September 2005 Archives

I finally got around to watching the Bones pilot a couple of days ago. Much to my surprise, I enjoyed the show quite a bit, though it might be better if they throw out the overdone crime solving aspect and just have the two main characters circle each other trading quips for an hour. If Deschanel and Boreanaz just kept repeating, "Squint! Sniper! Squint! Sniper!" that would be at least as engaging as the Scooby Doo-quality dead intern storyline in the pilot. (And even by Scooby Doo standards, this caper was one from the Scrappy Doo/Jonathan Winters-in-drag files, not the relatively cerebral Where Are You? caseload.)

Even more to my surprise, in the few months since I was last in D.C., Dulles Airport has apparently been moved to within a stone's throw of the Capitol Building. I've always thought that Dulles was unnecessarily located a long ways out in the boonies, but I would never have thought to plop it down right on top of the existing Reagan airport.

In Nathan's highly accurate review of the show, he already pointed out that the writers have relocated the long rows of headstones at Arlington National Cemetery to Abe Lincoln's backyard. (Have we learned nothing from Cuesta Verde Estates?) That bit of geographic revisionism is at least understandable from a narrative perspective. If the show's characters had to walk all the way across the bridge that actually separates those two locations, they might run out of snappy patter on the way. And if Bones ever runs out of snappy patter, even a surprise visit from Don Knotts and the Harlem Globetrotters isn't going to save it.

But calling Reagan airport Dulles has no apparent purpose. Is it possible that nobody involved in making the show bothered to check a map before allowing their opening shot to be so totally inaccurate? Nobody expects a Fox show to be the pinnacle of genius, but that would be dumb even for them.

The other possibility is that the name change is intentional, but what conceivable reason could they have for that? The only one I can come up with is that the show's creators are so left wing, they refuse to even have the word "Reagan" in their product. Such liberal sensibilities might also explain the pilot's repeatedly stated view of the Boreanaz character's background; that is, "Snipers bad! We shouldn't be hitting our enemies from 300 yards away with bullets, but with random acts of kindness." This message is only slightly diluted by the scene at the target range, in which we learn that being able to accurately shoot holes in people is really pretty neat.

I'm not sure which is worse. Actually being completely clueless, or being so fanatical in your political convictions that you're willing to appear completely clueless in the most public forum imaginable.

I just hope nobody ever tells the Bones writers that John Foster Dulles was a Republican, an aggressive opponent of Communism, and a pioneer of the doctrine of mutually assured destruction that was so favored by a certain 40th President of the United States. If they do, later episodes might see characters flying into Kennedy International Airport, conveniently located on the White House lawn.

Yesterday we announced the latest edition of our annual Dead Pool contest, picking not the best shows or the worst shows but the ones most likely to be killed.

Now it's time for our annual handicapping of the season's new shows. Which ones are strong, and which are weak? Who will be the first to go? Read our picks and then decide for yourself:

Man, don't you just hate it when you've got this gnawing sensation that you've forgotten something? Like there's something really important you're supposed to take care of, and you just plumb forgot to do it? That's the way I've been feeling lately -- normally, I'm a pretty organized cat, but I can't quite shake the sense that I dropped the ball on something fairly critical.

So let's go down the list here. Let's see... Water the plants? Nope. Took care of that this morning. Feed the pets? The little bastards seem alive and well to me. Did I leave a pie in the oven? Checking... checking... we are pie-free. Uh oh... did I forget to put on pants again this morning? Well, that would explain the strange looks on the train into work. But... nope. There they are. Huh.

Oh, you know what it is? I totally forgot to do the 2004-05 Dead Pool. Don't know how I let that escape my attention. And judging by the one or two reader e-mails that trickle in each month, some of you people are wondering the exact same thing.

"Hey, where's the Dead Pool, you jerks?" asked one.

"The Dead Pool is the only reason I bother with your garbage Web site," offered another disappointed customer.

"Concerned about the size of your package?" wrote a third. "This patch will take care of any and all problems in the bedroom."

OK, apparently not everyone who writes us is all that concerned about the Dead Pool's unexplained absence. But enough people were that we feel like some sort of explanation is in order for why we mothballed our annual contest to correctly pick the first canceled show of the Fall TV Season.

