February 2005 Archives

Not that I enjoy quibbling with our good pals at Television Without Pity, but I can't let slide one particular statement in the site's Oscar blow-by-blow.

It's this one: "6:27 PM PT -- Wow, great job "shortening" the ceremony with a schmaltzy filler sequence about Johnny Carson -- who was a TV host, not a movie actor."

Folks, Carson hosted the Oscars five times. Four times in succession in the '70s/'80s. For many people, he was the definitive Oscar host. In our era, I guess the equivalent would be Billy Crystal.

The way I figure it, being the definitive Oscar host qualifies you to be honored by the Oscars. But most annoying is that the TWoP folks sound like they don't even understand why Carson was being honored. If you want to comment snarkily on pop culture, shouldn't you at least be familiar with pop culture?

Nothing against TWoP -- in fact, some of our best friends are TWoP recappers. But that was one dumb comment. Not Sean Penn-dumb, but still dumb.

By the way, Sean, Jude Law called. His dry-cleaning is ready. Can you be a dear and go pick it up for him? There's a lad.

From local news coverage in the DC area, on Jamie Foxx's Oscar win for his role in Ray:

ANCHOR: "And Jamie Foxx thanked his grandmother..."

(cut to clip of acceptance speech)

FOXX: "And I can't wait to go to sleep tonight, 'cause we got a lot to talk about."

Oscar, Oscar…

I Was Deceived!

Yes, Virginia — There Is an Oscar-cast

Ambient Noise

Roger, What’s the Story?

Shock! Horror!

Now I’m Excited

Oh, right!

Killed. Absolutely Killed.

Yay!

Say, Wasn’t There a Lord of the Rings Movie Nominated This Year?

Snack time!

Pixar Victory is Sweet

My heart’s on fire for Elvira

Phil Has Held My Baby, I Swear

Oscar?

The best part about winning a best supporting actor Oscar …

Rockin’

Every Time a Pixar Movie Wins an Oscar…

Fashion Critique I

Let’s hear it for the ads!

The Miss Oscar pageant

Wha?

Go, Aunt Thel!

Counting Crows Feet

Talk to your fellow nominess

The Song Remains the Same: Lousy

It Becomes Clear…

Fashion Critique II

Fashion Critique III

Shut up, Al

TiVo and Monty: Two Great Technologies

I Also Rented Million Dollary Booty Once

Dodged a bullet

Fashion Critique IV

Fashion Critique V

Beyonce: The Hardest Working Woman in Show Business

What happened to Beyonce?

I’m Getting a Serious Double Mint Vibe Here

New Rule!

The only possible explanation: she’s a succubus

Hilariously Awkward Moment of the Night

Death Parade

Unhilariously Awkward Oscar Moment of the Night

Now I Get It!

Brilliant!

Fashion Critique VI

Sean Penn, Go Home

Lighten Up, Sean

Why we invited her

And Now, the Costume Design Team From Ray Will Come Out and Make a Pair of RayBans!

Clothing of the Rich and Famous

Ron Eldard Is… One Blind Cop!

And somewhere, Jim Carrey is crying, “That should have been me!”

Me, me, me, me, me

To Be Fair

OK!

The Big Finish

Because I am one of those dreadful, self-centered childless adults who replies "because I like to sleep late on Saturday" and means it whenever someone asks me why I don't have kids, I don't really spend too much time caring about what other people's children are watching on TV, or when they watch. TVs come with off buttons, children come with bedtimes, and the judicious application of both should guarantee that I am able to enjoy FX's prime-time dramas.

Thus convinced that this reasonable strategy should render the pearl-clutching defenders of America's moral faith irrelevant for now and forever, amen, I sat down tonight at 7 p.m. and flicked on the TV. EPSN was showing Tilt. And at about the 7:50 mark, ESPN was showing the wooden puppet they're calling "Eddie" getting into bed with two other women. They were not settling down for a group reading of Goodnight, Moon.

And that's when I turned to my cats and asked, "Don't they realize children could be watching this?"

I realize that on the East Coast, it was 10:50 when the party started. And I realize that, like many other cable channels, ESPN may broadcast on an East Coast feed and account for us left-coasters by repeating its programming slate every few hours. But here's what I'm thinking: ESPN's not known for its gritty dramas. Even after this, it's unlikely to stand out on the dial for the strength of its fictional program. ESPN is audiovisual wallpaper for the sports-fixated, and sports are one type of programming that has cross-generational appeal. ESPN is, in a lot of ways, a family channel. And the kids may be in bed in New Jersey, but they're probably watching TV after dinner out here. Someone's mom is probably trying to explain that not every boy grows up and trades in the teddy bear for two teddy-clad women. Would it have killed the channel to have set East Coast and West Coast feeds at some point?

But bringing this back around me, dreadful, self-centered childless adult that I am, I have to say I honestly don't know what's more surprising: that nobody at ESPN thought showing Tilt during the family hour was an issue, or that I'm actually thinking of the children when it comes to TV programming.

So last week I was ranting to Phil in an iChat session about American Idol, a show that I inflicted on him last year and that I gather he and Lisa are not watching this year. Their prerogative.

My complaints were specifically about show host Ryan Seacrest, who does a serviceable job and is brilliantly, fabulously not Bryan Dunkleman.

Jason: You know what would make me like Ryan Seacrest more?

Phil: His violent death at the hand of gibbons?

Jason: If he started every show by saying "Seacrest, IN!"

You see, Ryan Seacrest has decided that the way people will remember him and treasure the time they spend with him is by always using the sign-off, "Seacrest... OUT!"

So of course, last night on Idol we come back from a commercial break to hear him say, "Seacrest... IN! The Coca-Cola Red Room."

Good God, Seacrest, are you out there? In any event, I will never mock you again.

Okay, that was a lie. But you are so much better than Dunkleman now, it's not even funny.

I have to admit that when I first heard of the Sci-Fi channel’s intention to bring back Battlestar Galactica, I groaned and rolled my eyes. Yes, I had fond memories of that cheesy one-season wonder, mostly because when it first aired I was a nine-year-old who had devoured every pulp sci-fi novel at my local library. I sent away for the Galactica viper cockpit from the back of a box of cereal.

I was a sucker, as it turns out. Because upon revisiting several old (please, let’s not call them “classic”) Galactica re-runs, it was clear to me what was clear to able-minded adults back in 1979: namely that Galactica was a cheesy “Star Wars” knock-off, as my esteemed colleague Chris Rywalt put it. And in an age where we’ve attempted to exhume, Quincy-like, the bodies of Bewitched (too-hip meta feature) Gilligan’s Island (pained reality show), Mister Ed (failed pilot with Sherman Hemsley as the voice of the horse), and numerous other old TV shows, do we really need to unearth the body of Lorne Greene and bring back Galactica?

