March 2004 Archives

I spent my undergraduate years at a moderately-priced, fairly well-regarded public university on the Pacific coast, where I majored in Communications. And that probably seems like an ideal educational program for a budding media professional. “Indeed,” you may be thinking, “four years of studying communications at a moderately-priced, well-regarded public university must have given you plenty of practical skills and hands-on experience that have helped you build your reputation as a basically competent journalist and editor.”

You know, I think it’s your wry sense of humor that I like best about you.

Alas, the Communications Department at my particular moderately-priced, fairly well-regarded public university didn’t put much stock in practical skills and hands-on experience. Instead, we were drilled on theory, most of it filtered through a kind of anarcho-socialist world view that makes The Nation read like it was edited by neo-cons. My schooling in the rigors of Communications consisted of the following lessons:

• The media — newspapers, TV and radio stations, even those pamphlets coming out of Pueblo, Colorado — is controlled by a handful of mega-corporations who twist and distort information to meet their shadowy aims.
• Television programs, movies, Top 40-radio, and print publications — those not controlled by people with an anarcho-socialist world view, anyway — will fill your brains with mush in a transparent attempt to keep you down; and
• Most of this is probably Ronald Reagan’s fault.

There. Read those three things over and over again for the next few days and you will know as much about Communications as someone who spent four years at a moderately-priced, fairly well-regarded public university on the Pacific coast.

Thus armed with the knowledge imparted upon me by my college’s tenured hippies, I parlayed my degree into a career in the media, where I am presently responsible for twisting and distorting information to suit the whims of my corporate masters. In my spare time, I help keep the masses down by writing about television. The Man, as it turns out, pays surprisingly well.

Reading that last paragraph over, I guess it’s no longer that big a mystery why I’m not invited to many class reunions.

My undergraduate days of corporate conspiracy and leftist cant came rushing back to me last month, when Comcast made a $54 billion bid to take the Walt Disney Co. off Michael Eisner’s bumbling hands. Had the deal gone through, Comcast — easily the largest cable company in an industry not known for its mom-and-pop operations — would have gotten its mitts on a major entertainment studio that cranks out movies, TV shows, records and books; a theme-park empire; a clutch of cable networks, including ESPN and all its many off-shoots; and ABC, which I believe is some sort of loose affiliation of UHF stations broadcasting old Mole reruns. Disney’s board of directors, realizing that $54 billion would barely cover a weekend trip by a family of four to Epcot Center, spurned the offer. But as if you’ve ever had to explain to Comcast’s telemarketers that you are perfectly happy with the basic-cable package and would not like to order the seven additional channels of Starz!, you know that this is not a company used to taking “no” for an answer.

I imagine my old Communications professors picked up their papers the morning the Comcast takeover bid went public and nearly choked on their organic, unprocessed wheat germ. Or fired a sternly worded Letter to the Editor off to Mother Jones. Or spent the better part of the afternoon berating their students about the evils of corporate hegemony. Which wouldn’t make it that much different from any other day, actually. Only this time, they might have a point about Comcast. And I’m not even saying that because my GPA depends on it.

Oh, don’t misunderstand me — this isn’t some Bagdikian-fueled rant about the dangers of media conglomerates. Remember — I’m a dupe for those people. No, my problem isn’t necessarily that consolidation has put too much power in the hands of too few owners. Rather, it’s that consolidation is placing too much power in the hands of too few owners who also happen to be screamingly incompetent. If I’m going to be placed at the mercy of corporate interests — and given the inclinations present administration, I expect we’ll be wrapping up the paperwork on that sometime in early 2006 — the least I can expect is for the multi-tentacled corporate monstrosity to handle my business with some dispatch.

In short, if I’m to live in a nightmarish world, better that it be more like George Orwell’s 1984 than Steven Speilberg’s 1941. The former, while a chilling picture of the dangers of totalitarianism, at least describes a society where things are run efficiently, if a bit ruthlessly; on the other hand, the latter — a tedious and wince-inducing comedy from a man more at home filming mechanical sharks and mountains made of mashed potatoes — illustrates the dangers of handing a blank check over to someone who’s clearly out of their depth.

And few are more out of their depth than the men and women who make up today’s Comcast.

First and foremost, there is the bad service. I think anyone who’s ever spent any amount of time under Comcast’s thumb probably could fill the next several paragraphs recounting their own bad-service horror stories. In the interests of space, I’ll limit mine to simply reporting that in the four months since my wife and I have moved into our lavish Southern California estate, Comcast has had to send repair folk over to my home three times — that’s about three more 9-a.m.-to-1-p.m. service windows that I need in my life. (This figure does not count the half-dozen or so calls reporting technical difficulties that could be fixed over the phone.) On the occasions when I’ve had to explain that the cable box on our second television set is not receiving signals while the other cable box is working just fine, I’ve felt like I’d be better off explaining to apes how to make fire. And on the morning when my Internet service — also provided through the courtesy of Comcast — went out within minutes of my cable service, I found myself having to call two separate numbers to explain two problems to the same company.

Isn’t one of the benefits of being a bloated industrial monolith the fact that you only have to set up one phone number for putting irate customers on hold?

Not that Comcast doesn’t try to make amends for its service butchery. A couple months back, we had a cable outage that knocked out our HBO channels for a day or so. As subscribing HBO increases our monthly cable bill by — and I’m estimating roughly here — $10,000, our inability to watch countless repeat showings of “Powder” and “Arliss” reruns left us understandably testy. After a heated phone call to Comcast in which we explained that it’s generally considered bad form to accept payment for services and then not provide them, we received in the mail an apologetic card from Comcast along with a coupon for a free pay-per-view movie. “Up to a $3.99 value!” the coupon declared.

Honey, put on your best dress and break out the fancy pearls — we’re watching Jeepers Creepers 2 tonight!

Now what makes my interactions with Comcast especially funny are the commercials the cable operator constantly broadcasts in which it heralds its stellar track record of customer service and reliability. Oh wait — did I say “funny?” Pardon, my English is not too good — I meant to say “infuriating to the point where the mere sight of a Comcast ad makes my head swarm with bees and my eyes fill with blood and my face develop some sort of uncontrollable tic.”

Comcast has an entire series of ads in which families recount the multitude of slights and agonies they suffered at the hands of satellite providers before they wised up and put their home-entertainment needs in the hands of those selfless problem-solvers at Comcast. Having never owned a satellite dish, I can’t attest to the veracity of these claims — I’ve run into people that swear by DirecTV and those who curse its name to the heavens. But, having witnessed Comcast’s deft customer service efforts first-hand, I can’t imagine how a satellite TV outfit could possibly do any worse, unless the customer service reps end each phone call with a string of profanities or the guy who comes to install your dish runs off with your wife or that the business provider is nothing more than a mob front. And even then, it still might be a draw.

