to be Joe Millionaire?

By Philip Michaels on November 30, 2002 12:00 AM

If you caught Fox's Thanksgiving Day tilt between the Washington Redskins and Dallas Cowboys, then, well, God's mercy on you. But if you watched the game, you probably saw the dozen or so ads touting a new reality series that will debut this January. It features women of varying levels of vacuity, some sporting implants with differing degrees of severity, who have been brought to a mansion -- complete with bewigged footman and carriages and other things the women folk dream of when they're eight -- where they are the guests of a mysterious stranger. Once at the mansion, they compete for the affections of the mysterious stranger, or his millions, or some combination therein. The show's called Joe Millionaire, which probably sounded better than Temptation Mansion or Love Cruise II: Landlocked or More Reality TV Nonsense From Those Sick Bastards at Fox or Please, Oh Please, Don't Sue Us, 'Bachelor' Producers. The Fox promo was very unclear on this point.

What the Fox promo was crystal-clear on, however, was that the mysterious stranger -- let's assume he's named Joe Millionaire -- had something to hide. "Things are not all they seem," the Fox announcer growled during the promo. "What is he hiding?"

Huh. Well, OK-- I'll take a shot. His Christian name really isn't Joe Millionaire? He's infected with several venereal diseases, including a particularly tricky little virus out of Sweden? He once took a swing at a U.S. Senator? He's brought all these women to his mansion not to reward them with affection or free money, but rather to make them look like asses on national TV? 'Tis a mystery, indeed.

Oh, not so mysterious that I'll be tempted to tune in next January when Jimmy Bazillions or Johnny C-Note or whatever the hell it is Fox is calling this show debuts. Nope, I'm going to stick with a more life-affirming task -- making up patently false and potentially libelous secrets that Joe Millionaire is trying to suppress. Right now, I'm leaning toward "horribly scarred by acid in a freak industrial accident" but I'm willing to go with "Helped fix the 1919 World Series" in a pinch.

When Jerry Met Jimmy

By Philip Michaels on November 28, 2002 12:00 AM

What I Like About What I Like About You

By Steve Lutz on November 25, 2002 12:00 AM

It all started with those evil bastards at ABC. In the late 1980's ABC launched their TGIF lineup, designed to turn Friday night prime time into television's version of the teen center. The idea was to convince Little Jimmy to spend Friday at home enjoying some wholesome family entertainment, instead of out on the streets whorin' around and smoking crack.

There were two major problems with this concept, however. The first was that the shows -- Family Matters, Full House, and Just the Ten of Us, to name a few -- were unilaterally horrible. Every TGIF show was painfully contrived, saccharine enough to wipe out whole species of lab rats, and filled with jokes so stupid and condescending that they seemed to have been copied verbatim from Laffy Taffy wrappers.

Of course, even if ABC could have produced a half-decent show, there was still a more fundamental problem: that any teenager on this planet would, and probably should, choose social activity over rotting in front of the television set -- especially if there's even the tiniest possibility that it might involve getting laid. Naturally, this meant that the only people watching TGIF were the kids too socially inept to have anything better to do, and the shows were all so awful and patronizing that they only served to make these poor rejects' lives that much more depressing. I suspect that if you looked carefully at teen suicide statistics from the last twenty years, you would see a dramatic spike every time Full House's Dave Coulier said, "Cut... it... out!" Is it any wonder Alanis Morrissette was so miffed at him?

Worse, some of the ideas put forth by these shows seemed deliberately aimed at harming their viewers. For example, TGIF told a generation of fat kids and asthmatics that when times get hard, the best solution is to hike up your pants, laugh with a snort, and do the Urkel Dance. But ABC negligently forgot to mention that the next step in the Urkel Dance is a severe ass-beating. This sort of potentially dangerous content is not something that impressionable children should be exposed to. In fact, a responsible parent, upon catching Little Jimmy watching TGIF, would give him a crack pipe and a condom and tell him not to come home until morning.

Fortunately, in the fall of 2000, after over a decade of tarnishing our nation's youth, ABC scrapped TGIF in the face of declining ratings. (That decision has worked out really well for them, as the smashing success of TGIF's Friday night successors will attest: Two Guys and a Girl, Madigan Men, Norm, Thieves, That Was Then. Ratings bonanzas, all!)

Unfortunately, The WB then decided to pick up Sabrina the Teenage Witch and the Friday night teen center torch. Even on a good night, spending thirty minutes watching The WB is like having laparoscopic surgery performed through your urethra. So the idea of the Frog Network applying its singularly horrific vision to these already miserable teen shows is utterly harrowing.

That's why I'm downright shocked to admit that one of their new Friday night offerings, What I Like About You, is pretty OK television. It's a refreshing throwback to the days when comedy meant tripping over the Ottoman instead of an endless stream of wise-ass comments. And while the show is in no danger of being discussed at a Mensa meeting, I actually found it fairly entertaining.

What I Like About You is the story of Holly Tyler, a fun-loving 16-year old (is there any other kind?) with a knack for getting into kooky hijinks. Holly's salesman father has earned, you guessed it, a "Big Promotion!" that requires him to move to Japan. Rather than follow him to the land of silk and Sony, Holly decides to move in with her 28-year old sister, Val. Holly doesn't appear particularly upset about being separated from her father, which might strike you as a bit peculiar. Except that Dad is played by Peter Scolari, whom you may remember as the Bosom Buddy that doesn't have a shelf full of Oscars. Have you missed him much since Newhart went off the air? Okay then.

Amanda Bynes portrays the accident-prone Holly, and she is by far the show's biggest strength. Bynes built her comedy chops during a four-year stint on Nickelodeon's All That, which I've never actually seen, but which I gather is like an updated You Can't Do That On Television. So Bynes is basically a Moose for a new generation. She's cute in a gawky sort of way, winningly self-confident, and probably already a leading masturbation fantasy among pubescent boys across the country.

The WB's web site makes much of Bynes' "unique gift for physical comedy." I'm not sure I'd go quite that far. When it comes to physical comedy, the term "gifted" is more appropriately applied to the likes of Jim Carrey, although his so-called gift is more likely the product of years of self-loathing redirected into years of practicing in front of the mirror. Bynes is not of that caliber, but she does fall down well, and she brings to the task a ton of enthusiasm. It's a little ingratiating, but it's also infectious. In one scene, Holly dives, fully clothed, into an occupied mud bath in search of a dropped Polaroid snapshot of J.C. from N'Sync. It sounds stupid on paper, but Bynes is just so darn game that she makes it look almost natural, and the end result is surprisingly funny.