(Actually, they already did — PAX aired Bonanza: The Next Generation briefly. Let’s consider ourselves lucky that only smart-ass web sites have suggested bringing back ol’ Quince himself.)

When the original Galactica miniseries aired, I watched it reluctantly. (This is a concept that’s really grown since I got TiVo… these days I record a lot of stuff, but sometimes I just never watch it. Galactica, I started to watch… and watched the whole damned thing.) Turns out that this new Galactica was in no way related to the original. Not only did new series developer Ron Moore re-boot the show, he hollowed out all the cheesy parts and replaced them with something new: a dark, adult story about terror, war, and death.

Although the miniseries was better than I expected, it didn’t blow me away, either. But I decided to give the new series (airing Friday nights on Sci Fi) a try, just to see whether it would improve or fall apart. I would’ve laid serious odds on “fall apart.” And I would’ve lost my shirt.

That’s because, as unlikely as it seems, the new Battlestar Galactica series is a remarkable success. Led by the serious weight of Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell, and even weightier storylines, it’s a sci-fi series for adults that doesn’t shy away from dealing with big issues: God, sex, death, betrayal, obsession, self-denial… it’s all in there.

I honestly didn’t know Moore had it in him. Yes, Moore was the writer and producer who helped revitalize the latter years of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but who would have expected that the guy who finally made the Klingons interesting would have it in him to take a piece of junk like the original Galactica and rebuild it into such an excellent piece of modern television?

This Galactica doesn’t flinch at the original series’ concept, namely that the bulk of humanity has been wiped out by a vicious attack from a mechanized enemy, the Cylons. It’s not afraid of the dark places that a desperate, tired group of people on the run might go — including turning on one another even as their enemy bears down upon them, ready to strike.

This is not to say that the new Galactica isn’t without its flaws. It’s got great big ones, and they’re in plain sight. Proud to have cast a smokin’ hottie, Tricia Helfer, as a human-form Cylon agent-slash-sex kitten, Moore and company have shamelessly overused her. Speaking as a red-blooded heterosexual male, even I am tired of seeing Helfer dressed in lingerie and cooing sexily about Cylon religion. Toss in the subplot about Boomer, another female character who’s really a Cylon, and you get the distinct impression that the entire Cylon plot against humanity involves creating hot chicks and having them use their sexuality to bend human men to their will. I’m not saying that it’s a bad plan, but it reeks of sexism.

Similarly, every episode of Galactica is burdened with an interminable secondary story involving two characters stranded on the decimated world of Caprica. I’m sure the show’s producers are building up to a suitably exciting resolution to the plot, but there’s really no hint about why we’re seeing this poor bastard aimlessly wander the surface of a radioactive planet. However, these cutaway scenes do allow the producers to show lots of cool shots of Cylon robots blowing stuff up. As a red-blooded heterosexual male, even I am tired of seeing cool shots of Cylons blowing stuff up. Get on with it.

It says a lot about the sad state of Star Trek that just as one of its former (and deposed) producers has transformed a completely discredited franchise into a serious piece of television, Enterprise has gotten its pink slip? This year’s Enterprise, while much improved over its previous seasons, still can’t hold a candle to the energy and dark themes of Galactica. And the viewers know it: even though Galactica airs on basic cable and Enterprise on network TV (okay, UPN), Galactica regularly bests it in the ratings. Toss in the two Stargate series and Enterprise can’t even claim to be the fourth-best outer space show on television.

Does “Star Trek” need a rest? (Hey, my answer was “yes” six years ago.) But if Enterprise didn’t convince you that “Trek” needs some hibernation time (and a new creative team), five minutes with Battlestar Galactica will.

Battlestar Galactica, better than Star Trek (and if you want to toss in the prequels, “Star Wars,” too)? Ten years ago people would have laughed in your face. But in the cold light of 2005, it’s the truth. How times change.

Reuters is shocked -- shocked! -- to discover that people are downloading TV shows via BitTorrent. More specifically, people in the UK are using BitTorrent to watch American shows that might not make it across the pond for months after they air in the U.S.

The amusing thing about the Reuters story is that nobody seems to want to discuss the one, simple way to combat Internet piracy of this sort: air the damned shows the same week everywhere. The movie industry has changed its film roll-out strategy dramatically, in a response to widspread piracy of movies that hadn't yet been released in foreign markets.

Would it really have killed Channel Five in the U.K. to start broadcasting Joey with less than a five-month delay? (It premiered last week in the U.K.) And why won't Lost be seen in the UK until later this year?

On the flip side, U.S. fans downloaded episodes of Coupling and Battlestar Galactica and Stargate that were aired first in the UK. And in my earlier days, I watched several episodes of Babylon 5 and Doctor Who via a chain of videotapes that had been converted and mailed from the UK, where the shows had aired first.

Would I download the new Doctor Who series via BitTorrent if it were going to air within a week or two in the U.S.? Surely not. But would I download those episodes if I knew I was going to have to wait several months to see them? Uh, that's a no-brainer.

So the answer is simple: air the damned shows in a timely fashion. See? Problem solved.

I, for one, do not understand what all the fuss is over The Rock hosting the Academy Awards. The way people are carrying on, you'd think that The Rock was planning to smash all the winners over the head with a steel chair, which he will absolutely not do, unless their acceptance speeches run long.

Sure, there's always a chance that The Rock will pull a heel turn haflway through the ceremony, but that's always a risk whenever you have a pro wrestler anywhere. Just keep someone else standing in the wings -- Stone Cold Steve Austin maybe, or even Triple H -- to challenge The Rock to a steel cage match if he gets out of line.

Sheesh. It's not like they're having Nikolai Volkoff or The Iron Sheik host the ceremony. Now that would be distasteful, especially after The Sheik started his "U.S.A. ptooey, Million Dollar Baby, ptooey. Iran, number one, The Incredibles, number one" shtick.

Say what you want about Kelly Ripa. Maybe you don't like her. Maybe you think Regis was better off without her, or you're certain she torpedoed Ed by appearing as Ed's girlfriend for a few episodes. Perhaps she rubs you the wrong way on that sitcom she's on, Hope & Faith or Charity & Chastity or Sloth & Gluttony or whatever it is.

Say what you want about her. But do it at your own peril, because I LOVE Kelly Ripa. I love her to pieces. I find her absolutely wonderful in everything she does. Is it her smile? Is it her wit? Or is it simply that I'm attracted to women who are completely deranged?

I can't say. I haven't been in therapy long enough yet.