TeeVee reader Mike Morris hated The War at Home. But our friend and co-worker Jim Dalrymple begs to differ. Since this site is absolutely incapable of generating debate in comments attached to postings (the squirrel hasn't figured that one out yet) -- and since none of the Vidiots have actually seen this show -- we are happy to present to you Jim's rebuttal to Mike's pan of The War at Home:

Let's stop for a moment and go over the very promising components of Threshold, CBS' obligatory something-is-out-to-get-us offering for fall. It's executive produced by Brannon Braga, veteran of at least two good Star Trek series (and, uh, two fairly godawful ones, but we'll blame Rick Berman for those...), and David S. Goyer, who just did a bang-up job writing Batman Begins. And it has, hands down, the best damn cast of any new show this fall: Carla Gugino, one of the rare actresses who can earn your respect no matter how little clothing she's wearing; Brent Spiner in his first major non-Data-related role; Charles S. Dutton, who is basically excellent in everything; and Peter Dinklage, star of The Station Agent, with all the soulfulness and star power of Russell Crowe condensed into a four-foot frame. Not to mention guest star William "Don't Mention I'm Tom Cruise's Cousin" Mapother, who sent chills up many a spine as the menacing Ethan Rom on Lost.

Furthermore, Threshold has a truly creepy premise. A fourth-dimensional alien ship, portrayed in beautiful and startling CGI as a sort of kaleidoscoping silver snowflake, appears to the crew of a Navy freighter one stormy night and broadcasts a mysterious signal that begins to alter their DNA. The surviving crew members mutate into alien-controlled superfreaks who disperse into the general population, hatching plans to spread the insidious and infectious signal as far as possible, by any means necessary. Their calling card: a spooky fractal pattern that appears like a scar on any nearby electromagnetic equipment, and in the behavior patterns of affected animals.

Gugino's a contingency expert, mistress of worst-case scenarios, tapped by the government to assemble a team of surly geniuses to stop the threat in its tracks. Her experts, save for a wooden-but-somehow-endearing military tough guy (Brian Van Holt), have all been more or less kidnapped from their normal lives; they're alarmed to find themselves virtual prisoners of the government, and disturbed at the privacy-invading power they now wield to stop the alien threat. More disturbingly, Gugino, Van Holt, and the nerdy astrophysicist played by Felicity and Alias vet Robert Patrick Benedict were exposed to a secondhand copy of the alien signal through a crew member's video recording. It doesn't seem to be mutating them -- yet -- but it's done something weird to their brain waves that seems to let them tap in to the alien frequency. Will this help them stop the invaders -- or make them a danger to their own mission?

It sounds cool. Sometimes, it almost is. The cast certainly gives it their all, and Dinklage's underwear-stealing, sarcastic, hard-drinking mathematician can be a real hoot. But for the most part, Threshold wastes everything it's been given. The episodes thus far have felt mostly plodding, conventional, and -- aside from a few mildly eerie dream sequences -- dull as dishwater. (The second episode, written by Goyer and Braga, came closest to being entertaining, but it's been bookended by real letdowns.) Why do you take such a terrific cast and give them such mediocre, jargon-heavy dialogue, as if they were on one of CBS's other interminable string of Xeroxed procedurals? How exactly can you remove all but the faintest shreds of tension from the notion of an infectious, mutating alien presence? And what genius decided that since folks loved Mapother as an enigmatic, super-strong menace on Lost, they'd basically have him reprise the exact same role here (down to the costuming)? It's a crying shame, and whoever's making Dutton in particular read off all that Shadowy Government Official boilerplate deserves to be arrested.

I wish Goyer and Braga had been involved with the show from the get-go, instead of jumping aboard a series created by Bragi Schut, whose most notable previous credit was producing NBC's Average Joe. I want to like Threshold so much. I'm a huge fan of these actors. I'm keen on the premise. And I enjoy the rare moments when Threshold indulges in smart, subtle characterization or witty dialogue. (Spiner's pleasantly snarky biologist, in the graffiti-covered storeroom of a fast-food joint where an alien infectee's head has just exploded, notes that the blood spatter extends from "about two feet below the mirror to ... where we learn that 'Toto Bites It.'") But for the most part, Threshold manages to squander some terrific ideas, and a magnificent cast, with its sluggish and unimaginative execution. Sorry, guys. Better luck next time.