What I Like About You is a dumb show. Each episode consists of a dumb setup, followed by some dumb physical comedy, followed by a dumb resolution. Occasionally there's also a dumb subplot. And there's really nothing wrong with that. That formula is the very epitome of situation comedy, and it's good fun, just like it used to be back in the Three's Company days when this approach was more common. Maybe it's just the effect of too many years watching thirty-somethings sit around and chat in upscale coffeehouses, but seeing guest star Tony Hawk skate into a fully laden buffet table during the pilot episode felt like a breath of fresh air.

Of course the show is not without its share of problems. One of them is Jennie Garth, who plays big sister Val. She seemed a decent enough actress on 90210, at least for the three to five minutes that I ever watched 90210 before suddenly losing interest. Here she's just plain irritating. It's hard to tell whether this is because she can't do comedy, or because the writers haven't really given her much to do besides be a histrionic straight man for Bynes.

Therein lies What I Like About You's biggest weakness. Besides Holly, there are a total of three regular characters, and those are so poorly sketched that it seems like the writers went on vacation, leaving the script in the hands of seven-year old Billy. You get the high-strung sister/parent, the dumb-but-lovable boyfriend, and the best friend/partner in crime (who, as an added bonus, also happens to be the token black guy). Beyond those simple descriptions, there isn't much in the way of backstory for these characters, nor has any effort since been made to flesh them out.

So the whole show basically depends on the solitary premise of "Amanda falls down." This will not maintain an audience's interest for very long. Worse, because the focus is always on Bynes, it's likely that her hyperkinetic antics, which are endearing in small doses, will become grating very quickly. Like by the end of the opening credits.

That said, last week's week episode hinted that the writers are planning to expand the show's horizons by giving Bynes a job, and giving Garth a little more screen time. The episode also benefited greatly from the inclusion of two brilliant supporting actors, Beth Littleford (The Daily Show), and Samm Levine (the Jewish kid from Freaks and Geeks). Unfortunately, it looks like that bright spot may have been a fluke, as previews indicate that this week's episode is back to the old, repetitive formula.

I'm also annoyed that this show is called What I Like About You. Evidently, the show's producers had some difficulty in coming up with a title that was actually apropos of its premise; perhaps My Sister Val sounded just a bit too derivative. So they used The Romantics' big hit for both the title and the theme song, despite the fact that it makes about as much sense as calling the show Horse Rocket Cheese Podium. I suppose they're hoping that the song's popularity will net them an instant audience. But most fans of this particular song are well out of the teen show demographic, and the ones that aren't probably spend their Friday nights in Tijuana. Hopefully this sort of thing won't become a trend, lest next season bring us a buddy cop show called Talking In Your Sleep.

Nonetheless, as family programming goes -- that being defined as any show in which nobody gets screwed or shot -- What I Like About You is better than average. And while it's still not going to convince the popular kids to postpone their attempts to impregnate each other, it bests its TGIF predecessors in several key areas:

Important lessons are not learned. The most nauseating thing about the TGIF canon was that every damned episode had to have some sort of syrupy moral about just being yourself, or learning to forgive Kimmy Gibler, or telling somebody when the shop teacher fondles your buttocks. No such lessons are learned from What I Like About You, unless "breaking things is funny" counts as a lesson.

Gratuitous cuteness is kept at non-toxic levels. Apart from the occasional familial hug, What I Like About You doesn't go out of its way to be cute. This stands in stark contrast with the TGIF sitcoms, which tried to jam as much cutesy shit as possible into every episode. In TGIF-land, families and assorted wacky neighbors would organize impromptu talent shows for no apparent reason. Monkey-faced toddlers who could otherwise barely talk would emit curiously snappy comebacks. Every problem would be treated with a life-affirming speech from Dad, followed by a heartfelt "Awwww" from the laugh track. And so on and so on, until you were so revolted by cuteness, you just wanted to go out and buy a fluffy bunny so that you could slowly twist its head off.

Average audience I.Q. is assumed to be above the Drooling Vegetable range. TGIF always seemed to be laboring under the misconception that the teenagers in its audience had the intellectual capacity of mildly retarded second graders. What I Like About You ups the ante by mixing in some slightly more sophisticated humor of about fourth-grade level. As somebody who considers poopie jokes the pinnacle of wit, I appreciate the effort to include me in their target demographic.

The show is based in our universe. Some pretty over-the-top stuff happens in What I Like About You, but nothing that you couldn't imagine happening to spastic and somewhat brain damaged people in the real world. TGIF, on the other hand, was apparently set in some bizarre alternate dimension, where fat, bald gym teachers get hot lovin' often enough to produce eight offspring, nerdy black kids build evil puppet versions of themselves in their basements, and as many as two adults and three children love Bob Saget.

No Olsen Twins. I believe this one speaks for itself.

For these reasons, What I Like About You won't instill in our nation's youth an urge to kill themselves and others. Given its origins, that's really saying something.

Anyway, at least it's not fucking Step By Step.

Who Are the Ad Wizards...

By Monty Ashley on November 24, 2002 12:00 AM

Announcer: "Sunday. An extraordinary television event. The epic story that would show the world anything is possible."

He's talking about "The Wizard of Oz." I'm not clear on how the five millionth showing of a 60-year-old movie is an extraordinary television event. I suppose in a few weeks, we'll be hearing about how "It's a Wonderful Life" is "a visceral and shocking look at smalltown life, bankers, and angels."

Really, I don't even see why they felt it necessary to bring in Dramatic Deep-voiced Announcer Guy at all. They also put some song I've never heard of as the background music, so they don't seem all that confident in the movie. I would have thought they could just say "Wizard of Oz, this Sunday" and all the people who wanted to see it would tune in. But that would seem to be insufficiently dopey.

Madison and Her Sisters

By Kevin Lauderdale on November 21, 2002 12:00 AM

When our daughter was born two years ago, the nurse asked what my wife and I were naming her. When we replied, "Elizabeth," the nurse gave an audible sigh of relief and said, "Thank god it's not Hannah."

Indeed, as you've likely read (or experienced), Hannah has been one of the most popular name for girls in the United States for several years, second only to Emily (Elizabeth usually places near the bottom of that top ten list).