(Then again, Comcast has a bee in its bonnet when it comes to satellite television. After all, when the protection of limited competition helps you rake in $18.5 billion in revenue — 35 percent of your industry’s total sales — you’d be understandably peeved should a viable alternative like satellite TV emerge to muscle in on your business. Just be thankful if you only have to worry about pissy commercials decrying satellite television — in the Bay Area, Comcast pays its employees a bonus for providing the names or addresses of neighbors who have satellite dishes, according to this San Francisco Chronicle article. “If one of our employees notices that a house in the neighborhood has a satellite dish, they’ll make a note of it,” Comcast spokesman Andrew Johnson told the Chronicle. “We’ll put it in our database and then turn it over to our marketing folks. Then they’ll hopefully work their magic.” Presumably, that means “repeated phone calls while you’re trying to eat dinner” and not “late-night visits from gangs of local toughs,” though I wouldn’t put the latter past Comcast.)

I could deal with all of this — the lousy service, the inefficient use of phone lines, the paltry pay-per-view coupons offered as recompense, the Captain Queeg-like paranoia about those devilish satellite TV companies — were it not for one commercial so awful, so hideous, so positively hateful that I have taken a blood vow against Comcast and all its subsidiaries. This one Comcast commercial so perfectly encapsulates all that is wrong with that company and why it is unfit to handle its own affairs, let alone those of Disney’s.

The commercial begins with a married couple enjoying a lovely meal at what I assume to be the kind of local Italian eatery — my clue: the faux relief of Mediterranean pastoral scenes behind their table — aimed at diners who consider an evening at The Olive Garden to be “putting on airs.” The woman frets about their adolescent son, left home alone so she and hubby can enjoy their $7.95 plate of noodles and Ragu. The husband reassures her — their son is a good boy, a smart kid, not the kind to get himself in any sort of trouble. “Besides,” the husband says, “he doesn’t have the code for the cable box.” Cut to the their son, looking flabbergasted that Comcast’s confounded parental controls and channel locks are preventing him from ordering “Sex House 3” on pay-per-view. Cut back to the parents laughing maniacally at their son’s folly. The commercial ends before we can see whether the son, denied his chance to see boobies in digital-cable clarity, decides to commit himself to a life of quiet contemplation and prayer or whether he winds up breaking into Dad’s liquor cabinet.

This commercial is so wrong on so many levels. First of all, as a former teenage boy, I can assure you that nothing — not even some cable company’s fancy-pants parental control or channel lock — will stop us from watching programming we really shouldn’t. Back in my day, my parents had a few parental controls of their — they called them “savage beatings” and “the threat of eternal damnation” — and that didn’t stop me from trying to dial in the scrambled Playboy Channel in the vain hopes of identifying and illicit body part or two. So if I was willing to risk the wrath of both my mother and Almighty God just to see a digitally scrambled boob, what chance does Comcast think it has of stopping me and those of my ilk?

But let’s pretend for a second that Comcast does possess the space-age technology to stop horny teenage boys in their tracks and make them slink off in shame and self-recrimination like that poor, dumb kid in the TV ad. Who on earth — other than lazy people eager to hand off their parenting obligations to a multibillion-dollar corporation — would want such a thing? The hooter-obsessed youth who a decade or two ago were jury-rigging cable descramblers out of tinfoil and coffee stirrers so that they could catch a fleeting glimpse of Sybil Danning and Shannon Tweed are now running companies, designing products, shaping industries. They are developing the technologies that will drive our economy back into the boom times. But Comcast apparently wants to put the kibosh on all that. Comcast doesn’t like it when people challenge the rules. Comcast wants a neat and orderly world where any and all creative impulses are snuffed out before they can take root, lest they ruin mom and dad’s passable spaghetti dinner down at Luigi’s House of Noodles. And maybe Comcast is right — maybe people are eager to embrace a world of conformity and dullards and boob-free television.

Me? I’d rather die.

And so I shudder to think what would happen if Comcast ever got its covetous mitts on Disney, and Uncle Walt’s old company began soaking in Comcast’s peculiar brand of corporate culture. Would the SportsCenter anchors only give the baseball scores at some point during a four-hour service window? Would viewers who call up to complain when The Bachelor gets pre-empted receive a coupon for a free Miramax rental? Would Comcast employees snoop around looking for neighbors who don’t tune into ABC? And would those neighbors then receive menacing phone calls from Jim Belushi pestering them to watch According to Jim? Worst of all, would ABC be subject to intermittent outages and reception problems, preventing people from tuning into It’s All Relative and My Wife and Kids and whatever other bland, inconsequential programming the Mouse Network is airing these days.

Say, you know what? It probably would.

Maybe this merger isn’t such a bad idea after all.

My kids have been wandering into the older-skewed shows on Nickelodeon such as All That and The Amanda Show. The Amanda Show in particular exerts some kind of weird hold on my daughter. I can't explain it. The show is so awful it makes Korman and Conway look like they were doing "King Lear."

One of the names which goes by in the credits on The Amanda Show is Dan Schneider. Which had me wondering: Is this the same Dan Schneider from the great Head of the Class? Last I'd seen Dan -- who, as the wiseass fat kid, was something of a hero of mine, especially when he lost all the weight and got all handsome and stuff -- last I'd seen Dan, he had put on all the weight he'd lost and then some and was playing a big fat guy with a greasy mustache in the Tonya Harding TV movie.

According to the IMDb, at least, this is, in fact, the same Dan Schneider. He's a writer, producer, and show creator, mainly responsible for shows like Drake & Josh.

Alas, Drake & Josh makes What's Happening!! look like Dostoevsky.

There are many traps for the unfortunate television reviewer. Being forced to watch unrelieved dreck is only the most obvious one. The other traps are more insidious and often more agonizing: Sometimes you watch a show only for it to be cancelled before you can write your review. Other times someone else on staff gets to writing their review first, so you’ve wasted your valuable time for nothing. Unless you’re Phil, in which case you can run your redundant review anyway. Rarely, you find a show you fall in love with and write that glowing review, only to have the show yanked from the air anyway. Yes, there are many traps.

Perhaps the worst trap, though — the one you can’t even get out of by chewing off your own leg — is when you watch the show with someone you live with, be they husband, wife, child, roomie, or cellmate. And you do not like the show and would never watch it again, except they do, and they then put it on your TV — perhaps as often as once a week! — until you die. Or anyway the show gets itself cancelled.

It was just this way that I ended up watching almost two full seasons of the wretched That’s Life. I was even about to spin that moldy hay into spiteful follow-up review gold when the show was summarily put to death (see Trap Number Two, above).

I wasn’t out of the trap for long before the next one came along and snapped me up, this one titled American Dreams. As you can tell from my review, I was not overly fond of this show. I really only wrote the thing to make fun of my wife’s mostly former accent, just like Phil said.