But darling Kelly is on the cover this month, of all magazines, of the Ladies Home Journal. I actually bought a copy of it today because I couldn't resist and I had to explain myself to the cashier in a totally different way than I usually do. "I'm only buying it for the pictures," I found myself admitting sheepishly.

Darling Kelly is on the cover taking a bubble bath and coquettishly hiding her bosom behind two rubber duckies.

Now that's my kind of woman.

Today the word is out that not only will Chris Rock be hosting the Oscars, he'll be hosting a different, wackier Oscarcast. Producing genius Gil Cates said today that this year's Oscar show will feature some winners being awarded in their seats and, in other categories, all nominees being brought onstage.

The show's 71-year-old producer Gil Cates announced that the changes were made "to accommodate Rock's hip-hop-direct brand of comedy," according to the L.A. Times. The show's new set will jut into the audience, a feature that Cates said "Would not work for Billy Crystal or Whoopi Goldberg, but... is a very good fit with Chris."

Why do I get the unsettling feeling about all this "hip-hop" talk? Look, Chris Rock is a brilliant comedian -- but what makes him unique has nothing to do with hip-hop. It has to do with him being a funny, edgy, cutting comedian. Chris Rock doesn't need to be walking down the "yellow brick road" under the gondola of the Kodak Theatre. Chris Rock doesn't need to motion five Best Actress nominees on stage. Chris Rock doesn't need to award the Best Sound Editing award to a guy who now has to sit in his seat rather than come onstage.

Not to mention that listening to a 71-year-old hollywood producer talk about hip-hop sensibilities is giggle-inducing.

None of it will matter anyway. This year's Oscarcast will still be bloated and boring -- except for Rock's material. I'm expecting him to kill. But not even Chris Rock can save the Oscars... not even with the help of Old Man Cates.

Super Bowl XXXIX has come and gone. What did we at TeeVee contribute to the action? Well, since our site was down during the game, we sat on our fat American asses and watched like 80 million other people.

Now, as always, it’s time for the bitter recriminations: which ads worked, which didn’t, why the damned server went down, that sort of thing. This year, we collected five Vidiots together for a roundtable discussion — or as the kids call it nowadays, an “instant message” — of the Super Bowl’s strengths and weaknesses.

Join us, won’t you?

THE GAME

Philip Michaels: Dullsville, baby.

Jason Snell: The game or the ads?

PM: The game. Perhaps the dullest game ever to be decided by three points with the final outcome still nominally in doubt with a minute or so to play. You could look it up.

JS: I found it remarkably poorly played. But then again, the Patriots as a team are not in it to entertain you. They just want to sit on their opponents until the clock runs out. Which is what happened.

PM: To draw a parallel to hockey — just for the six or seven hockey fans in the country who might be reading this site and will therefore understand what I’m talking about — the Pats are like the New Jersey Devil teams of the 1990s. Very successful. And very dull.

Steve Lutz: I found the game to be very fast-paced and exciting. But only because I watched the whole thing in double fast-forward mode on the TiVo.

PM: Send a memo to Paul Tagliabue, Steve. That approach might improve NFL games immeasurably. Especially since New England’s reign of terror figures to continue for the time being.

THE TELECAST

Lisa Schmeiser: The whole thing had the whiff of Amateur Hour.

SL: From Fox? The shit, you say…

LS: This is the NFL’s flagship event. It’s supposed to be what cements its public image with non-football fans like me. And Fox’s take on it is just so much gimcrackery.

PM: I always get this feeling before any Fox Sports telecast — the World Series, the Super Bowl, whatever — that Fox assigns crews that have never actually watched the sports they’re tasked with covering. So you wind up not getting replays of key penalties that wind up nullifying interceptions. Until after the commercial breaks, of course. Oh, there was a holding call on that play? Well, I guess I’ll just take Joe Buck’s word for it since none of the 300 cameras taping the action appeared to have caught the penalty.

JS: Speaking of gimcrackery, I enjoyed the premiere of “pylon-cam.” Namely, that nothing interesting was happening at the pylon, so to recoup the expense of planting that camera, they showed Corey Dillon scoring far, far way from “pylon-cam” and said, “If you ever wondered what a touchdown looked like from a pylon… there you go.”

LS: You know, I have wondered that.

JS: Fox may appear to be a major network, but it’s really a chintzy operation that values sound effects over information.

SL: Explain this pylon-cam business. Did it have something to do with sleestacks?

PM: Now there’s an innovation: Sleestack-cam!

SL: With Enik reporting from the sidelines.

PM: “Chaka turnover, no!”

SL: “Let’s go to the sleestack for his analysis. Sleestack?” “Hissssss, hissssss, hissssssssss.”

JS: Remind me to tell you my theory about Lost sometime — that it’s secretly a remake of The Land of the Lost and that the monster in the jungle is a Sleestak.

LS: That would explain so much.

JS: But if the NFL is truly concerned with the quality of its product — and not just cashing checks — it would rethink its relationship with Fox. Anytime Terry Bradshaw is handing out Lombardi Trophies, you need a serious intervention.

PM: Having gone out of my way to avoid the Fox, CBS, and ESPN pregame shows all throughout the football season, I was shocked that Terry Bradshaw would show up at the Super Bowl wearing a fake beard. It was fake, wasn’t it?

JS: So to sum up: Game boring. Fox awful and amateurish. Or, pretty much what we expect.

THE COMMERCIALS

JS: This was the year Janet Jackson ruined Christmas.

PM: Absolutely.

JS: Well, her and Michael Powell.

LS: One wardrobe malfunction, and we have to suffer through bland, unmemorable commercials. Gutless wonders, all of them.

PM: Although, if government crackdowns on anything straying from safe predictable scripts means I don’t have to watch a Bud Light commercial where a guy in an upside down clown costume drinks a beer through the clown’s posterior, then I, for one, welcome the new age of repression and self-censorship.

JS: Watch out for those four-hour erections, though.

PM: Hey, they aired that Cialis ad after 9 p.m. on the East Coast. You turn on the TV after nine, you should expect to hear people talking about four-hour erections.

LS: While The Ronettes play in the background?

JS: Maybe we should mention something positive…

PM: The FedEx-Kinko’s ad.

SL: Loved it.

JS: Best ad of the day. I really enjoyed the deconstruction of Super Bowl ads. Burt Reynolds was used properly, as a joke.

SL: Burt Reynolds is continuing his rich, post-career career of making fun of Burt Reynolds.

JS: And how can you go wrong with Journey? Don’t stop believing!

PM: It didn’t really do much to sell any sort of product, did it?

LS: Nope. No compelling reason to try out FedEx/Kinkos.

SL: Is anybody on the planet unaware of what FedEx does at this point, though?

PM: Other than maroon Tom Hanks on uncharted isles?