We do know quite a few Hannahs as well as Emilys. Both are solid, traditional girl's names. But what has astounded me is the number of young girls we've met named Madison. Curious to know exactly how popular a name it was, I went to the Department of Social Security's web site and searched their table of Most Popular Names for Births in 2001. No wonder we were meeting a lot of them. Madison, which had been #3 in 2000, has traded places with Hannah and is now the second most popular name for girls in the United States. I was dumbfounded.

When I was growing up in the 1970s, I didn't know anyone, male or female, named Madison. What had caused this rush in popularity? Had PBS shown a Ken Burns documentary on our fourth president that had portrayed him in a particularly impressive light? No.

I could understand perhaps a few people naming their daughters Madison in instances where it was a family name that was being passed on. My wife's father's middle name was Carson not because he was named after a soap opera character or the host of a music video request show, but because it was the last name of his great-grandmother, and several generations had borne it before him. But surely not enough people had ancestors with the last name of Madison for it to outpace such stalwarts as Abigail (#8), or even Ashley (#4).

I asked around. Everyone else seemed to have the answer. "Oh, it came from that movie 'Splash,'" I was told over and again. "Daryl Hannah played a mermaid named Madison." Upon watching the 1984 film, I learned that she chose the name at random because she happened to be on Madison Ave. at the time. Her "real" mermaid name is a very loud screech.

This seemed as plausible an explanation as any. After all, it is a fact universally acknowledged that the Jennifer craze of the 1970s was due to Ali MacGraw's character in "Love Story."

But a search of the Social Security records also revealed that Madison was not in the top ten at all from 1880 until 1997, when it suddenly arrived at #7. It has been one of the top ten names for girls every year since. Could one film single-handedly be responsible for a naming revolution? Surely we had shaken off such excesses of the 1970s.

A search of the Internet Movie Database (which advertises that it has "information on over 250,000 movies made since the dawn of cinema," including over half a million actors and actresses) reveals that only one female movie character has Madison as a first name prior to Daryl Hannah's appearance in Splash. Nita Martan received fourth billing in 1928's "Lady Be Good." Her credit reads simply as "Madison" so we don't know even know if, in the context of the film, that is her first or last name.

There have been a handful of television characters with the nickname of "Maddie" (most notably Cybill Shepherd's Maddie Hayes on Moonlighting, which premiered the year after "Splash"), but those have been diminutives of Madelyn or Madeline. "Splash" seems to be the culprit.

Looking at the records for Jennifer from 1960 to her last year in the top ten, 1992 (She shows no sign of a resurgence; she was #25 in 2001, behind Rachel, Sydney, and Destiny.), we see that she was in the top ten from 1967 to 1969. From 1970 through 1984, she was #1. From then until 1992, she slowly slid down the list.

From these numbers we can see that the name was popular in its own right, but that "Love Story" propelled it to unparalleled heights for 15 years. But that 15-year span tells us more. Our basic assumption is this: A great many people -- most likely women -- who saw "Love Story" were so taken by the character of Jennifer Cavalieri that they decided to name their daughters Jennifer. That would certainly explain why women who had children in 1970, 1971, or even 1972, would use that name. It was fresh in their minds. But why was Jennifer still #1 in 1984? The most popular films of the early 1980s were "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi," yet Leia is nowhere to be seen in the Social Security tables (not even the ones that list the top 1,000 names). One possible explanation is that "Love Story" had such a profound impact on younger women and girls that they decided they would name their daughters Jennifer, whenever they eventually had them. If you were 12 years old in 1970, you were 26 in 1984; a not uncommon age to have a child. This desire can only have been reinforced by subsequent viewings of the film on television. Even as I write this, 32 years after the film's release, "Love Story" is scheduled to be shown in a few days on the Women's Entertainment channel. Say what you will about Oliver and Jennifer, they have staying power.

Why then did 26-year-old women (Mary, if you were born in 1958) having children in 1984 not rush to name their daughters Madison? Why did The Madison Explosion not occur until 13 years later?

One can easily imagine a situation where a Mary of child-bearing years sees "Splash" in 1984 and thinks Madison is a great name (after all, it was good enough for Daryl Hannah). She mentions this to her other Mary friends. They agree. The name Madison is unusual, but not odd. But then our Marys look around. Their parents did not have the foresight to imagine that a name they found appealing might be equally appealing to others in their age group. Had the mothers of all those Jennifers (also named Mary -- it was the #1 or #2 name from 1880 - 1964) checked with each other first, some of them might have gone with Ali (the actress) as opposed to Jennifer (the character).

So our Mary decides that cute as Madison is, it's bound to be "too popular" from 1984 on. She names her daughter Jessica instead. Imagine her surprise when no Madisons appear because everyone else has thought better of it as well.

Though there are no statistics on the names of the women who have named their daughters Madison, it's a safe bet that a great many of them are Jennifers. If you are a Jennifer, born in 1970, then you were 14 when "Splash" was released. How did Madison skip your older cousins and become your baby name of choice?

A sample Jennifer grew up watching "Splash" on television. In fact, the odds are she's seen it several times on cable, ingraining it more and more into her consciousness. Having experienced being one of six people to turn and look when someone calls her name, she seeks out an unusual name for her daughter. Madison certainly fits the bill. But she does not confer with her other Jennifer friends on this matter. Why? Because 1997 is a different world from 1984.

More likely than not, Jennifer does not live in the same city where she grew up. Her support network is small and scattered: her mother, her sister (Michelle), and her co-worker who just transferred from the India Division, Lakshmi. Perhaps she's in e-mail contact with some other female friends, but "What do you think of this for a baby name?" wasn't something you put in an e-mail back then. (Though in 2002 it's all over the misc.kids.pregnancy news group, allowing complete strangers to remind you that there are only so many spaces on an SAT form. You'll want that first name not to exceed the eight-character limit. Sorry, Elizabeth, you'd better start going by "Lizzie" soon.)

Jennifer was trapped by her place in time. She was sophisticated enough to wonder about the hazards of naming a child, yet she had no one with whom to discuss it.

What does the future portend? "Titanic" was released in 1997. There were numerous reports that a significant percentage of viewers were young girls watching the movie repeatedly (One theory held that it was the first film they had seen which -- like "Love Story" for an earlier generation -- had a tragic ending as opposed to an upbeat, "Hollywood Ending."). A Jessica who was 12 years old in 1997 will be 26 in the year 2011.