I didn’t like the show, but my wife jumped on it like a fresh cheesesteak from Pat’s. I can understand why, although it took me a while to work it out: In a way, it gives her something of a window into her father’s youth. He and the character of JJ would be almost exactly the same age, and both grew up in pretty much the same neighborhood. Her father played football in high school and he attended the same one fictionalized as East Catholic in the show. JJ and my wife’s dad were pretty close parallels until JJ got sent to Vietnam; my wife’s father never served, while JJ is having all kinds of adventures in the Land of Artfully Disarrayed House Plants.

Truth be told, the show has grown on me. I’m a sucker, really. I’ll fall for almost anything, and American Dreams, which can be very not good, also isn’t often really bad. Sure, the second season’s gimmick of having performers from the 1960s played by modern performers has done little except show how lousy most modern performers are in comparison. The high point of this (or low, if you prefer) came with the überbland Nick Lachey getting lost in the toes somewhere while trying to fill the shoes of Tom Jones — never mind his complete inability to fake a Welsh accent (and who can blame him for that?), the boy just can’t sing with anything approaching Tom Jones’ power. Jones, lest we forget, once broke a microphone with the power of his voice alone. Nick Lachey could break a microphone, maybe, but only with a hammer and a burly assistant.

The show still has its share of overwhelmingly cutesy moments, too: As when Meg visits Beth at her job as a bartender while a performer does a sound check in the background. “Who’s that?” asks Meg. “Janis something,” Beth replies, and we are then treated to a very unfortunate rendering of early Janis Joplin courtesy of next month’s flavor, Bonnie McKee. Thank you, Relentless Promotion Machine!

Nevertheless, I follow the show in a soap opera kind of way, even though I dislike myself for it. My wife will sometimes watch an episode without me and I find myself spending the next viewing pestering her with questions: “What happened to the pregnancy? Aren’t they still dating? Who’s that guy? Where’d the Nation of Islam go? Did they kiss yet?”

The show has some quirks which I actually think are good TV. Early in the show’s run they used a technique — which they later played down but which has been making a strong comeback — where the dialogue from one scene overlaps with the following scene so that it comments on the action even though the two are unrelated. It’s simple, maybe, and not the most original thing ever, but it’s not the kind of thing you see in off-the-shelf TV, and it brings American Dreams to a new level.

Another thing the show clearly is trying to do is have characters react in unexpected ways, but which are consistent with the character. I keep expecting Henry, for example, to finally say something to his nephew Nathan about what a jerk he is — it would be standard in any TV drama to have a big confrontation around the dinner table — but the writers steadfastly refuse to have Henry do anything other than a low simmer no matter how angry he gets. That Henry is a man who has learned to keep his emotions, good and bad, under tight control is a trait the show has come back to again and again. It would be so easy to turn him into a caricature, but they’ve managed to avoid it so far. And Jonathan Adams has built a whole range of physical nuances for his portrayal of Henry to reflect the writing almost perfectly.

Which brings me to what I think is the true center of the show. NBC would have you believe the show is about Meg Pryor, but I happen to think Meg is the weakest, limpest part of the show. No, the true center of the show is shared by the two fathers, Henry and Jack. Tom Verica’s Jack Pryor is what draws me into American Dreams the most. Verica and the show’s creative team have collaborated to create possibly the most rounded portrait of a father ever seen on TV. Going in to the first episode, I was sure Jack would be your standard by-the-numbers TV dad: Gruff, lacking understanding of his kids, a force to be defied and ignored by his children, someone to be undercut by his wife at home and his wise African-American underling at work. But by some miracle or planetary conjunction or other unknown force, Jack Pryor wasn’t written that way. He’s strong, thoughtful, sometimes wise, sometimes wrong, occasionally stubborn, always loving. He’s often conflicted and Tom Verica shows that with a subtle and powerful performance. He doesn’t always know what’s right but he tries to work it out, and the actor gives him small silences in which to think. You don’t often see characters thinking on TV. You also don’t often see characters who don’t broadcast their every feeling with dialogue. I find myself telling Jack on my TV, “Just say how you feel. Tell Henry how much you value him. Go ahead. SPEAK!” But he doesn’t. Because that’s not Jack. Jack lets his silences and his actions speak for him.

Unfortunately, if all you’ve seen of American Dreams is the promos NBC runs for it, you probably think I’m insane. NBC has been undercutting this show from its inception, trying to place each new episode as some enormous crisis in American history during which one family is torn apart. The promos always take a few lines completely out of context so you think all hell is breaking loose, when in fact in context it’s just another small step along the soapy plotline. Jack Pryor is especially badly served by the commercials: There’s always some line where he’s throwing someone out of the house or making some kind of ultimatum or something, when on the show he’s very measured.

If NBC would promote the show properly, and maybe stop trying to peddle their lame would-be pop stars during an otherwise inoffensive show, American Dreams could be a whole lot better. Well, I guess NBC figures the series nabbed a couple of Emmys so it doesn’t need improving. Even if the awards were for Outstanding Costumes and, uh, Outstanding Hairstyling.

There is one more small bright spot. Peter Onorati has been showing up more and more lately as the recurring character of Dom, another store owner in Jack Pryor’s neighborhood. The amazing thing about Dom is this: He has a genuine Philadelphia accent. Onorati must have perfect pitch to have so superbly captured the inflection which has so eluded virtually every other actor on the show. It’s even more impressive since the actor is from Boonton, New Jersey, which, despite sounding as if it’s the distant hinterlands, is actually a fairly urban area not known for its working-class accent.

Every time Dom speaks, I feel like I’m in my in-laws’ row home. But I manage to suppress the urge to flee. After all, I need to find out if JJ is going to get his privates blown off in the Nam.

The inherent flaw in American Idol is that you can only vote for someone. I would also like to be able to vote against people. I think that would make this show even more popular. As online bulletin boards, chat rooms, and the e-mail we get on a regular basis all attest, people thrill to the idea of being anonymously nasty. So why not tap into that vein of sublimated maliciousness?

Better still, why not start it for free, then charge people to vote negatively? Imagine the dollars that would roll in! The ugly family scenes as some ninth-grader blows her allowance trying to vote against all the rivals to whichever ambisexual dork ascends to Clay Aiken's throne while her brother votes against the latest teenybopper idol! Chaos and discord are rarely this profitable outside the defense sector.

It's a genius idea. I just hope Fox sends me a cut.

At this point, criticizing Star Trek: Enterprise seems as wrong and unfair as, say, beating up a retarded child. After all, it’s just Silly Sci-Fi For The Kids, right? But when it comes to Enterprise, hand me the critical brass knuckles and stand back. It’s not only bad Star Trek — it’s bad television.

Though I can’t profess the same level of affection for other areas of fandom, I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Star Trek. Not the original series, mind you — I’m afraid I was born too late to view William Shatner’s crazed-alpha-male behavior as anything but amusing. But The Next Generation was must-see family viewing during my formative years, so I had ample opportunities to contrast my dad’s disciplinary style with that of the Klingon empire. (I swear, every time Worf opened his mouth, Dad was taking mental notes.) The famous “I See Four Lights” episode (That’s “Chain of Command, Part II,” Nathan. -ed.) remains burned into my memory as one of the most disturbing, gut-wrenching hours of TV I’ve ever seen.