I do not question ABC's decision to use that song by Tug McGraw's kid as the background to a tightly edited package of NFL highlights during halftime on Monday Night Football. It's an entertainment show, and music and highlights go together like stink and Warren Littlefield-produced pilots.

But who thought it was a good idea to have all 16 weeks of highlights played to one single song, over and over again, with changes to the lyrics to make them topical? Once is enough, kids. Pick 16 great songs and run with it.

By the way, I enjoyed Jimmy Kimmel's 60-second non-sequitur this week, in which he interviewed "legendary Dallas Cowboys quarterback Clay Aiken" about how to throw a pass and how Brett Favre can work his way out of his slump. It may not be classic comedy, but it beats hearing more from Tug McGraw's kid, let me tell you.

You know, it's extremely hard to do a TeeVee Dead Pool when Fox cancels shows after two airings. In any event, Head Cases is history. Head Cases, we hardly knew ye -- thank goodness.

When someone like me hears about a show titled something like Everybody Hates Chris, it's pretty much a given that someone like me is going to watch. Because we Chrises must stick together: Chris is a fairly puffy, soft, vague name and we need the support. Seriously. Kings aren't named Christopher. Presidents aren't named Christopher. Who's named Christopher? Nobody. Kings, presidents, inventors, heroes, they're all named John and Michael and William and George. Even Ronald has a better rep than Christopher.

So I'll be voting for Christopher Walken for president, I think Christopher Lee deserves some kind of Oscar -- most enormous comeback, maybe -- Christopher Reeve should be sainted. Christopher Guest is the most amusing member of British royalty and I hope Topher Grace runs his own network someday.

And Chris Rock, well, he's at the peak of his powers and we're lucky to be here to see it. I'm too young for Richard Pryor, and Bill Cosby's gotten awfully cranky; Eddie Murphy's sort of wandered off into Mediocre Movieland. But Chris Rock is on top now, and we should get as much of him as we can before he starts slipping -- if he ever does.

With the possible exception of lima beans -- the gold standard for universal food hatred -- no two palates are entirely alike. One man's haute cuisine is another's pet chow. Same goes for Kitchen Confidential, Fox's new culinary sitcom; whether you clamor for more or spit it out depends entirely on your taste in comedy.

Fellow Vidiot Monty Ashley has reamed the show for unimaginative plotting, paper-thin characters, and a deeply unlikeable protagonist. Honestly? He's absolutely right, especially about the plotting. Of course the food critic coming to give the restaurant its opening-night review is the head chef's frosty ex! Of course the conveniently severed fingertip winds up on said critic's plate of sea bass! Of course she writes a favorable review of the restaurant anyway! It's not like the scriptwriter could come up with anything novel or surprising, right? That would be all hard, and stuff.

And yet ... it's still really funny. Kitchen Confidential moves with the blistering pace of classic screwball comedy, with visual, verbal, and auditory gags flying from every direction. Like its far superior lead-in, Arrested Development, the show's unafraid to stretch its sense of humor slightly toward the surreal. (As long as they're not actually suffering in real life, people catching on fire are my idea of comedy gold.) For all my critiques of the plot, the pilot did set up one classic "wacky misunderstanding" only to defuse it with a welcome dose of common sense. And there's a refreshing measure of subtlety in at least some of the wit, as when the show presents an Olive Garden-like chain restaurant as its hero's own personal vision of culinary Hell.

Kitchen Confidential's terrific cast deserves the lion's share of the credit for the show's graces. Bradley Cooper -- most notably seen pining for Jennifer Garner, as the surrogate for every right-thinking heterosexual man, on Alias -- plunges into the role of semi-sleazy chef Jack Bourdain with gusto. He's a fast-talking scoundrel, sure, but he takes enough well-deserved karmic lumps to retain our sympathy. There's something sort of moving in Jack's realization of just how far he's fallen from his gustatory glory days, and how desperately he wants to stay sober and responsible. Cooper also manages to completely sell a scene in which he addresses his staff while holding a gigantic fish, which is no mean feat.