So where is Rose, the name of Kate Winslet's character in "Titanic", according to the statistics? It was not in the top 100 names for 2001 or 2000. It was #348 in 1997, #298 in 1998, and #276 in 1999. Clearly it's on an upswing. In 1996, the year before "Titanic", it was #1344. Rose was in the top ten almost every year from 1883 - 1902. It has not achieved that height in any year since. But it soon will.

All New II!

By Philip Michaels on November 18, 2002 12:00 AM

My colleague Jason Snell leaves out a few important details about the NBC billboard that beams out its electronic messages of love and peace and Must-See happiness to the Bay Area masses. First off, the sign is owned by NBC-3, the local Peacock Network affiliate, which is not actually available in parts of San Francisco, since the station broadcasts out of San Jose. And the billboard is just part of the station's efforts to let grateful San Franciscans know that the NBC programming they've grown accustomed to finding on channel 4 for the past four decades is now airing on a crummy little UHF station that was willing to meet the parent network's usurious compensation demands.

Secondly, the billboard has gone throw multiple changes since NBC-3 made it as recognizable a part of the San Francisco landscape as the Bay Bridge and the Transamerica building. Before its present mission to spread the good news about NBC's 10 p.m. lineup ("ALL NEW ER! TONIGHT! "), the sign touted a daytime offering called Life Moments, which, according to the show's Web site features "stories of hope, stories of triumph, stories of inspiration for and about women." Presumably, any men who flip by the show by accident should change the channel immediately, lest they be captured and debriefed by the Life Moments shock troops.

(And what is a story of hope, a story of triumph, a story of inspiration for and about today's modern woman? "Moments that are important to you," the Life Moments Web site enthuses. "Like the romance of dating and weddings, the excitement of reunions and makeovers, and the miracle of birth." Stories about equal work for equal pay and Title IX presumably will have to wait for another series.)

When it was busy pimping Life Moments, the electronic portion of the billboard beamed out the following message: "NEW EPISODE TODAY AT 4 P.M." And that turned out to be a problem, since the billboard is right near the Bay Bridge, all the better to capture the hearts, minds and eyeballs of drivers stranded on I-80 during the morning commute -- or to put it another way, not the kind of folks who are anywhere near a TV set at 4 p.m. today, no matter how hopeful, triumphant, or inspiring the stories are.

So the Life Moments billboard went away, and San Franciscans are now on their own when it comes to finding out when an exciting and inspiring story about a makeover is on.

Before that, NBC-3 used the billboard to promote NBC's prime-time lineup, with artist renderings of the stars of popular Must-See TV shows. There was the cast of Friends, hugging one another in anticipation of the inevitable all-cast orgy that will close out the series this year (The artist who designed the billboard apparently couldn't decide whether to draw Chandler after his precipitous weight gain or after his sudden weight loss, so he drew both.). There was Will and Grace, also hugging, and President Sheen, not hugging anybody, but leaning forward in preparation of rattling off some homey aphorism or obscure factoid that perfectly illustrated how conservatives are plotting to eat your children. And there was Law & Order's Jesse Martin standing next to Sam Waterston as if to say, "NBC -- it's not just for lilly-white characters anymore!"

Here again, the electronic billboard conveyed news and information about NBC programs. "LAW & ORDER! TONIGHT!" or "WEST WING! 9 P.M.!" Only, that information wouldn't always be correct -- during the summer, when the billboard assured you that Crossing Jordan would be on that evening at 10 p.m., if you turned in expecting to see Jill Hennessy solving crimes in a series of low-cut tops, you would have actually found Meet My Folks, in which a parade of lunkheads competed for mom and dad's approval to debauch their daughter. And low-cut top or not, that's quite a comedown.

Other times, owing to burnt out light bulbs, the billboard would beam out utterly incomprehensible messages. Thanks to a missing "W" and ampersand, Law & Order became LA Order, causing many confused commuters to believe that Dick Wolf and Steven Bochco were teaming up for an hour-long series about New York cops who investigate criminals and the flashy, Southern California attorneys who prosecute them. And the billboard has never been able to master the letter "V," turning every promotion for Law & Order: SVU into an unwitting advertisement for Law & Order: SUU.

Which is another show entirely.

Perhaps most fittingly, the old NBC-3 billboard carried a slogan, this one displayed in paint instead of the more fickle electronic form: "The Quality Shows on NBC!" If it's anything like the quality showing on the billboard, I'm beginning to understand some of the network's programming decisions a little better.

Fall 2002: Run from the Hills

By Philip Michaels on November 18, 2002 12:00 AM

Robert Wright is the president of the NBC television network, a title he's held since 1986. In the ensuing 16 years, NBC has gone from a problematic General Electric subsidiary to a mighty cog in the corporate machine, as responsible for G.E.'s good fortunes as engine turbines and nuclear devices. For a large chunk of Wright's tenure, NBC has sat atop the network heap; as ABC and CBS go through ratings peaks and valleys and Fox struggles valiantly not to trip over its clown shoes, NBC sails along with its high-rated shows, its Must-See TV promotional juggernaut and enough Emmy Awards to build a sizable house entirely out of statuettes. The Brandon Tartikoffs and Warren Littlefields come and go -- Robert Wright endures. Even when he apparently loses, he wins. David Letterman, who regularly used Wright's own network to portray the executive as a simp and a boob, may have bolted for an 11:30 p.m. time slot, a huge paycheck and critical raves a decade ago, but it's Jay Leno, the NBC-anointed heir to Johnny Carson's late night empire, who regularly drubs Letterman in the ratings. Add it all together, and it's a pretty good gig being Robert Wright, president of NBC.

And yet, Wright would probably chuck it all away without a second thought if he had the chance to turn his network into HBO.

Wright flips to the upper reaches of the cable system to tune in HBO and fumes as that network wins accolade after accolade for programs with an audience size that wouldn't match the ratings for a Third Watch rerun shown in the dead of night. He seethes as The Sopranos, Oz and Six Feet Under have the leeway to use language and situations that even his most shameless programming executive wouldn't dare to suggest. And even if the FCC didn't take a dim view of, say, Ross calling a Joey a motherfucker or Sam Seaborn stopping to pay his respects to a room full of topless hookers on his way to the Oval Office, it's likely that the folks who make pedestrian fare such as Crossing Jordan and Just Shoot Me into ratings smashes -- the housewife in Peoria, that clutch of senior citizens in Abilene, the lonely shut-in from Muncie -- would be less understanding. So all Wright can do is sit and stew and write the occasional memo, decrying the unfairness of it all.