I’m only too willing to roll my eyes at Trek’s notorious technobabble, or its overuse of the famous Cosmic Reset Button. I wouldn’t be caught dead at a Trek convention. And you’d have to repeatedly taser me, and risk some really vicious bites, to get me to wear Spock ears. But when I think Star Trek, I get an undeniably warm, glowy feeling, not unlike one of those nebulas that went whizzing by in the opening credits.

Which is why, after bailing out of Enterprise two episodes into its first season, and hearing nothing terribly favorable in the years since, I nonetheless sat down the other night to give the latest Trek one more chance to win me over. Star Trek is Star Trek, right? I tried. I really did.

I lasted maybe ten minutes before the awfulness collapsed my brain.

Before I go any further, I should note that I recently saw “Star Trek: Nemesis,” the last gasp of the Next Generation crew, for the first time. Mind you, I’ll gladly watch Patrick Stewart in anything. The man could bring wit and gravitas to a recitation of the phone book, or even to those horribly cutesy nursery-rhyme commercials for Unidentified Prescription Drug #243B. (I swear he’s reading those through clenched teeth.) But whose decision was it to give Picard a Galaxy-class midlife crisis? Jean-Luc Picard is not Chow Yun-Fat. He does not dive down corridors, taking out a hail of enemies with a gun in each hand. Since when does the cerebral diplomat of my youth drive dune buggies?

“Nemesis” certainly had its moments — take that, giant viewscreen! — but on the whole it seemed to herald a crude, ugly new age of Star Trek. The women are sexualized, victimized or sidelined (sometimes all three!) while the big, tough men solve problems with their fists and their phaser pistols. You can try to work out your problems peaceably, if you want to be some kind of gigantic wuss, but ultimately you’ve gotta kill the bumpy-forehead bastards before they kill you.

So, now that you know what I thought of “Nemesis” — well, Enterprise is worse. And I’m not just talking about the godawful Diane Warren-penned theme song.

Remember Scott Bakula, that guy from Quantum Leap? The funny, clever hero who survived the most desperate or embarassing of situations with aw-shucks charm? Well, Enterprise doesn’t. Bakula’s Captain Archer honestly looks like he’s walking around with a dilithium rod up his port nacelle. Watch him glower! Watch him brood! Watch him deliver all his lines in the grim monotone of a man thinking about his next house payment!

It’s not just him — it’s the whole ship. Jolene Blaylock at least has the excuse of playing a Vulcan. But dammit, Jim, it’s not a good sign that she’s got more personality than 90 percent of the cast. Especially when she and her spectacular cleavage seem to be confined to the role of Officer In Charge Of Strategically Leaning Forward At Every Opportunity. Sadly, she’s still a more dynamic character than Scaredy-Cat Translator Woman, who in turn is at least female, and therefore vaguely distinguishable from Helm Guy, Weapons Guy, and Engineer Guy.

Wait. I think two of them might have accents. And one of them is possibly black.

(The perennial exception, I should mention, is John Billingsley as Dr. Phlox. He’s just as awesome as I remember him from the pilot, reeling off even the most wooden lines with breezy, understated good humor. If they renamed the show Star Trek: Phlox, I would seriously consider watching.)

The only thing more palsied than the acting? The writing. The writers can’t just be funny — they have to wink broadly at the audience to announce that, yes, now is Humor Time. And then the music gets all light and goofy, and the cast members put on their strained Humor Faces and enact some painfully out-of-place bit of yuks. Humor should arise naturally from the characters. (See: Firefly. Or Farscape. Or, heck, Deep Space Nine.) But as we’ve already established, Enterprise is a bit lacking in the character department, and the resulting attempts at amusement feel forced and embarrassing. It’s like watching a six-year-old botch the perfomance of an elaborate joke he doesn’t even fully understand.

Unfortunately, the show can’t shake its stodginess even when it’s trying to be serious. Granted, the original series was no pinnacle of subtlety, and even The Next Generation had its share of thuddingly obvious morals. But sitting through an episode of Enterprise is like getting a 44-minute beating with the Relevancy Stick.

I’m all for using science fiction as a means to discuss complicated real-world issues. The problem with Enterprise is that subtlety apparently does not exist in the 23rd century. The writers drag out their clumsy, tinfoil-covered version of some real world event and agonize through all its most obvious aspects, all the while declaring, “Look! We’re being relevant! Relevant, damn you!”

For instance, there’s the enigmatic parable that concluded Enterprise’s second season, involving Evil Space Terrorists who come out of nowhere and launch a devastating killer laser beam that leaves an ugly scar clean across the United States. Gee, I wonder what that could be referring to. It’s ghastly enough for Star Trek to so ham-fistedly exploit such an enormous real-world tragedy. But the path the show has taken since — transforming the Enterprise from an exploratory vessel into a warship hellbent on vengance — feels like a violation of the peaceful spirit that’s defined the series from its earliest carboard-and-model-glue days. Maybe this plotline was supposed to energize the Trek franchise. Instead, it’s sucked the last traces of fun out of it.

It’s cheesy, but it’s true — Star Trek used to tell us that we were better than hate. That the future was a hopeful place. And that even when we had to defend ourselves, we could still find something in our enemies to relate to. Something we could build from. Even Star Trek: Voyager, which was no prize in the overall quality department, kept its sense of optimism. It’s a sorry day indeed when the touchy-feely idiocy of Voyager can serve as an example of anything good about Star Trek.

It’s no surprise that ratings for Enterprise continue to plunge. The cancellation sharks are circling. And fans aren’t exactly leaping to the show’s defense. After years of complaints along the lines of “this food tastes terrible, and the portions are too small,” even science fiction’s most loyal enthusiasts have apparently had enough.

Enterprise isn’t silly, it’s barely science fiction, and what with all the cleavage and the killing and the general absence of fun, it’s definitely not for kids. It’s just another stupid show with hot babes, laser beams, and stuff blowing up. And it needs to take that last lightspeed jump into the distance, preferably at Warp Factor 9.

Please, Paramount: make it so.

AP reports that Paul Reubens -- ahem, and I quote, "'Pee-wee Herman' actor Paul Reubens" -- plead guilty to a misdemeanor obscenity charge, leaving him paying a $100 fine and going into counseling for a year. Apparently the Florida police seized around 30,000 images among which were some of naked youngsters.

Reubens' mouthpiece is quoted as saying, "If that means a black-and-white tintype from 1901 with a young man of indeterminate, 17- to 19-year-old age, laying on the beach after having gone skinny-dipping... then they got it."

Lucky for Reubens (Paul), the more serious child pornography charge was dropped. Unlucky for Rubens (Peter Paul), since many of his 17th century paintings now qualify as child pornography, I guess.