His restaurant full of cheerful lunatics includes seafood samurai John Cho; earnest newbie John Francis Daley, formerly of Freaks and Geeks; Owain Yeoman as an apparent graduate of the Guy Ritchie Culinary Institute and East End Finishing School; Jaime King as the sweetly dim hostess; and Buffy's Nicholas Brendan as the high-strung pastry chef. They do a great job of making the funny stuff funnier, and the awful stuff considerably more palatable. The personality they bring to their roles helps paper over the script's flimsiness. (Although it's slightly distressing to see that Xander is now sporting some serious jowls.) Only Bonnie Somerville, as the obligatory rival-who-will-inevitably-become-the-love-interest, can't quite rise above the gaping hole where her character ought to be -- but she's trying, at least.

The one rotten ingredient in this otherwise pleasant recipe: The odious influence of producer Darren Star. No, really, Mr. Star, thank you so much for "improving" the show with a parade of skanky, drunken socialites who bear no resemblance whatsoever to the horrible, horrible stars of Sex and the City! And that walking cliche of a gay waiter? The one who makes Nathan Lane look like Clint Eastwood? Man, was that a brilliant decision! (It's not the actor's fault, I should add -- in the one or two moments where he's not required to act like Sean Hayes to the nth power, he's funny and likeable.)

Still, Kitchen Confidential succeeds in spite of itself -- at least for now. Like Monty, I'd like to see more actual cooking on the show, what with it being set in a restaurant and all, and the mere mention of Darren Star's name makes me shudder, but I'll be tuning in again in hopes that the show builds on its unexpected strengths. If Arrested Development is a five-star gourmet comedy experience, Kitchen Confidential is more like a really good hamburger -- but given the slim pickings among new shows this fall, that's fine by me.

I have seen some terrible television in my time. Some in service of TeeVee, some not. I have watched shows that would take men grown hard and soften them to limp, weeping, withered shadows of themselves. Aye. Bad TV.

It’s been many a moon since I thought it wise to volunteer to review new shows, so this fall I’m not reviewing anything unless I can’t help it. I’ve had enough bad TV for one life. And yet I still stumble on shows by accident. Shows which never should have seen the light, let alone the green one.

One such show is Twins. My TiVo was tuned to the channel, the show was half in the buffer, and, what the hey, the program description listed Sara Gilbert and Melanie Griffith as the stars. So I watched it.

I have seen some terrible television in my time. Some in service of TeeVee, some not. I have watched shows that would take men grown hard and soften them to limp, weeping, withered shadows of themselves. Aye. Bad TV.

It’s been many a moon since I thought it wise to volunteer to review new shows, so this fall I’m not reviewing anything unless I can’t help it. I’ve had enough bad TV for one life. And yet I still stumble on shows by accident. Shows which never should have seen the light, let alone the green one.

One such show is Twins. My TiVo was tuned to the channel, the show was half in the buffer, and, what the hey, the program description listed Sara Gilbert and Melanie Griffith as the stars. So I watched it.

The show, it turns out, is one of those brainless high-concept sitcom shows so beloved of TV studios and subsequently found on a stainless steel table wearing a toe tag. Sara Gilbert and Molly Stanton play the titular twins — yes, they’re fraternal, or sororal, or anyway not identical. Discovering that kind of detail is what makes studio executives feel smart, which may explain why Twins is on the air while I’m stuck typing from my basement at midnight. Melanie Griffith and Mark Linn-Baker play their parents — as Griffith’s character helpfully explains, giving birth was “like pooping out two watermelons.”

Linn-Baker is the supposedly brilliant, brainy founder of a lingerie company. Griffith is the face of his company, a tottering, aging former model. The pair plan to pass the company on to their two daughters who — follow this closely now — are Gilbert, as the supposedly brilliant, brainy designer of lingerie and Stanton, as the new face of the company, a dumb, young model.