Until this year. Following last season's success with Scrubs, NBC is slowly inching away from the shot-before-a-live-studio-audience, crank-up-the-laugh-track approach to sitcoms that has been the network's calling card since Sam and Diane were going at it hammer-and-tong . This year, the Peacock Network hopes to mirror the success of Sex and the City and Curb Your Enthusiasm with a program that offers up its own edgy, adult take on modern life -- all without rocking the boat or upsetting the staid mores of NBC's mass audience. It's a tricky balancing act. After all, what happens when you set out to create a show aspiring to tackle adult themes with urbane humor, but without offending the delicate sensibilities of the middle-of-roaders raised on a steady diet of bland, inoffensive fare?

You'd wind up with Hidden Hills.

The freshman show -- wedged comfortably between Frasier (no, it hasn't been on the air for an eternity, it just seems that way) and one of the several thousand hours of Dateline that airs on NBC each week -- focuses on the exploits of a married couple as they muddle through life in an affluent suburban enclave. All the stuff that separates pay cable sitcoms from their network counterparts is on full display here. Oh, not the superb writing, distinctive outlook and convention-defying approaches -- the other stuff. The salty language. The suggestive entendres. The adult situations and strong sexual content. It's as if someone stripped all the HBO shows of their more prurient elements and mashed them together into the comedic pastiche that is Hidden Hills. Think of it as The Mind of the Married Man Who Wants to Have Sex in the City with Arli$$. Or as Dream On without all that pesky nudity.

Actually, neither comparison is entirely fair. An unwieldy amalgamation of HBO shows wouldn't be nearly as derivative as Hidden Hills turned out to be. And while the boob-free version of Dream On may have been an absolute snore, it could at least boast of the talents of Brian Benben, who's not nearly so detestable as Hidden Hills' Justin Louis.

Hidden Hills would like to cast itself as a send-up of life in these United States, a delicious skewering of the conformity and expectations of suburban living. If that doesn't exactly sound like Hidden Hills is breaking new ground, consider the show's theme song -- a kicky remake of Pleasant Valley Sunday, the Monkees tune that sent up life in these United States and deliciously skewered the conformity and expectations of suburban living 30-plus years ago. If ever you have to wonder whether you're panning through well-mined source material, it's generally not a good sign when Peter Tork and Davy Jones are beating you to the satiric punch.

It's also a bad sign when your edgy, adult sitcom sounds like it's been written by 13-year-old boys on their way to gym class. Being a childless urbanite, I can only hazard a guess, but I assume there are numerous issues of concern to kid-rearing suburbanites making their way in this crazy world of ours -- house work, pressures on the job, a sudden and unfortunate influx of wacky neighbors into the subdivision. Hidden Hills seems primary interested in the issues emanating specifically from just above the upper thigh and just below the beltline. And that's not necessarily a fatal error -- bawdy humor in the hands of a master practitioner can be pants-wettingly funny. As for Hidden Hills, well... at least you won't have to worry about any embarrassing dry cleaning bills.

Of course, one man's puerile blather is another's Noel Coward play. Maybe you enjoyed the episode in which Louis' character mulled getting a vasectomy, and we were treated to repeated montages of sausages getting sliced, cigars getting guillotined and other assorted phallic symbols enduring myriad forms of abuse. Maybe you're delighted by the recurring character, a married man who speaks with a pronounced lisp (the joke being, I guess, that even though he's heterosexual, he talks all queer-like, and isn't that just outrageous?). Maybe you think it's just delightful when the male characters ogle one of the suburban moms who happens to run a little adult Web site business on the side. Maybe you found all of these things funny. I didn't. Then again, I have a functioning brain stem and a high-school degree that's more than a decade old, so the odds that I might enjoy Hidden Hills' brand of funny were probably pretty slim to begin with.

Ultimately, though, Hidden Hills fails as a comedy because it lacks the courage of its ribald convictions. If you want to successfully work blue, you have to be comfortable with your material, no matter who it offends; the folks working on Hidden Hills clearly aren't. Instead, the show mixes its raunch-obsessed approach to plotting and character development with an almost puritanical attitude toward sex. In early episodes of the program, the woman with her own adult Web site ("Porn mom," as she's dubbed by the arrested adolescent wits on Hidden Hills) is regarded alternately as an especially desirable extra in a Whitesnake video from the mid-80s and a dangerous interloper who should be feared and shunned. Every time Louis and his wife (played with a palpable air of resignation by Paula Marshall) try to enjoy an intimate moment together -- it averages about once or twice an episode -- it ends in disaster. You can see Hidden Hills visibly straining to keep its mind in the gutter in hopes of attracting young, hip viewers while planting its feet a safe distance way, so as not to alarm the squares. The result is a contorted, jumbled mess of a show.

Just to make sure that the Hidden Hills viewing experience is as awkward and uncomfortable for viewers as possible, the producers opted to center the show around two unlikable people -- or at least, that's how the actors have apparently decided to portray them. Justin Louis appears in every scene as if he's been sucking a lemon right before the cameras started rolling. Saddled with the thankless task of having to play a sex-obsessed imbecile, Louis ups the hate ante further by making him whiny and -- judging by a scene in which his character has difficulty removing a condom from its wrapper -- the victim of a fairly serious brain injury. As his wife, Paula Marshall comes across as a shrill harridan, drifting through her scenes with pursed lips and incredulous eye rolls, as if her character can't imagine why she's still wed to this nitwit.

That may be the most honest thing about Hidden Hills.

What's not believable is the pat feel-good ending that comes standard with each Hidden Hills episode. Louis and Marshall spend the first 25 minutes of the show bickering, blasting, and generally looking like they can barely stand to be in the same room with one another. By episode's end, there's a "Hey-we're-all-in-this-together-because-deep-down-we-love-each-other" voice-over from Louis, and we're supposed to believe an important life lesson has just been learned by this detestable couple. It's as phony and fake as the suburban landscape Hidden Hills is meant to skewer.

Marshall has found herself stuck with a reputation as a show killer after appearing on programs both good (Cupid) and bad (Snoops), memorable (SportsNight) and forgettable (Cursed) that networks haven't been able to cancel fast enough. So naturally, when she lands herself in a truly terrible sitcom, what does NBC do? Pick-up the show for a full season of misery.

"Hidden Hills represents the smart and edgy kind of humor that has come to establish NBC as America's favorite network," said NBC Entertainment president Jeff Zucker, in one of those statements that makes us wonder if network executives even watch their own shows. "We believe this fun look at life in the suburbs is well-positioned to be a strong hit comedy."