JS: As the ad pointed out, extolling the virtues of your product in a Super Bowl ad is optional. Which was, in itself, a pretty good joke.

LS: It’s a bad sign that I can barely remember that it was FedEx making that joke.

PM: It just seemed like a weird way to spend the money.

JS: That’s really true of many of these ads, though, isn’t it?

LS: The Brad Pitt ad for Heineken surprised me. Typically the A-Listers don’t shill to the common man. That’s what C-Listers are for.

PM: Like P. Diddy.

JS: I thought that ad — the Brad Pitt one — was really well done, actually. As a piece of advertising and film art, I thought it was spot on. Although I do admit that I spent the entire commercial wondering if they had to change the ad because of his split with Jennifer Aniston.

SL: Maybe he’s drinking Heinken to forget about Jen.

LS: I just don’t get what the benefit is to have Pitt shill for Heineken. Drink this beer and going to the store will be a tremendous hassle?

PM: No, no — drink this beer, and you’ll look like Brad Pitt! And then Angelina Joie will bust up your marriage! And Troy will bomb at the box office. And…

JS: I’m $ure Brad Pitt ha$ hi$ rea$on$ for doing that ad.

SL: The first rule of Brad Pitt commercials: do not talk about Brad Pitt commercials.

PM: Well what about P. Diddy, then? Him and his magical Diet Pepsi truck?

LS: I have to take a moment to separate my searing P. Diddy hate from the question…

JS: P. Diddy lost all credibility from me when he appeared at Election Plaza at NBC on Election Night. Or when he began his career. One of those. Though acutally, I thought the Puffy Diet Pepsi — what a terrible flavor that would be — was good. However, since I couldn’t recognize half of the people in the ad, I realize now that I am so far removed from the nation’s cultural touchstones that I might as well be frozen in a block of ice.

PM: Exactly. I don’t need Pepsi to remind me that I’m unhip. I can look in the mirror to do that.

SL: Funny concept, nice commentary on celebrity culture, only marginally tainted by the presence of Carson Daly.

PM: You want to talk weird uses of celebrity? What about that Cosentino Silestone commercial with Jim McMahon, Mike Ditka, William Perry, and Dennis Rodman proclaiming their love for Diana Pearl countertops?

JS: I was kind of expecting the real Diana Pearl to appear and electrocute Rodman as he bathed.

PM: And the affinity credit card ad with Gladys Knight! Inexplicable!

JS: That’s an example of corporate ego. Who really cares that MBNA is a leader in selling credit cards to crazed fans?

PM: MBNA sure does.

JS: Inside baseball — the worst kind of Super Bowl ad. Instead, let us spend a few moments praising the use of chimpanzees in commercials. Even if CareerBuilder.com insists on calling them monkeys. Did anyone else notice that the name of the guy’s company was YEKNOM?

LS: I did. I also wondered if the guy wound up getting a new job.

PM: Did he ever manage to escape his monkey employers through the grace of CareerBuilder.com, or is he still working for the monkey Man?

JS: And really, who among us does not feel that he or she works with a collection of ant-eating, chest-beating primates?

SL: I can’t count the number of times I’ve walked into a meeting and been hit square in the chest with a steaming lump of thrown poo.

PM: Now, if it’s possible to do a monkey ad and fail, then Verizon pulled it off. Because when I first saw the monkey aping the “Can You hear me now?” business, I thought it was an ad where a competitor making fun of Verizon. “Ha, ha — Verizon’s a bunch of chimps! Oh wait… this is for Verizon. Uh…”

JS: Don’t forget Verizon’s coup de grace, the ad with a tiny Shaq.

LS: The shrinking ad? That was creepy. Although it was the second Christina Aguilera appearance of the evening. Who would have thought that one day, she’d look presentable and that Britney Spears would morph into a syphilitic wreck?

JS: Talk about taking a vaguely amusing premise and wringing the last bit of cleverness out it until it was just a boring, mirthless exercise in celebrity walk-throughs. All it needed was the part where they injected Shaq, Christina, and Kid Rock into a guy’s bloodstream to fight disease.

SL: Any ad that claims that the ability to send pictures over your cell phone is going to change the world should be dismissed without consideration.

PM: A couple other celebrity cameos worth mention — first, M.C. Hammer in the Lays potato chips spot.

JS: Remember kids, if anyone ever throws M.C. Hammer at you, throw him back. Catch and release. I actually didn’t like Hammer’s appearance. It seemed so obvious and thrown in. All he did was stand up and lip sync to “U Can’t Touch This.”

SL: What? How can you not love “You’re not supposed to touch this?”

JS: I was hoping for something truly funny from Hammer. Actual dialogue or something. Then they throw him over the fence.

SL: The implication that Hammer’s career didn’t implode but, rather, that he just inadvertently rolled into some crusty old man’s yard is delightful.

JS: I guess I just wanted a little bit more from Hammer.

SL: We’ve all had that feeling at one time or another.

JS: It’s good to see Hammer’s still got the gold pants, though.

SL: I would have liked to see the guy with the pyramid hair, too, but I guess Hammer lost him in the bankruptcy settlement.

PM: Speaking of pop culture curiosities we thought we were rid of, looks like Baby Bob is back.

LS: The Quiznos ad — creepy! Especially since the woman in the ad seemed interested in Baby Bob in, shall we say, a less than nuturing way. Quiznos — the sandwich shop of choice for would-be pedophiles.

JS: I can’t say that Baby Bob is worse than those Spongmonkey ads Quiznos ahs been running…

LS: I love the Spongmonkeys! Big joy is in our hearts!

JS: … they’re both horrific and make me wish to burn down every Quiznos I see. Which is something, since I walk past at least two on my way home from work each night.

LS: What does it say that I can recall more details about the Spongmonkeys than any ad I saw Sunday?

JS: But if you’re going to do a goddamned Baby Bob ad, at least make the mouth effect look like you spent more than 10 bucks. The “Clutch Cargo” mouth on Conan O’Brien looks more realistic.

PM: The thing that irritates me about Baby Bob’s return — besides his return itself — is who exactly is the target audience for that ad? The 14 people who wept their eyes out the night Baby Bob got canceled? The young people who have made Baby Bob a folk icon alongside Tupac and Biggie?

LS: My late grandmother would have loved Baby Bob.

PM: Do you think the ad would persuade her to eat at Quiznos?

LS: Well, not now. Late grandmother, remember?

PM: So senior citizens. And as you already mentioned, pedophiles. Those are two overlapping demographics.

JS: I can’t believe nobody has talked about the Emerald Nuts commercial, because it mixes some of the classic Super Bowl ad elements. Clever integration of odd concepts like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Parents being cruel to their children. Comedy gold! Or so they think.