But the most shocking thing about this article was not that everyone's favorite kiddie show host is still an unrepentant perv. No, the most shocking thing was this: Paul Reubens is 51 years old.

The FCC has so far issued fines to Howard Stern for being indecent and to Bono -- everyone's favorite humanitarian since Mother Teresa kicked and Willie Nelson admitted to smokin' da ganja -- for daring to say the word "fucking" during the Golden Globes.

Salon reports FCC chaircritter Michael "That's My Daddy in Iraq" Powell as saying, "By our action today, broadcasters are on clear notice that, in the future, they will be subject to potential enforcement action for any broadcast of the 'F-Word' or a variation thereof in situations such as that here."

The F-word in question being, of course, Family connections.

I just read on AP that Paris Hilton was thrown from a horse during the taping of The Simple Life 2 and hospitalized. While I do not wish that Paris was actually hurt -- as much as I despise her public persona and deeply resent the fact that I even know the name of such a seemingly worthless creature -- I can't help but think that The Simple Life would be greatly improved by a helping of Christopher Reeveism.

Imagine, if you will, The Simplest Life, in which we watch as a paralyzed Paris lies perfectly still, with a soundtrack of respiratory machinery, the monotony only occasionally broken as she blinks.

Granted that this would cut greatly into her extracurricular activities, especially those involving infrared videocameras and mugging frat boys. I think, though, that it would still total up as a net profit for the entertainment industry.

LIST OF CHARACTERS

LAIRD BROWN, a programming bigwig

V. RIESEN, a perpetual junior exec; his sense of ethics is a constant hindrance to his career

A. YESMAN, a yes-man

The action takes place in a television network boardroom.  The players are seated around a huge mahogany table that occupies most of the room.  The back wall is dominated by a circular black logo, a gigantic prime time schedule and an equally gigantic print of an eagle in flight, labeled with the caption, “Dare to Soar!”  To one side is a calendar, opened to November 2002; the picture for November is of an orange and white cat.

BROWN. All right, then, it’s settled.  We secretly prep our own British show as a mid-season replacement in case this Coupling thing takes off.  If Seth Tucker thinks he can corner the market on Limey imports, he’s going to have to get past Mr. Bean first.  Next up on the agenda is the homo situation.

RIESEN. The “homo situation”?

BROWN. You know what I’m talking about.  Almost every other network has some show about gays on their schedule, and their ratings are going through the roof.  Homos are hot, my friend.  Will and Grace!  Queer Eye for the Straight Guy! Those collect call commercials with Mike Piazza and Alf! I’m telling you, this country is cuckoo for cream puffs, and what I want to know is, where’s our piece of the pie?

YESMAN. You’re absolutely right, LB!

BROWN. That’s why I’m in charge, kid.  So the question before us is, how do we put together our own gay show in the quickest amount of time, while expending the least amount of effort possible?

RIESEN. Well, that depends.  Are we talking about a Norman Lear style examination of the cultural issues surrounding homosexuality, or the same kind of crap we usually trot out every season?

BROWN. The second one.  I think.  Who’s Norman Lear?

RIESEN. Producer who had a string of successful sitcoms in the seventies based on a realistic examination of minorities, bigotry, and class struggle.  He’s the guy that did Good Times, Sanford and Son, All in the Family…

BROWN. Yes!  That’s exactly the approach I’m looking for.

RIESEN. Really?

BROWN. Absolutely.  We’ll take the premise of All in the Family and slap in some gays!

RIESEN. Oh.

BROWN. Only without that “realistic examination” business to weight it down.

RIESEN. Right.

BROWN. All in the Family was huge by itself; with gays, people will go absolutely horseshit over it.  And just so nobody misses the connection, we’ll call the show All in the Gay Family.

RIESEN. I suspect the lawyers might have something to say about that.

BROWN. Well, let’s get as close as we can.  Something with the words “all” and “family” in it, anyway.  All About the Family.  It’s All Family. Something like that.

RIESEN. We’ll work on it.

BROWN. Of course, you know why All in the Family was such a massive hit, don’t you?

RIESEN. Because of its honest, even-handed, and humorous portrayal of prejudice and of the clash between conservative and liberal values?

BROWN. Close.  It’s because the star was a big, gruff Irish Catholic.

RIESEN. Oh, God, not the Irish thing again.  Did you learn nothing from Madigan Men?

BROWN. The only lesson to be learned from _Madigan Men _was that Gabriel Byrne wasn’t big and gruff enough.  Irish Catholics are funniest when they’re big and gruff.  And drunk.  So we get the biggest, gruffest, drunkest Mick we can find to play our new Archie Bunker.

YESMAN. Didn’t Archie Bunker own a bar, LB?

BROWN. I like the way you think, kid.  That’s perfect!  The Irish guy owns a bar.  That way we get a whole roomful of big, gruff, drunk Micks.

RIESEN. So where do the gays fit in?

BROWN. Hmmm.  How about if, instead of a flaming liberal, the Irish guy’s daughter marries a flaming gay man?

RIESEN. If he’s marrying a daughter, he probably isn’t very gay.

BROWN. Okay, what if Archie has a son instead of a daughter, and his son marries a lesbian.

RIESEN. Same problem.

BROWN. All right.  What if his son marries a straight woman… with a gay mother and father?

RIESEN. Gay father and father.

BROWN. Jesus Christ, you’re nitpicky!  Fine, Archie’s son marries a straight woman with two gay fathers.  They’re Protestants, so the Irish Catholics have another reason to hate them.  One of them is an interior decorator, or a hairstylist, or an art dealer or something, and the other one will be a teacher, so it looks like we think it’s OK for gays to be teachers.

YESMAN. That’s so progressive, LB!

BROWN. And, of course, whenever there are two or more sitcom dads, one of them has to be laid-back and mellow, and the other one has to be uptight and anal… [He begins chuckling quietly to himself.]  Anal!  [He continues to chuckle for several seconds.  RIESEN shifts uncomfortably in his seat.]  Make sure that gets into the show somewhere.

RIESEN. Isn’t that a little crude for family hour?

BROWN. Nothing’s too crude as long as gays are involved.  Will and Grace does off-color stuff all the time.  And have you watched those Queer Eye guys?  The Fag Five?

RIESEN. Fab Five.

BROWN. Whatever.  Every third sentence that comes out of their mouths is either a penis reference or a crack about butt-sex… Hey, “crack!”  Make sure that gets in, too.

RIESEN. Well, can we at least get some legitimately gay actors to play the fathers?

BROWN. We’ve been through this before with the blacks and the Latins, Riesen.  There just aren’t enough minority actors out there looking to be cast.

RIESEN. I’m pretty sure we may be able to dig up a couple of gay ones.

BROWN. Well, even if you could, you know that gay actors can’t act gay.  They’re no good at it.  They refuse to prance about limp-wristed, emit high-pitched squeals, and openly slobber over other men’s buns, and it always completely ruins the realism.  On the other hand, look at the straight guy they got to play Jack on Will and Grace.  Now that is what it means to be gay.