Maybe so. On a network where Just Shoot Me can run for years and years with nary a peep of enthusiasm or protest, anything's possible. As for Hidden Hills fulfilling Bob Wright's fondest dream and becoming NBC's entree into the world of sophisticated, adult comedies populated by HBO's offerings? Better luck next time, Bob.

Then again, NBC already devotes an entire night of its schedule to airing movies everybody's already seen. So at least, it has that in common with HBO.

All New!

By The Vidiots on November 14, 2002 12:00 AM

Near my office is a large billboard for NBC. Today I noticed that it's featuring NBC's "Quality Dramas at 10 p.m." The electronic segment of the billboard cried out in large letters: "ALL NEW ER TONIGHT AT 10!"

Which made me wonder, at what point did "new" become a concept so weak that it must always be buttressed by "all-"? Is there a rash of "new" TV shows out there that are simply old parts chopped up and slapped back down into confusing, disjointed bits?

Then I remembered that I had once seen an episode of Friends advertised as "all-new," only to discover that it was a clip show. If television shows were meat, they'd be shutting NBC down, slaughtering the cattle, and fumigating the plant.

Stay tuned -- all-new installments of TeeVee are coming soon. We're talking to you, Rob Lotterstein.

TiVo Taken 'Hostage'

By Chris Rywalt on November 12, 2002 12:00 AM

The latest installment in the long-running series "Keep TiVo, Inc. Solvent" was downloaded to my unit the other day. And I watched it. The funny little fact is that I bought a device which allows me to skip the commercials during the shows I watch and yet I have gone purposely out of my way to watch the extra commercials the TiVo automatically downloads for me. Yes, I have watched advertisements for Best Buy (its Electronic Feng Shui spots), the films "Mr. Deeds," "Red Dragon," and "Austin Powers in Goldmember," the boxed set of James Bond DVDs, and videos by Sheryl Crow, No Doubt, and Vanessa Carlton, even though the only one of those things I'd ever shown any interest in was Gwen Stefani's underwear.

This newest item to be downloaded is the most interesting (underwear excepted), though. It's a nine-minute mini-movie involving -- or perhaps a nine-minute extended commercial for -- a Bavarian auto manufacturer. And while it's really just the logical extension of those car commercials starring Udo Kier which aired a few years back, it's a leap forward in terms of quality: Directed by John Woo, produced by the Scott brothers Ridley and Tony and former commercial director David Fincher, starring Clive Owen ("Croupier") and Maury Chaykin (about eight million movies -- trust me, you've seen the guy).

These little mini-movies have been available for download on the Web for ages but this is the first time that I know of they've been "broadcast." Others in the series were directed by John Frankenheimer, Ang Lee, and Guy Ritchie; upcoming, my TiVo promises, are shorts directed by Joe Carnahan and Tony Scott himself.

The series as a whole is called "The Hire." The most recent installment, "Hostage," is a really neat little film. The short format means we can gloss over details which might derail a feature. Clive Owen appears to be working for the FBI -- so why are the local police chasing him in his fancy car? Well, the reason is, so we can see how fancy the car is. "Hostage" is an exercise in pure style -- typical John Woo, really -- which never loses sight of who is footing the bill. Thus we get a large number of shots of Clive Owen manhandling the gearshift, twisting the car into turns, skidding to a stop, and so on, all the while with this look on his face like he's trying really hard not to drop his ben wa balls.

And that is possibly the ad's only fault: It sure doesn't make driving this car look like much fun. At one point Clive's got the car up to about 120 and suddenly the darn thing flies off the road "Bullitt"-style only to come crashing down unpleasantly hard. And you can actually see, in between one frame of film and the next, in your mind's eye, the tow truck come and haul away the $60,000 tangle of wrecked German machinery and the new car drive up for Clive to get into.

Now, I don't know about you, but I don't want my car to come flying off the road for no reason. I especially don't want this happening if I owe the balance of a year's salary on said car. And I definitely don't want the paramedics to find me in the driver's seat looking like I'm trying to hold a greased hardboiled egg between my butt cheeks. But that's what this commercial is telling me will happen if I buy this car.

So as a fun little exercise in filmmaking, "The Hire" series is perfect. As an advertisement, though, it's notso hotso. And if it keeps TiVo afloat, I'm all for it.

Nielsen Ratings? We're Taking Bids

By Gregg Wrenn on November 8, 2002 12:00 AM

This week I was a proud participant in democracy at its finest. No, I didn't do something silly, like voting. I exercised real power and joined America's cultural elite: the Nielsen television ratings households. TV producers and network executives will be at my mercy for an entire week. It's a wonderful feeling.

Once you've been selected -- DNA tests? Childhood report cards? Secret kickbacks to the Nielsen folks? -- the company calls to find out how many people are in the home and how many televisions there are. In all the hustle and bustle, I accidentally miscounted the three people in my house as 479. This may help explain why Alias will end up notching an 85 share in the 18-34 demographic next week. The company then sends you a diary for each television, which you fill out with a good old-fashioned pen or pencil. For each entry you're required to list the station or network, the show title and who in the house is watching.

Obviously, the first duty of any true television fan is to jot down the best shows as soon as you get the booklet on Tuesday. So even if you're dismembered and eaten by the Rally Monkey on Friday, The Simpsons will still grab its ratings. One curious side-effect of the diaries is to emphasize how much time one spends just flipping through channels. Technically, you only need to record shows you watch for five minutes or longer, but the Nielsen folks have their spiel down pat: woe be the family that doesn't meticulously note every single channel it lays eyes on. With this kind of constant pressure it's easier to just set the remote down and suffer through the commercials.

The diary radiates an unmistakable aura of power, one that easily overwhelms most people. Especially those of us who are sweeps month households. The responsibility is almost too much to bear and the temptation to abuse the system is overwhelming. Not being particularly principled, I did what any sensible American would do: set up an eBay auction.

That's right, Hollywood weasels, you can now bid for my Nielsen diary entries. Prime-time starts at $1,500 an hour for the 18-34 year olds, but the 50-and-over demo is a bargain at $500. Bartering is also acceptable. This means you, J.J. Abrams: a chance to woo Jennifer Garner away from that Felicity wimp trumps anything Dick Wolf and his Criminal Intent gang could offer up.