LS: I always enjoy the Emerald Nuts commercials. “Evil navigators! Egotistical Normans!” The branding strategy they have going on is amazing. Planters is all about the traditional nuts, but Emerald Nuts — they’re the zany nut people.

JS: I enjoyed it, but I don’t really like ads whose premise is, “Our product is so great it will cause you to do morally objectionable things, like scar your children emotionally.”

SL: Agreed. And I thought both Santa and the Easter Bunny looked crappy and sort of frightening.

PM: It’s funny how the parents in this discussion were both disturbed by the ad, while the childless people aare all, “Traumatizing kids? Ha!” Speaking of Jason’s theory about “Our product is so great that it makes people do moronic things,” I liked the Bud Light skydiving commercial where the pilot dives out of the plane to go after the beer. But I hated nearly everything else that Anheuser Busch threw our way. Including, but not limited to, the troops ad.

SL: When your other primary message is “Horse farts are funny!,” “God Bless the Troops” somehow doesn’t resonate as much.

PM: Exactly my point, Steve.

JS: If I may speak about Cedric the Entertainer for a few moments…

PM: Proceed.

JS: …if I see another ad where women are portrayed as shrill, shrieking harpies…

PM: … then you’ll have been watching sports on TV?

JS: … then I will have to kill somebody. Let’s put it this way. If you can’t stand having two hot women next to you because you feel women tend to be nags, you should be sent away to an island with only a barbecue and a dog to keep you company. Once the meat on the grill runs out, considering that there are also no women on the island, you’re going to have to make a really tough choice about that Dog, Cedric.

SL: Are you suggesting that if he had a woman around, he could have cooked her?

JS: Now that’s an ad I’d pay to see.

SL: Or that he’d have to resort to humping the dog?

JS: It’s all in the eye of the beholder, my man.

PM: Some of the poorer efforts from Sunday: the Ford Mustang commercial where the guy freezes to death, the McDonald’s ad about the french fry that looked like Lincoln, the pedestrian GoDaddy.com ad…

JS: I appreciate that they tried to satirize Janet Jackson. But it wasn’t that funny. And it was clearly cheap and crappy.

PM: Then there was the Degree ad, the one about making risky choices like which deodorant to wear.

SL: That stank.

JS: It reeked of desperation.

PM: You know what I look for in a deodorant/anti-perspirant? 1) Will it mask my odor? 2) Will it prevent the armpits of my shirt from looking like I’ve been dipped in a jacuzzi? You know the question I don’t want to ask? Say, what’s with these leisons? Because, that’s what I think of when I think of risky underarm protection.

JS: Also, any ad that resorts to using “wuss” is out of ideas.

LS: Oh, but what if it was monkeys saying wuss?

SL: I have to say this for the Ford ads: it’s nice to see a car company doing something other than “See car. See car drive. Drive car drive.” Even if both the Mustang and the Ford Truck ads were not particularly inspired.

PM: Like the Honda truck spot. “We’ve reinvented the truck!” No you haven’t. It’s got four wheels, an engine… that’s pretty much a truck.

JS: It’s a truck… from Honda!

PM: Unless the thing has three wheels and is powered by potatoes, it’s more or less the same old same old.

JS: To me, Honda represents tiny, little cars that last a long time and are slightly more expensive than crappier, tiny, little cars. So… this truck is like a Honda how?

SL: Because it’s snub-nosed and goofy-looking.

JS: I loved the Vin Diesel career snapshot we saw courtesy of two movie ads. Vin Diesel: in a crappy comedy called The Pacifier. Ice Cube: Got Vin Diesel’s role in XXX 2. Vin Diesel’s agent: fired.

PM: Vin Diesel … easily replacable.

LS: Which car company had the car-in-space business?

JS: Ford and Volvo. That one gets the Special Jury prize for use of Stock Footage. What’s the over-under on Ford and Volvo renaming themselves as Forvo?

PM: Or Vord.

JS: Vord Folvo!

PM: Which sounds like a Vin Diesel character. Vin Diesel is Vord Folvo in My Bald, Talentless Nanny.

Greg Knauss Sorry I’m late.

SL: Hey, it’s Greg.

PM: Nice of you to drop in for the wrap up.

GK: I trust the whole monkey discussion has already taken place.

JS: Of course.

GK: Damn.

SL: That’s all right. The great thing about monkeys is you can talk about them again and again.

PM: Jason, of course, has already weighed in elsewhere on the Napster ad and its Web of lies.

GK: Beyond the lies, it was just a plain bad ad. A title card for 20 seconds? It’s TV, not a magazine fer chrisakes.

SL: Any ad that makes you read and occurs after halftime is destined to fail.

JS: Don’t get me started on the use of that cat character. Because as we all know, Napster was a big hit and became a huge brand because of its loveable cat character. And not because of the free music downloads.

PM: Shall we name our top three and bottom three? My favorites were: 1. CareerBuilder.com. 2. FedEx. 3. Those Ameriquest ads about not jumping to conclusions. The bottom three: 1. GoDaddy.com. 2. Risky deodorant. 3. McDonald’s and that goddamn french fry.

GK: “Our fries taste like the dessicated corpse of our 16th president!”

PM: “And this filet o’ fish bears a vague resemblance to John Wilkes Boothe.”

LS: Top three: Ameriquest, CareerBuilder, Emerald Nuts. Bottom three: The Cedric spots, Budweiser’s cheap patriotic pop, and Quiznos.

JS: Top three: 1. Fed Ex with Burt Reynolds. 2. CareerBuilder’s monkeys. 3. Ameriquest’s cell phone jackass getting maced. Bottom three: 1. Quiznos and Baby Bob. 2. Napster. 3. Verizon Tiny Shaq and Other Tiny Celebrities I Have Known. Oh, and a Special Jury Prize to the Tabasco ad. It was long and dull, but the fact that the girl was burned under her swimsuit was one I didn’t see coming. Plus, she was really hot.

SL: Top three: 1. FedEx/Kinko’s 2. Lay’s MC Hammer 3. American Idol NFL dudes. Bottom three: 1. Budweiser 2. Budweiser 3. Budweiser. Number three just narrowly beat out Budweiser.

JS: Greg, any last words?

GK: This is how most parties end after I show up: quickly.

Additional contributions to this article by: Jason Snell, Philip Michaels, Lisa Schmeiser, Greg Knauss, Steve Lutz.

So as you might have guessed, shortly after posting the second of what promised to be a whole slew of high-larious Super Bowl-related posts, our Web site crashed and burned like an NBC sitcom. And despite the best efforts of our tech guy to hide under his desk until the problem magically resolved itself, we've only now got things working with the smoothness and professionalism you've come to expect from TeeVee.org.