That’s the high concept and from there on the show is pure cookie-cutter, only the cutter is getting really dull and the oven is totally fucked, so the cookies are all misshapen and raggedy and half overcooked and half undercooked and made out of dog crap anyway. Why anyone would think to drag Gilbert back to series TV for this, then rope Linn-Baker back, too, then somehow entice Griffith — who is, after all, a big-time movie actress — onto the small screen, why anyone would think of all this and then think it’s a good idea, well, color my mind boggled.

It’s not that I don’t have enormous, enormous reserves of goodwill for the cast. My love for Melanie Griffith goes back a long way: How long I would not have imagined if not for Melanie’s appearance on this show. Gone is the tiny-boob-swinging wacky chick of “Something Wild”; apparently she got run over by Nip/Tuck. She looks like she’s had so much plastic surgery, she is now actually made of plastic. My daughter’s Barbie-as-CGI-mannequin DVDs have a more expressive and textured heroine.

It seems like they tightened the skin too much on Mel’s head, too, because while playing an airhead has never been a big stretch for Ms. Griffith, here she manages to come off as a total airhead playing an airhead — poorly. It was one thing when darling Melanie was young and ditzy, but seeing her as this ravaged, sanded, injection molded automaton trying to be young and ditzy — it’s very painful.

My love for Sara Gilbert is more recent but not less. It’s bittersweet to think that I’m playing on the wrong team if I want to slide into the home plate of her embrace, but that’s Sara for you: Aloof. All sharp corners. Too cool for you.

Alas, someone thought it would be great if Gilbert played against type and instead went for the milquetoast nerd with self-esteem issues. That someone was wrong. Bay of Pigs wrong. Little Big Horn wrong. Waterloo wrong. Sara Gilbert cannot play weak-willed any more than she can play the Godfather. Are the producers next going to hire Elton John to play their theme song — on clarinet?

Mark Linn-Baker, at least, isn’t straying too far from his strengths. He used to play young nebbishes, then he did Cousin Larry, and now he’s playing older nebbishes. His turn as a homicidal older nebbish on Law & Order: Criminal Intent was fun, and I was happy to see Linn-Baker back on the scene. I’d be happier if the homicidal nebbish showed up on this show, wiped out the entire cast, and spent the rest of the season in the gynecologist’s office with Coral and Mimsy… but somehow I don’t see that happening.

Despite nebbishness being well-traveled ground for him, though, even Mark seems dragged down by the material. He has no chemistry with Melanie Griffith — and no wonder since she’s made of Pyrex — but he seems to have no connection with Gilbert or Stanton, either. Since there are only one or two other actors on the whole soundstage, this leaves poor Cousin Larry adrift, alone, a straight man in search of a Balki.

Maybe if he finds Balki, Pinchot’ll have a decent script on him, and then all the cameramen and grips and craft service critters and whoever else can work on some entirely different, better, show. Something like, I don’t know, I’m just casting about here, you know, blue-skying it — something like Perfect Strangers?

It’s a sad day when a grown man longs for Perfect Strangers. But I have softened to a limp, weeping, withered shadow of myself. Bad TV can do that to you.

As a real-life housewife, let me say this first: I do watch Desperate Housewives, and I like it. I laugh at it. I make note of the fact that it bears little resemblance to my life in any way, shape, or form, and that's okay -- it's a soap opera, after all. No, none of my neighbors are former runway models who are screwing the gardener, nor are they man-hungry divorcees. There are two very nice single moms who live across the street, but while they're both lovely people, neither of them looks remotely like Teri Hatcher. The woman who lives next door does garden constantly, but she does it in a denim shirt and a ponytail, not a cashmere twinset and an oddly shaped sun hat like Marcia Cross.

That said, Desperate Housewives does bother me. And that's because it does contain one character whose life is actually meant to resemble mine and that of many of my friends -- and it doesn't, not at all. Lynette -- played by Emmy-winner and all-around excellent actress Felicity Huffman -- is a stay-at-home mother of four, with three young boys and a baby girl. When the show began, her life was portrayed as pretty extreme -- but as the show's first season evolved, it went from extreme to ridiculous.