In addition to the enormous profit potential, the possibilities for revenge are quite heady as well. Sorry Joss Whedon, but to punish you for last year's Buffy debacle, Tuesday night's entry reads JAG. And in protest of the addition of Elizabeth Rohm to the cast of Law and Order, the Nielsen folks will think I spent Wednesday night reading a book.

While the whole ratings system is tried and true, there is definitely room for improvement. For example, it's lucky girls club was canceled, because there wasn't enough room in the 9:00 p.m. Monday night slot for me to scribble: "If David E. Kelley creates another show about lawyers, I will run him over with my car." There should also be a negative ratings slot, one where you can jot down the shows you refuse to watch. The negative points would then be subtracted from the positive ones to get the real rating. Just think of the wondrous possibilities: 8 Simple Rules would go from a Top 20 show to -98th place.

It's also hard to believe any subjective statistic that relies on self-reporting. The Nielsen people want you to record everything you watch, but that's hard to do when you know someone will soon be reading your choices. I'll bet 95% of PBS's ratings are from people too embarrassed to admit they were actually drooling over VIP.

It's unfortunate my Nielsen experience will soon be over. Hopefully, by the end of the week, I'll have learned a little something about the principles of democracy, responsible choices and scoring some serious payola swag. And hey, 24 producers, your 9:00 p.m. Tuesday bid just got topped by Haunted.

Privy Video Recorder

By Lisa Schmeiser on November 5, 2002 12:00 AM

I realize that examining entrails for portents of doom is a popular practice in some societies, but I had no idea we were actually reporting on the contents of the entrails and calling it news. In the AdAge story "More U.S. Homes Have Outhouses Than TiVos," the author posits that the personal video recorder is a technology in search of a business model and cites as support one statistic, origin unknown: More U.S. homes have outhouses (671,000) than TiVos (504,000 to 514,000).

Putting aside for a moment the pesky questions of who commissioned this survey, what the questions were, and what the intent of the survey was -- I have to ask: who on Earth thought it would be a good idea to compare Tivos to outhouses? It's not as if they're competing technologies -- nobody is going to stand in the aisle at Circuit City saying, "Damn, I really want me one of them TiVos, but I reckon I should dig a new privy first."

Also unmentioned in the TiVo-outhouse comparison: what the economic factors leading to the inclusion of either one in a household might be. Chances are, unless someone's on one of those survivalist kicks where they've gone off the grid, people aren't exactly opting for outhouses. They use them because they can't afford plumbing. Given the number of people living in poverty relative to the number of people who can afford a gadget and some sort of service agreement, it only makes sense that there are more outhouses than TiVos.

Assessing a personal video recorder's success relative to an outhouse in 2002 is like assessing the gramophone's success relative to the horse-drawn carriage in 1906: more homes were likely to have the carriage, which provided a vital household function as transportation, than they were to have an entertainment device. And yet, the phonograph -- which eventually incorporated electricity, long-playing records and stereophonic sound before metamorphosing into the home stereo system -- survives in some form to this day. Black Beauty as the number-one way to jaunt around town does not.

So it is with TiVos and outhouses -- one will probably change, and the other has been supplanted as the norm in its function by another option. Their successes or failures are independent of each other.

FlubWatch 2002

By Philip Michaels on November 5, 2002 12:00 AM

CNN's Candy Crowley is in the midst of a tortured explanation of how the all-news network will be tallying the votes and prematurely declaring winners this year. Apparently, it involves a bunch of men sitting at computers and talking loudly while they crunch numbers into Excel spreadsheets. This, in turn, will cause state maps to change colors like some sort of politically attuned mood ring. All this to let you know that the North Carolina Senate race is too close to call.

"Why are we doing all this?" asks Crowley, since the CNN microphone in the Michaels apartment has apparently captured my incredulity. "One word -- Florida in 2000."

Apart from learning to tell the difference between one word and three, if CNN really wanted to avoid a 2000-esque embarrassment, it should just keep anchor Judy Woodruff away from the liquor cabinet. Every segment involving the easily befuddled news anchor was either featured a malaprop, a miscue or a sentence that trails off into thin air long after the vagaries of subject-verb agreement have long since flummoxed poor Judy. My favorite moment so far: when Woodruff gave a lengthy introduction to a reporter standing by in South Carolina, only to discover that the correspondent was actually in South Dakota.

Somewhere, Bernie Shaw cackles gleefully.

Perhaps this is terribly immature of me, but every time CNN cuts over to Minneapolis where reality TV show host/journalist Anderson Cooper is standing by to report on the Senate race, I keep waiting for him to say, "Coming up next: Is Walter Mondale... The Mole?"

Of course, every time CNN cuts over to James Carville on the Crossfire set, I expect him to start detailing his plan to buy up the world's kryptonite reserves in yet another effort to destroy his arch-enemy Superman.

So when I got home the other day, there was a message waiting for me on the answering machine from President Bartlett.

"Hello, I'm Martin Sheen," President Bartlett began. "And I'm asking you to join me in voting yes on Proposition 52. The truth is if we don't vote, then we don't have a voice. Prop 52 gives everyone a voice, by allowing eligible citizens to register and vote on Election Day with proper ID. It also requires a voter's bill of rights to be posted at polling locations. Protect voter rights and prevent voter fraud by voting yes on Proposition 52."

Huh -- no witty repartee, no repetitive dialogue, not even a reference to an obscure factoid or bit of minutia used to illustrate a larger issue. I bet the president wasn't even walking down the hall and talking on the cell phone when he left me the message.

Man, the critics are right -- The West Wing really has gone downhill this year.

As for Prop 52, I'm voting against it, just because allowing folks to register to vote on Election Day sounds like a great way to ensure high voter turnout among the recently deceased. But then again, I'll hold off final judgment on the proposition until I hear what that wacky bowling alley lawyer thinks about the issues.

We kid CNN, but to the network's credit, it hasn't erroneously predicted that Al Gore has been elected senator in Idaho tonight, so it's already a couple steps ahead of its 2000 election coverage. Besides, on what other network could you flip by and see James Carville putting a waste-paper basket on his head in reaction to Saxby Chambliss's win in Georgia?

Also, I think it's great that CNN has hired former Brat Packer Andrew McCarthy to sit on the right for Crossfire because after Emilio Estevez, McCarthy always struck me as the one '80s movie star who... Oh, that's Tucker Carlson? Never mind then.