Which is to say things are still pretty squirrely around here.

Anyhow, I kept jotting down observations, bon mots, and pissy slurs, at least until the scotch overpowered me, and I'll probably wind up posting those in the next day. Better late than never, right?

No, you're right -- "never" is pretty the better option in this case.

Laurel Krahn of TVPicks.net writes to inform me that I erred in my Super Bowl alternatives piece to your immediate right when I said that the WB was airing all new episodes of Summerland tonight. They are not.

I repeat: Do not watch Summerland tonight if you are expecting new episodes. You will be bitterly disappointed. For the love of God in His heaven, AVERT YOUR EYES FROM SUMMERLAND OR REAP THE CONSEQUENCES!

Also, I apparently misspelled Paula Deen's last name. I will apologize to her the minute she does likewise to my arteries.

On an unrelated note, my wife just flipped past ESPN's figure skating coverage and exclaimed, without a hint of irony, "Oooh, it's Irina Slutskaya!"

If you say so, darling.

[Ed. Note: Philip Michaels will be favoring us with live, in-game Super Bowl blogging this afternoon, when he isn't busy preparing barbecue beef sandwiches, drinking, or wishing to God that he had followed through on his annual pledge not to watch the game.]

I have no use for pregame hype. The way I figure it, we've just been subjected to two weeks of pregame hype. Unless there is some breaking news to report -- Donovan McNabb and David Akers were spotted late last night defecting to Cuba! -- there is nothing to say about the Super Bowl that has not already been said in the preceding 14 days. And even if there is, I doubt that Terry Bradshaw and Company possess the cranial capacity to say it.

As if to test my theory, I turned on Fox's bloated pregame show just after 2 p.m. PT today to hear James Brown gush about what a wonderful host city Jacksonville has proven to be this week. (Given the widespread reports of traffic problems, cab and hotel shortages, and cranky high rollers, I can only assume NFL Commissioner Paul Taglibue has Brown's loved ones stashed away in a safe house to extract such an obviously coerced endorsement.) And then Brown launched into an introductory preamble about the status of Terrell Owens' ankle.

Click. Back to the Puppy Bowl for me.

I said this last year about this time and wound up looking like a dope, but since looking like a dope is my default setting, I'll say it again: today's Super Bowl is likely not to be very watchable.

Oh sure, the New England Patriots and Philadelphia Eagles could turn in a memorable contest for the ages, just like the Pats and Carolina Panthers did last year. Or, more than likely, the game will be a by-the-numbers, forgettable affair decided just before halftime.

Not that the rest of the Super Sunday spectacle offers much incentive to tune in. The Fox pre-game show -- in its 73rd hour on the air as I type this -- promises to be a bloated, information-free parade of gasbaggery. And prolonged exposure to the collective insights and intellects of both Terry Bradshaw and Gillian Barberie does not figure to be good for your long-term mental health. Thanks to this country's growing experimentation with theocracy, the halftime spectacular figures to be bland and watered-down, so as not to offend the delicate sensitivities of pearl-clutching Red Staters. They're turning the stage over to Paul McCartney for chrissakes -- the most boring, embarrassing, and creatively bereft Beatle, which is saying something considering that Ringo is still in the mix. The post-game airing of The Simpsons figures to be hit-and-miss, as The Simpsons usually are these days, and I think I liked Seth McFarlane's American Dad series better when it was called Family Guy.

Yes, indeedy -- not much cause to participate in America's biggest secular holiday at all. So why not watch something else instead?

Ah, but what to watch? Well, that's why I'm here, friend -- to provide you a list of Super Bowl-alternatives (all times Pacific, naturally) should the sight of another Boston-based sports franchise prove to be as hateful to you as it is to me.

You won't get much help from the other networks, which, facing Fox's two-fisted assault of a Super Bowl telecast and a Simpsons-led post-game schedule, are opting to fight fire with reruns. CBS features a three hour block of NCIS, Cold Case and Without a Trace starting at 8 p.m. NBC trots out three consecutive hours of its Law & Order franchise -- we'll leave it to you to figure out which spinoffs air when -- while ABC curls up and dies with repeats of America's Funniest Home Videos, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and Desperate Housewives. Meanwhile, over on the WB, there appear to be two installments of Summerland -- the Frog Network apparently figuring that folks into wispy dramas about attractive young people are not going to be over-concerned about whether Tom Brady and his mates can establish themselves a modern-day football dynasty.

So the networks are running scared. Again. Thank God our good friend cable is able to step up to the plate.

A few channels are going with football-themed offerings. Animal Planet is turning its schedule over to The Puppy Bowl (noon to midnight): they're dogs -- and they're playing football. If real football games sound too interesting for your taste, there's always Angels in the Endzone (WGN, 5 p.m. PT), a movie featuring a fake, uninteresting football game, with Christopher Lloyd appearing as one the Heavenly Hosts, no less. And Brett Favre may not be in Jacksonville for Super Bowl XXXIX, but he will be on F/X for a sure to be heavily edited airing of There's Something About Mary (5 p.m.). On the West Coast, that's preceded by two hours of King of the Hill episodes (3 p.m. to 5 p.m.), raising the question of whether anyone employed by F/X sees the inherent contradiction in scheduling a mini-marathon of a show about a football-obsessed Texan opposite of the biggest football game of the year. Get your head in the game, nameless F/X employee!

Speaking of marathons, cable channels will be featuring plenty of those today, just in case you're all Terrell Ownes'ed-out. Freed from the rigors of planning terrible halftime shows, MTV devotes its attention to a four-hour Viva La Bam marathon (4 p.m. to 8 p.m.), which I assume is some sort of show about lousy, no-good punk kids. USA gives us a marathon of a slightly better show -- five hours of Monk, beginning at 6 p.m. -- and the chance to watch Bitty Schram fade away before our very eyes as her role as Monk's helpmate is usurped by Traylor Howard. If grisly crime documentaries are your thing, there's always eight hours of The Investigators starting at noon over on Court TV. TVLand has a four-pack of Gunsmoke episodes (4 p.m. to 8 p.m.) from 1974, which, for those of you who care about such things, was the same year that the Miami Dolphins crushed the Minnesota Vikings 24 to 7 in Super Bowl VIII.

You know who really hates football? Witches. Fortunately, they'll have nine hours of Charmed episodes on TNT beginning at 2 p.m. to divert them. (And bookended by showings of The Craft at noon and 11 p.m., no less.)