RIESEN. Well, who, then?

BROWN. Just pull somebody from the pool of regulars.  I’m sure Jonathan Silverman wouldn’t mind an Emmy on his shelf.

RIESEN. Already working on a pilot.

BROWN. How about Breckin Meyer?

RIESEN. Already signed up for Married to the Kellys.

BROWN. Steven Weber?

RIESEN. You just earmarked him to play Mr. Bean.

BROWN. God damn it!  Fine.  Hire your gay guys.  But they damned well better mince.

RIESEN. I’ll talk to them about it.  So, uh, what happens during an episode of this show, exactly?

BROWN. Happens?

RIESEN. You know… Plot.  Storyline.  That sort of thing.

BROWN. Oh, well, uh… The Irish parents will do some heterosexual, Irish thing, like going to a Red Sox game.  And the gay parents will come along and make fun of them for swilling beer and being uncultured boobs.  And they’ll always be saying hilarious, over-the-top, gay-oriented things like, “Oh my gay God!”

RIESEN. A phrase that no gay man since the dawn of time has ever uttered.

BROWN. And then the Irish guy will say something like, “You’ve always got to gay everything up, don’t you?”  Then he’ll call them fruits.  There will be a big fight, and then at the end of the episode they’ll all agree to disagree, for the sake of the kids.

YESMAN. It’s brilliant, LB!  I love it!

BROWN. What’s not to love?

RIESEN. Oh, I don’t know.  How about the fact that the show’s sole premise is to trot out the most overplayed, insulting stereotypes about gays and Irish-Americans?  How about that the so-called humor content relies entirely on either riding those stereotypes into the ground, or on dispensing dick jokes that are too juvenile for most third-graders?  Or how about that the show is only “about gays” because you think you can use them as justification to get away with this unoriginal, unfunny, offensive bullshit?

BROWN. Why do you even open your mouth during these meetings?  Nobody in this boardroom wants to listen to your voice, Riesen.

RIESEN. I just think that if we’re going to go out of our way to be offensive, we should do it in the furtherance of at least some tiny modicum of entertainment.

BROWN. Now listen here, Riesen, and listen good.  This network is a business first.  And it’s a business second.  And third, and possibly fourth, this network is a business.  It’s only an… an entertainment fifth or lower.

YESMAN. And it’s a political organ, LB!

BROWN. Right, a political organ, yes.  The network’s a business first through fourth, then it’s a political organ fifth, but only insofar as politics help business.  And only then is it an entertainment, if we have time left over.

YESMAN. Fuck entertainment, LB!

BROWN. And I’ll tell you something else.  I don’t know shit about entertainment, but I know one thing for damn sure: stereotypes, dick jokes, and covering our ass behind a thin veneer of political correctness is good for business.

YESMAN. [standing and applauding] Well said, LB!

BROWN. Thank you. [He stands.]  And now I believe our business here is done.  You two call around to the studios and see what they can throw together by January. [He leaves, but returns a few seconds later.] And make sure “organ” gets in, too!

    BROWN leaves again.  There is a moment of strained silence.

YESMAN. [sadly] This show is going to be miserably bad, isn’t it?

RIESEN. Yes, Yesman.  Yes it is.

YESMAN. Shall I bury it in the schedule?

RIESEN. That’s a good idea.  In fact, slot it opposite the American Idol awards show.  At least, then, no gays will ever have to see it.

    Exeunt.

I know that Guinness ad -- the one where the three guys jump out of bed screaming "It's St. Patrick's Day!" as they race downstairs and gather 'round a keg to open up presents which just happen to be gift-wrapped boxes of Guinness Beer -- is supposed to be a whimsical and fun and reminiscent of many a Christmas morning. But each time I see it, I mistakenly think that I'm watching a PSA on how to tell if you're a problem drinker and that maybe it's time to seek help.

Though maybe that's the message Guinness was hoping to get across.

Yes, the Snell family did vote after American Idol tonight. The votes? George Huff, Jon Peter Lewis (twice), Diana Degarmo, Amy Adams, John Stevens, and Jasmine Trias. I am responsible for a couple of those votes....

In any event, here's how I'd project the final elimination places for the top 12, once all is said and done:

12. Leah LaBelle, 11. Matthew Rogers, 10. Jennifer Hudson, 9. Amy Adams, 8. Camile Velasco, 7. Diana Degarmo, 6. John Stevens, 5. Jasmine Trias, 4. George Huff, 3. La Toya London, 2. Jon Peter Lewis, 1. Fantasia Barrino.

That said, I think tonight clearly we found a first tier of talent (Fantasia, La Toya, Diana, Jennifer, Jasmine), a second tier of singers-with-personality (George, Pen Boy, John, Amy, Camile), and two people who are hopelessly outclassed (Leah and Matt).

All in all, tonight's show was indeed the best group of 12 in American Idol history. Nobody embarrassed themselves, really -- and usually there are 3 or 4 of those at this stage. I think Leah's going home, because she did the worst and because the women outnumber the men by so much (giving Rose Bowl Rogers a reprieve), but at this stage nothing would surprise me. I think Jennifer Hudson, who is clearly one of the best singers, is in danger because there are two other fabulous and soulful black women who are better than her, and therefore she might find herself without a strong enough following.

Anyway, that's a pick involving my theory of Idol voting tending to pick individuals to represent diverse constituencies, which would mean that women are more likely to go than men right now, and that the weakest member of a group of similar performers will always be a target.

And that's all part of the beauty of American Idol. Yes, it is just a damned popularity contest. That's the whole point. And sometimes that means an adorable in-over-his-head 16-year-old crooner advances when he shouldn't, and sometimes it means that a real talent (hello, Tamyra) gets booted while a non-threatening pretty boy (Justin Guarini!) sticks around.

It's like high school student government, with singing. Brilliant!

Did you miss the premiere of Wonderfalls, the intriguing new show on Fox that premiered Friday night? Well, you get a second chance -- it's re-airing Thursday night at 9.

Give it a try. If you're a-feared that it's going to be a bit too much like CBS' Joan of Arcadia, don't be. It's got a really different vibe. And at this point in the season, much to my shock, I'd say that I think Wonderfalls has more in store creatively than Joan does.

I missed American Idol on its first couple of go-rounds. No… "missed" isn't exactly the most accurate word. More along the lines of "ran away screaming like a Mensa recruiter leaving the Lachey-Simpson home." There are many reasons for this one-man American Idol boycott, chiefly that the siren of reality television, she does not sing for me. Also, back when I lived in Northern California, we had an open-mouthed-breathing simian of a neighbor who blasted American Idol at top volume as part of her one-woman campaign to turn our luxury apartment complex into a flophouse for hillbillies. So naturally, I began to blindly hate all that she held dear — certain television programs, the Oakland Raiders, her children — and vowed to never rest until every one of them had been driven into the sea.