Above all, though, CNN has Jeff Greenfield, and he is just stupendous. He can formulate a relatively coherent analysis on a moment's notice, he doesn't fill the surrounding air with hot gas every time he opens his mouth, and he has a wealth of information about every race at his fingertips. Short of Dan Rather and his impressive arsenal of metaphors and similes, there's no one I'd rather get my election news from then Greenfield.

Plus, he's managed to sit next to a sputtering Judy Woodruff for seven hours without slamming her head into a nearby console or making "Who farted?" faces every time she opens her mouth, and that may be the greatest act of Christian forebearance I have ever witnessed.

Watch Out, NOW's at it Again

By Lisa Schmeiser on November 1, 2002 12:00 AM

When I got an e-mail this spring asking if I wanted to assist the National Organization for Women in its television-monitoring campaign, I toyed with the idea for ten minutes. I wanted to go because I was honestly curious how this group consistently managed to misread television programming, but I really didn't want to have to monitor Dawson's Creek and then jump into a discussion afterward, which was the proposed activity for my local monitoring group. In the end, I decided against it: I felt I haven't seen enough of Dawson's Creek to be able to accurately critique it, so whatever I would have said wouldn't have reflected the show as a whole, and would therefore be worthless as a way of assessing it.

Would that those who did serve as "field analysts" for NOW's "Watch Out, Listen Up! 2002 Feminist Prime Time Report" had felt the same way. The final report is an embarrassment, and does more to discredit the argument that television has some gender issues than it does to support it.

It's never a good sign when a report starts off by getting basic facts about television wrong. NOW makes an understandable error in the first paragraph of its report when it talks about "the six broadcast networks: ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC, UPN and the WB" because almost nobody remembers that PAX is also a broadcast network, but it's an error nonetheless.

We get into real trouble in the second paragraph, which reads:

"These six networks transmit programming over the electromagnetic spectrum (known as "the airwaves"), which is a public asset owned by the people of the United States. The 1934 Communications Act established the practice of granting free broadcast licenses to networks and local TV stations with the requirement that they "serve the public interest, convenience and necessity." The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Congress do not enforce this obligation and broadcasters feel little pressure to live up to their part of the deal. While license-holders pay nothing for the use of this valuable resource, they make billions of dollars selling people's viewing time to advertisers."

First of all, the electromagnetic spectrum is "owned" by nobody; it's merely regulated by the government as a result of a series of National Radio Conferences held between 1922 and 1925, which have been cited in nearly every broadcast case to hit the Supreme Court since. As for the duties which broadcasters must discharge in exchange for the airwaves -- there's nothing there saying they have to do it during prime time, which is why all the programming that's good for you is on at 6 a.m. on Sunday. Therefore, starting off by claiming that television networks are reneging on their part of the broadcast deal is not an argument I'd want to stake a report on.

Then again, I wouldn't write "excessive sexual exploitation and violence create a hostile environment on TV, and the lack of content addressing social issues leaves people uninformed and isolated," because that's not true either. I can appreciate NOW desiring to concentrate their efforts on a small, specific segment of television-watching, but the entire report assumes that prime time network television is representative of the medium as a whole, and that assumption is flat-out wrong. Ask anyone who watches daytime television. Better yet, ask anyone who watches cable. It's hard to make the case that television is hostile to women at 11 a.m. on any given weekday, or when a cable package includes Lifetime: Television for Women, the Oxygen Network, and The Learning Channel.

So what we have is a report that's really about 21 hours of programming total per week, as opposed to the 168 in the 24/7 world of television, which examines six channels instead of the twenty to one hundred available to most television viewers. From this narrow slice are broad generalizations made.

Well -- from a narrow sample and an analysis process that leaves a lot to be desired. Based on the "analysis process" portion of the report, NOW's analysts judged a show based on a quota system, its violent content, its sexual exploitation, and its social responsibility. Nowhere are concepts such as a show's premise and execution, quality of writing, or entertainment value listed as a criterion. This explains why NOW gives ER, Judging Amy and Providence A+ ratings.

No, I'm not making that up. Three of the most unwatchable shows on television are A-OK with NOW.

The problem with the report and the ratings is the complete vacuum in which NOW's rating criteria operate relative to the show as a whole. Boston Public earned a B+ from NOW, a grade that will surely surprise anyone who watched the show and remembered the enterprising young miss who swapped blow jobs for votes, the Lolita who compromised her older teacher, the surrogate unwed mother, and the teen prostitute. That's a show with a systematic pattern of treating its female characters as sex objects first, people second, and it gets a B+ while shows that bother to take the time to explore women as complex characters -- Buffy and Alias, for example -- earn Cs and Ds? It's evident that these shows were graded on a grid, and not examined for any thematic execution whatsoever.

If you're going to study prime-time, then study it: get people to watch an entire season of a show so they can note trends in the writing, get a grasp on the sensibilities of the show-running team, and see how the series does as a whole. Get people to look at the freakin' premise of a show: CSI gets repeatedly dinged for its violent content and sexual exploitation, but it's a show about solving murders. Short of filling week after week with people choking on mah-jongg tiles, you're not going to be able to evade either sex or violence.

The fatal weakness in NOW's report, however, is its inability to understand why people watch prime time television. NOW repeatedly insists that television has a responsibility to be socially conscious and representative of reality, and not once do they examine the slate of shows they assessed and address the possibility that people watch these shows for entertainment value. In other words, NOW is expecting prime time to be one thing when it is clearly another, and so any analysis of prime time is bound to fail by its criteria.

And the thing is -- prime time television does have problems with sexism. It is disconcerting that David E. Kelley has amassed a body of work dedicated to treating women as sex objects and suggesting that smart, career-oriented women are deeply flawed individuals. It is disheartening to see one fat dullard after another sporting a babelicious wife while there's not a single example in reverse.

However, it's insulting to hear characters zing each other by saying that they write like a girl, got beaten like a girl, or argue like a girl -- as I did on The West Wing -- and discover in the report that those comments don't tarnish the show's grade as an A- haven for gender equity. It's insulting because it's lazy. What that grade tells me is that whomever watched the show didn't bother to look beyond a checklist to see what was really playing on the screen. And that's not the only show that got misread -- which makes me question exactly how accurate any of the assessments are.

If the report demonstrates anything, it's that critically assessing prime time television isn't as easy as asking volunteers to fill out a checklist. So long as NOW's issuing poorly structured, deeply misguided reports, it's going to be harder to take any complaints about sexism on prime time television, or television as a whole, seriously.

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