TLC continues to mine its "Trading Spaces" franchise -- fellas, you're just scraping the walls of the shaft for pyrite at this point -- with Trading Spaces: Unglued at 5 p.m. This blooper-and-outtake show presumably does not feature the rumored Paige Davis sex tape. That's followed at 6 p.m. by Best of Trading Spaces, featuring the most memorable moments from 2004. (If you're lucky, maybe this does featuring the rumored Paige Davis sex tape.) Speaking of home decorating pornography shows, apparently A&E hasn't gotten the memo that that particular genre is played out: it's schedule two episodes each of Sell This House! and Find & Design beginning at 5 p.m.

It's a Paula Deen marathon over on the Food Network, with seven episodes of Paula's Home Cooking commencing at 2:30 p.m., followed by Paula's Southern BBQ (6 p.m.) and Paula Dean's Wedding! at 7 p.m. Note: you are advised not to spend the entire five-and-a-half hours of the Paula Dean marathon sampling her assorted recipes without a crash cart within arm's length.

E!, which will never be confused with television for rocket scientists (unless you're talking about rocket scientists who are particularly dim and somewhat obsessed with Jessica Simpson's comings goings), has a double marathon of vapidity. First Up is 101 Most Sensational Crimes of Fashion (10 a.m. to 3 p.m.) -- my vote goes to that time Pol Pot wore white in the Killing Fields after Labor Day. Then there's 101 Most Starlicious Makeovers (3 p.m. to 8 p.m.). I would like it entered into the record that typing "starlicious" just now has made me measurably stupider than I was a minute ago. Thanks, E!.

Spike TV finds itself in a quandary. The self-proclaimed First Network for Men -- at last, a refuge from all the chick-centric programming on my television these days -- realizes that its target audience might be just a tad preoccupied this afternoon. So it's striking back with the one thing this year's Super Bowl is guaranteed not to feature -- boobs. Behold, the Sports Illustrated: Swimsuit Issue videos from 2002 (2 p.m.), 2003 (3 p.m.), and 2004 (4 p.m.). Curiously enough, VH-1 -- which is really more like The First Network for Pop Culture Obsessed Simpletons -- is also going to the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue well with five hours of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Model Search, starting at 1 p.m.

Looking to do a 180-degree turn from the Super Bowl? Bravo trots out the obligatory Queer Eye for the Straight Guy counter-programming push from 2 p.m. 10 p.m. Meanwhile, TBS throws the women-folk a bone with the kind of movies one can assume are not normally shown to fire up the players the night before the Big Game: Fried Green Tomatoes (9:30 a.m.), As Good as it Gets (12:30 p.m.), What Women Want (3:30 p.m.), and Serendipity (6 p.m.). Speaking of insipid programming for women, Lifetime is hoping that you ladies are still hepped up about Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onasis, since it's broadcasting the four-hour miniseries of the same name starting at 1 p.m.

Movie marathons, in fact, are all the rage for some cable channels on Super Sunday. Turner Classic Movie's month-long Oscar Salute continues with Intermezzo (3:45 p.m. PT) and The Uninvited (5 p.m. PT). By the time the Patriots are undoubtedly hoisting another Lombardi Trophy, Portrait of Jennie will be well underway (7 p.m. PT). Comedy Central decides to shirk its normal mission of delivering laughter to the masses for the day with a trio of painfully unfunny comedies: 40 Days and 40 Nights (4 p.m.), Saving Silverman (6 p.m.), and The Sweetest Thing (8 p.m.). And the Sci-Fi Channel airs Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies (9 a.m.), Wishmaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell (11 a.m.), and Wishmaster: The Prophecy Fulfilled (1 p.m.), but not the original Wishmaster. I mean, how are we supposed to pick up the subtle intricacies of the narrative without the first chapter of this saga? It's like the Sci-Fi Channel is going out of its way to antagonize its lonely nerd audience.

Back before the Olsen twins were regular tabloid fodder, they made a series of movies in which they rampaged through Europe: Passport to Paris, Winning London, and, of course, When in Rome, the Citizen Kane of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen movies. Now you can sample all three on the ABC Family Channel at 4 p.m., 6 p.m., and 8 p.m., and recall a simpler time in our nation's history.

Even the dullest of Super Bowl blowouts should not drive you to watch Tommy Lee Jones and Anne Heche match wits with a Volcano (5:45 p.m) over on AMC.

You know who I really bad for on Super Sunday? Sports fans who for one reason another just can't abide football. Because they turn to ESPN in the hour of need, looking for sweet succor from the drudgery of the Super Bowl, and what do they get? Figure Skating, (12:30 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. PT) followed by the 2004 Double Dutch Jump Rope Championship (6:30 p.m. PT). I mean, why not just air test patterns? ESPN2 at least bothers to dig up the 2004 World Series of Poker tapes (3 p.m. to 9 p.m. PT), so you watch Greg Raymer win for the 56th time. Only 73 more airings to go before these episodes are banished to ESPNClassic, so catch 'em while you can! Poker addicts can also catch The World Poker Tour over on the Travel Channel from 8 a.m. to midnight, incidentally.

I don't know about you, but if the game begins to drag in the second half, I'm flipping over to British House of Commons at 6 p.m. PT on CSPAN, since nobody trash talks like members of Parliament.

Today, PAX laid off 50 employees, including its president and a handful of vice presidents who handled everything from programming to advertising. If this is not the death toll for the so-called "network," it's certainly the sound of the hunchback doing limbering exercises before making that first running leap into the bells.

And while the first thing I should have thought was, "Oh, no! Network employees released into the wild!" what I actually thought was, "Please God, do not shut down this network. Keep it open, so that Billy Ray Cyrus may continue to toil far from the public eye."

For those who are lucky enough to have forgotten who Cyrus was: the man who exhorted us not to break his achy-breaky heart is now playing a homespun country doctor workin' in the city. So that people don't forget Cyrus is indeed playing a doctor, the show is titled Doc. The show is packed to the gills with the usual family-friendly elements: dialogue that thinks it's Oscar Wilde, yet should sign its name Oscar Meyer; plots so transparent, if they were clothing, the viewers would be writing irate letters to the FCC; moral messages so clearly telegraphed, the closed captioning should read "-.. --- -.-- --- ..- --. . - .. - ..--.. --- .-. ... .... --- ..- .-.. -.. .-- . ..- ... . ... . -- .- .--. .... --- .-. . ..-. .-.. .- --. ... - --- --- ..--.. "

(Which makes me wonder: why is "family-friendly" synonymous with "bone-headed" and "lame"? Surely not all families are collections of morons -- most are actually collections of people secretly convinced they're related to morons. Wouldn't your children resent you less if you stopped confusing their height with their IQ?)