Besides, why bother to tune into a show when you can hear it perfectly clearly through the walls?

Anyhow, I had never really set eyes on American Idol until I returned to the San Francisco area on business and flopped at the plush estate of fellow Vidiot Jason Snell. And the Snells, they are an American Idol household. They watch the shows. They review the candidates. They argue over which one will get the coveted Snell votes and engage in the kind of horse-trading that would make seasoned legislators look as if they just rolled into Capital City on the 4:28 turnip truck. If just a simple majority of the American electorate vetted the presidential candidates with the same rigor the Snells apply to American Idol hopefuls, it's a cinch that our next president would be a lot better than the simp we're stuck with now.

Sure, we'd be stuck with Clay Aiken. But improvement — however nominal — is still improvement.

Anyhow, I was staying with the Snells, and they watch American Idol. And as a thoughtful house-guest, I can't just whine and complain and stomp my feet until they feel obligated to watch something else. I mean, I certainly tried my level best, but they just wouldn't budge.

They're very selfish people that way.

Now, as it turns out, the night of my first, and what I hoped would be my last, exposure to American Idol occurred the night the second group of semifinalists performed — an evening widely regarded by Idol-ologists as quite possibly the worst evening of pained caterwauling since Roseanne Arnold crooned the National Anthem before a San Padres game in 1990. Which would make it the worst evening of pained caterwauling since human beings developed the ability of speech. I know I'm hardly the first person to make this observation, but I realized right then and there that the thrill in tuning into American Idol is not to see which obscure talent will emerge from the competition to clog the pop charts with hit after hit of bland, overproduced pap or to pull for a gutsy underdog to turn back the challenge of a field of unworthies. Rather, it is the chance to watch people with just as much talent as the next guy but a limitless capacity for embarrassment crash and burn on a global scale.

And — big surprise to regular TeeVee readers accustomed to the special brand of life-affirming malice served up 'round here — I'm pretty OK with that. I mean, I've long since given up the illusion that the Kiwanis are about to make me grand marshal of the Nice Guy Parade, so why not have a few hearty chuckles at the expense of some teenybopper mutilating "I Wanna Dance With Somebody?"

So I'm hooked. I've tuned in every week since then. I don't miss a minute of the voting-results show (45 seconds of action jam-packed into 30 minutes of programming). I have reasoned, deeply help opinions on people named Amy Adams (huzzah!), Leah LaBelle (put a sock in it, sweetie), and Matthew Rogers (Oh dear God in heaven, no.) I read the article penned by my fellow Vidiot Steve Lutz on Jon Peter Lewis and John Stevens, and I understood every single word.

You can imagine how chilling this all is. I've known Lutz for more than a decade now, and the best I've ever been able to manage is ever third word and most of the nouns.

Nevertheless, American Idol is now part of the regular Michaels viewing rotation and will remain so until the last deluded wannabe is kicked to the curb. And there's not a damn thing I can do about. Change the channel, look away, stuff throw pillows into my ears the next time someone gets it into their skull that they can out-Whitney Houston Whitney Houston — all forms of resistance are futile in the face of American Idol's relentless assault. But there are a few things Fox can change about the show to make my voluntary captivity a little more enjoyable.

• I do not like it when the contestants — foolishly deciding to show off the limits of the pipes — take a note and begin sliding up and down the musical scale like an escalator gone mad, and the audience responds by cheering lustily. First off all, such vocal pyrotechnics usually fizzle out, turning what was once a passable performance into Drunken Sorority Sisters Karaoke Night at the Elephant Bar. So when the audience starts cheering as if Beverly Sills just nailed a high C, it naturally confuses and alarms me and makes me think that I'm receiving an alternate satellite feed of Bizzaro Idol where the worst singer wins a record contract. Second, that sort of behavior only encourages future contestants to make similar mincemeat out of vocal arrangements, and that can't be good for anyone's eardrums. I realize that some production monkey is doubtlessly prodding the studio audience to go bananas whenever a singer cranks up the ol' fortissimo meter to 11, but still…
• I do not like it when Simon Cowell — really, the only reason besides the schadenfreude to watch American Idol — offers up a perfectly valid criticism of someone's rotten singing and the audience boos robotically. Again, it's probable that some production monkey — likely the same one sending the mild electrical shock into the audience's seat cushions to get them to cheer everytime someone goes hideously off key — is pressing the button on the "Boo!" sign until his index finger goes numb. That doesn't mean I have to like it. Often times, Cowell is the only one giving an honest assessment of the singers — Randy Jackson is far too generous with his praise, and I think the only time Paula Abdul would ever utter a discouraging word is if one of the Idol hopefuls was a tone-deaf mute, and even then, she'd probably laud his spirited grunting — and all Cowell gets for his efforts is the mob's scorn. That's suppression of dissent, pure and simple, and no good can come of it. Sure, it's all in good fun to boo and hiss at the acid-tongued limey today, but in a month or two, when Rupert Murdoch overthrows the U.S. government to begin his brutal czar-like reign, we're going to wish we had been more supportive of Simon Cowell when he told that hapless chanteuse that she sucked rocks.
• I do not like Ryan Seacrest. Then again, outside of the 14-year-old-girl demographic, that's not really that unique of a sentiment.
• I do not like it when one of the contestants clearly crashes and burns — by singing the wrong notes, by making faces like they're trying to clean-and-jerk a 500-pound weight while belting out "I Get So Emotional," by causing car alarms to go off and dogs to yowl piteously in a five-county radius — and the judges do nothing but rave about the contestant's "potential." That this usually happens when the contestant is young and pretty and malleable is probably just a coincidence. I have long given up the illusion that we live in a meritocracy, but it seems that, in a talent competition, the participants should actually be judged on their talent and not their potential to one day — if all the conditions are right and the planets are aligned and nobody's listening too closely — actually remain on key.

But mostly, I do not like the fact that I am spending valuable hours of my life watching this show. And for that, I blame not Ryan Seacrest nor Paula Abdul nor the overeager production monkey ordering people to boo — I blame Snell. I will never forgive Snell. I will make Snell pay.

Right after I finish dialing up the American Idol hotline to pad the vote total for Amy Adams and John Stevens, that is.

I don't want to sound like a snob, but on matters of popular culture, the American public and I don't often see eye to eye. Of course, that's not really all that surprising. After all, they're fucking idiots.

Sure, that sounds harsh, but just look at the evidence. They tune in to Yes, Dear in great enough numbers to keep it around for four excruciating seasons while Freaks and Geeks is left, unloved, to wither and die on the vine after only one. They've let pop music become a wasteland of tepid, boilerplate R&B and third-generation Pearl Jam imitators -- now featuring all the bad playing and pompous lyrics of grunge, but sanitized of all that unpleasant aggression and inspiration! They turn out in droves to see movies that are nothing more than schlock seventies television shows chewed up, partially digested, and squirted out the dirty bunghole of Hollywood onto a roll of celluloid. And, despite the repeated efforts of the McDonald 's corporation, they refuse to embrace the McRib sandwich with enough enthusiasm to warrant adding it permanently to the regular McDonald's menu.