Doc is on PAX. I know this because my mother, who is otherwise an uncanny dowsing rod for the next big thing on television, has a tremendous blind spot for this network. And on the rare occasion when I've been home and circumstances haven't dictated that we watch blizzard coverage, Mom's parked in front of the PAX on Sunday nights lest she miss Doc and Sue Thomas, F.B.Eye. I've been exposed to the PAX. I've seen what it does.

What it does, most notably and laudably, is keep Billy Ray Cyrus from unleashing a second epidemic of line dancing and moronic ditties on a battered nation. Country music has already set up an axis of banal with Kenny Chesney, Chely Wright and jingoistic cretin Toby Keith. We don't need Cyrus imploring us not to re-break his formerly achy, breaky heart. We don't need a revival of the mullet. What we need is a witness protection program for gimmicky "artists" whose moment has passed.

PAX was that program. And it may be argued that the friendliest thing it's done for families is to reduce their exposure to Billy Ray Cyrus. It's a worthwhile venture. So keep PAX alive! Support the cause!

Won't you do it for the families?

In an act of mercy to “Star Trek” fans and the series as a whole, UPN cancelled Enterprise, their misbegotten excuse for a “Trek” prequel.

Don’t get me wrong — I have plenty of sympathy for the crew members, writers and actors who’ve abruptly lost the last three years of what was presumably a seven-year meal ticket. (The actors, at least, have the convention circuit to fall back on.) I’d heard some favorable noises about some of this year’s episodes, mostly those written by “Trek” novel veterans Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, and it sounded like showrunner Manny Coto had several good ideas about tying the series more closely to the continuity of the original show.

But the few episodes I saw, with some notable exceptions, were as awful as ever. The two-part season opener, with Scott Bakula battling doughy-faced alien Nazis on a mildly trashed-up Paramount backlot, aided by goombah gangsters straight from central casting, was just plain embarrassing. The way it hastily smeared over the preceding three years’ “temporal cold war” story with some last-minute fixes also did the series no favors. And whatever coolness Brent “Data” Spiner brought to his role as a twitchy mad scientist was negated when the producers surrounded him with buff, oversexed superhumans with Axl Rose-class mullets.

“Star Trek” needs a break. It’s needed a break since the end of Deep Space Nine. This season’s positive indicators to the contrary, it’s wandered too far afield from the idealism that powered the original series and the thoughtful drama that made The Next Generation and much of DS9 such a pleasant surprise. As science fiction evolved around it, producing faster, funnier, more irreverent shows like Farscape and Firefly, Enterprise largely clung to the worst and stodgiest elements of its forebears. It was re-telling the same plots its original fans had seen in the ’60s; better shows were reinventing those plots, or coming up with entirely new ones.

Here’s hoping that idea-bankrupt executive producer Rick Berman gets the hint and goes down with the ship. And that when the series re-emerges in a few years’ time (and don’t kid yourself that it won’t,) it’s as something new, exciting and unpredictable. There are still plenty of brave new worlds to explore. But for now, it’s probably for the best that Enterprise is boldly going away.

Although it got off to a strong start back in 2001 (drawing over 13 million viewers when it premiered just after the 9-11 attacks) this Wednesday UPN and Paramount jointly announced the cancellation of the low-rated Star Trek: Enterprise after four seasons. The series finale will air May 13, 2005; that date will also mark the first time in some 18 years that no first-run "Trek" series will be in production. It's an astonishing record, made even more remarkable when one considers Trek hasn't been on a major broadcast network since the original "Star Trek" series (barely) ran for three seasons on NBC in the 1960s. (And if you consider UPN a major broadcast network, well, you're certainly no stranger to science fiction!) Enterprise was also preceded by overlapping seven-year runs of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Star Trek: Voyager, as well as several feature films.

Think about it: eighteen years is a long time. The better parts of Generation X, Generation Y, and now Generation D define science fiction television in relation to "Star Trek": these people are the backbone of today's (and tomorrow's!) society. Trek's impact on popular culture (indeed, world culture) has been well documented, and despite its many shortcomings, the "Star Trek" franchise is the yardstick by which genre television has been measured for more than a generation. Babylon 5 shone brightly because of the contrast; Stargate SG-1 ran with the essence of Trek's franchise model and paused only to plant its tongue firmly in cheek; Farscape succeeded from its sheer delight in breaking all Trek's rules. Plus, from green-skinned dancers to silver catsuits, no television franchise combined skimpy and laughably tacky female costuming like Star Trek. Not even close.

Although my personal relationship to "Trek" has always been testy (Gene Roddenberry's vision of a positive, hopeful future for humanity seemed increasingly Mayberry-like in eras of mutually-assured destruction and pre-emptive war), I've always admired the various shows' dedication to their fans, sense of responsibility to their viewers, and family-like loyalty to their own. Folks like Michael Okuda, J.P. Farrell, Robert Blackman, and Peter Lauritson have been with "Trek" for the better parts of their professional lives; producers love to bring back actors like Tony Todd, Jeffrey Combs, Suzie Plakson, and Vaughn Armstrong in diverse roles; cast members from "Trek" series seemed to make careers as directors in subsequent series. Despite sometimes Herculean efforts by Paramount to disgruntle everyone involved, more often than not, Trek managed to bring out the better side of people.

Oh.

And "Trek" made lots of people big, shiny piles of money. So it'll will be around for a long time. All four completed "Trek" series are currently running in syndication, with Enterprise's 98 episodes sure to follow. The juggernaut of "Trek" video games, books, memorabilia, conventions, and merchandising is not going to be stopped by the mere cancellation of a television series -- no, the carbonized ashes of eBay will have to be scattered across the solar system before "Trek" fandom grinds to a halt. And after a while -- say, when Trek's peeps have finally had some downtime after eighteen years of continuous television production -- I think you can expect Paramount to say, "Hey, we sure could use some more shiny money. What about Star Trek?"

In the meantime, I'd provisionally recommend the last episodes of Enterprise, even if that's a couple years down the line when you stumble across them in late-night syndication. Although no one's been watching, Enterprise's now-final season has had some well-executed moments, and hardworking series headliner Scott Bakula has been turning in gritty, physical performances, along with occasionally twisting the most predictable of "Trek" dialog into something unexpected. And anything which gives John Billingsley a regular paycheck is OK in my book.

So, goodbye for now, "Star Trek". You'll always be in our thoughts.

My wife made me watch ABC's Supernanny last night and from this experience I learned the following things:

• I despise reality television. Still.
• I used to believe my children were evil. I now know that evil is more nuanced than I thought. Other people's children are rabid dog evil -- evil due to circumstances beyond their control. My children are James Bond villain evil, which is to say evil in a calculated and entertaining way.
• The Supernanny is a super babe. When Jo Frost does Maxim, I'm buying two copies!