O, McRib! You delectable conglomerate of pork and pork-by-products, lovingly stripped off the bone (or what-have-you) and pressed into a rib-shaped slab such that the consumer may recognize its origins, then slathered with a glistening, barbecue sauce flavored gel! Why hath my countrymen forsaken thee? Must I be doomed forever to wait nine months to a year between opportunities to indulge in your fatty goodness?

One thing is for certain. The very last forum in which I ever expected to reconcile my differences with the teeming masses would have been Fox's American Idol. Idol is like a four-month long "Up yours" from the music business, the equivalent of the recording industry saying, "This is what you like, whether you like it or not." If we're to believe American Idol, the future of music is the status quo, and the performers we should most idolize are the ones who can best mimic the by-the-numbers pop of their forebears. What's worse, up until now Idol's phenomenal ratings have suggested that the audience agrees.

The contestants, for their part, play right into it, stripping themselves of all individuality to better fit the mold the marketing department has cast for them. Take last season's winner, Ruben Studdard, and his performance on this week's results show. When Ruben drifted ominously onto the Idol stage like the shadow of the Hindenburg, I knew the crushing weight of tedium couldn't be far behind. Ruben has a silky smooth voice and a seemingly bottomless well of likeability, but suffering through one of his inert renditions of a song that wasn't very interesting the first hundred times it was written is about as stimulating as staring at a wall and thinking back fondly on how fun it was to watch the paint dry. True to form, Studdard unleashed three minutes of the most derivative R&B imaginable, so boring that it seemed expressly crafted to lull his audience into a catatonic state so that they wouldn't struggle much when he ate them.

And so it was for the first half-dozen weeks or so of American Idol season three. Bereft of a better option -- Whoopi? Be serious. -- the wife and I tuned in each Tuesday to watch the clones roll off the assembly line and to assess their ability to meet the requirements of a mass produced pop icon. Got a voice that warbles like a horny alley cat, that may not actually be capable of holding a note, but that can flutter rapidly between all the notes around it so that it's hard to tell? Check. Got enough manual dexterity to point vaguely at members of the audience while bending slightly at the knees at rhythmic intervals? Check. Got a non-threatening demeanor and the willingness to let the people in wardrobe dress you up like a manic, colorblind Liberace? Check. Congratulations, kid, you may have what it takes to be the next American Idol! Yawn.

But something funny happened on the way to the foregone conclusion. Somewhere along the way, America veered off course from its pre-packaged pop destiny, thumbing its nose at the will of its corporate masters and simultaneously restoring my faith in the common man.

The first sign of rebellion appeared during the fourth semi-final round. Nestled unassumingly among seven attempts to replicate the mating call of the rose-breasted grosbeak were the vocal stylings of John Stevens. Stevens is a skinny redheaded kid from New York with a penchant for crooning and a deeper voice than he looks capable of. Remember Rick Astley? The little white man with the big black voice who insisted he was Never Gonna Give You Up on MTV in the mid-'80's? Swap Rick's Member's Only jacket for a dark suit coat and you've got John Stevens.

Midway through the show, young John stood up and crooned Billy Joel's "She's Always a Woman." Not very well, as it turns out. Quite badly, in fact. But unlike the other singers that night, he treated the song with respect -- meaning he didn't decide to change the notes he couldn't hit -- and, more importantly, he looked like he meant it. What Stevens lacked in vocal talent he made up for with a simple sincerity that, coupled with the bright orange patch on top of his head, has probably earned him more than one accidental visit from the Great Pumpkin on Halloween night.

Naturally, I was sure he was doomed. He had not selected an R&B standard. He had not dressed as a mannequin from the store window at The Gap. He had not pretended, against blatant evidence to the contrary, to be black. So when Stevens was pulled aside as one of the top three vote getters during the results show, and when he was soon afterwards revealed as the owner of the highest vote total, I had to have TiVo replay the moment several times just to convince myself that I hadn't gone insane as a defense mechanism against Ryan Seacrest's infernal mugging.

What was this? Could it be that America had become fed up with the endless parade of wannabe Mariah Careys? Had they, in fact, chosen a mediocre performer as their champion simply because he dared to step outside the confines of urban adult contemporary? But no, that couldn't be. Simon Cowell had stated the night before that he hoped Stevens would do well because he was different. Obviously the proletariat, mindless automatons that they are, had simply latched on to his comment and voted accordingly. This was, after all, the same tribe of unwashed heathens that had held Jessica Simpson aloft in the Billboard 200 for 29 weeks and counting.

Then came Jon Peter Lewis. Already a failure during semi-final round three with his painfully mannered rendition of "Tiny Dancer," the 24-year old pen salesman from Idaho decided to pull out all the stops when he was brought back for the wild-card show. And pull out the stops he did, if by "pull out the stops" you actually mean, "stop taking his epilepsy medication." JPL got up and belted out Elvis' "A Little Less Conversation", and though his singing was marginal at best, he backed it up with a ridiculous, spastic boogie that looked like the sort of jig the Fat Elvis might have danced once or twice when he inadvertently misplaced his stash of bennies. It was embarrassing. It was undignified. It was, in short, the single most entertaining performance American Idol has ever seen.

This time, Simon was not amused. And as Lewis was in the company of a number of expert Whitney Houston-alikes, I wistfully bid him adieu. I mean, come on. America's not going to give a guy their collective thumbs-up just because he had the cajones to emulate a seizure on live national television, are they?

America did.

And so I've had to rethink my opinion of my compatriots. On balance, maybe we're not so different. After all, it was not the American public, but the recording industry itself, that turned FM radio from an actual entertainment venue into a twenty-four hour advertisement for the musical flavor of the month. And maybe, just possibly, the reason album sales are flagging is not so much that ten-year olds with no disposable incomes are downloading MP3s of music they couldn't afford to buy anyway, but because the record-buying public has just about had it with the tasteless, processed slop they've been force-fed in disc form for over a decade.

It still doesn't exonerate my people for their wanton rejection of the McRib. But it's a good start.

TeeVee's favorite food personality, Alton Brown, is just fine, thank you. Yes, he had a heart arrythmia during the taping of Food TV's new Shatner-free Iron Chef, in which he plays the role of color commentator.

But he's okay, even if he did have to eat hospital food for a day. And while he was in the hospital, he even got to spend some extra quality time with his new gold iPod mini.

Now get better and get back to work, AB!

I didn't get a chance to participate in TeeVee's running Academy Award commentary yesterday, but I just have to add that I'm enormously happy that Peter Jackson won his shiny trinket for Best Director. It's a victory for fat, sweaty guys everywhere.

If you can't find a shirt whose collar will button for the Oscars, baby, you're my hero.