Are we really supposed to believe that a woman who evidently has the financial means to hire a full-time, live-in nanny never thought of getting a sitter a few hours a week to help her maintain her sanity? Or that once she hired the nanny, she would go directly from being worried the nanny couldn't handle things to being jealous of how much the kids liked the nanny (a fact learned, of course, after installing a nanny-cam) -- all without taking an afternoon to go get a manicure and go shopping and relax? Each episode features Lynette dealing with one particular parenting issue, as though the show's writers are meticulously working their way down a checklist of Mom-related dramatic themes.

And then there are the ridiculous portrayals of marital issues. What housewife with four kids complains when she and her husband haven't had sex for ten whole days? Lynette does. Which one has time to put on a French maid costume and falls asleep drunk on the couch? Lynette again!

The other characters have ongoing storylines in which they get to deal with interesting soap-opera type issues, but Lynnette's too busy crossing items off the mommy checkist -- and with stupid and far-too-speedy resolutions. Because, you know, stay-at-home mothers aren't very interesting, and you wouldn't want to waste too much time on them.

The one part of Lynette's character the show does get right is her ambivalence about having left a high-powered career to be home with the kids, not to mention how difficult her new role is. Unfortunately, the way she responds to the challenge makes her seem like such a petty, shrewish moron that it's hard to buy her as a former captain of industry.

Really, this points to a bigger problem, not so much with this show in particular, but with the portrayal of parenting on TV in general, and the parenting of young children in particular. I'll admit I don't watch many sitcoms anymore, but I can't think of any shows on TV that do a good job of this. On Desperate Housewives, Lynette's three sons are barely distinguishable from one another. Same with the twin sons on Everybody Loves Raymond, another good show that had a dismal track record when it came to offering believable storylines about young children. Really, I have to stretch as far back in my memory as Roseanne (before that show went to hell, that is) to think of a show that dealt realistically and interestingly with the whole topic of parenting on a regular basis. That's pretty sad. I guess good parenting just doesn't seem as entertaining as bad parenting. Or maybe the hand-wringing of Mel Harris on another show I loved, thirtysomething, poisoned TV's willingness to deal with real parenting.

If Lynette really does head back out into the corporate world this season (in last spring's finale, she sabotaged her husband's promotion, forcing him to quit), maybe she'll finally be allowed some interesting storylines. Of course, then she wouldn't be a housewife anymore, would she?

So the car crash we've seen coming for at least six weeks finally impacted tonight -- egomaniac game-player J.D. Fortune won Rock Star: INXS.

Just as winning American Idol can be more of a curse than a blessing -- watch as the record company mishandles you in order to quickly cash in on your celebrity! -- it's unclear whether joining a band from the '80s as its new frontman is really the huge leap forward that it's made out to be. It certainly seems that J.D. wanted the gig really badly, though, so let's hope all of his brown-nosing of INXS was based in truth -- because he's going to be singing "What You Need" and "New Sensation" every night for the next year, in Indianapolis and Singapore and Hamburg and who knows where else.

Maybe singing sensation Marty Casey and the true stars of Rock Star: INXS, the kick-ass House Band, can make an album together. That one I'd buy -- especially if "Trees" is the lead single.

In any event, as I have written before, Rock Star has really been a creative success. It sounds like the chances are pretty good that it'll be back next summer; I, for one, am hoping it gets a nice ratings build like The Amazing Race before it. Because as I've said before, it's a better show than American Idol, hands down.

In addition to tonight's premiere of My Name is Earl (see review), NBC is airing the season premiere of The Office. I can't recommend the show highly enough, especially if you haven't given it a try before.

The Office isn't for everybody -- it's full of awkward pauses, has no laugh track, and features a simply awful main character doing simply awful things. And yet, it's hilarious. Thankfully, this new American version of the series has successfully modified the formula of the British original, tossing in some more workplace laughs and slightly reducing the amount of time spent with Steve Carrell's embodiment of the Worst Boss Ever.

Really, seriously, you should give it a try. I was skeptical, but over the summer I found myself laughing out loud, long and repeatedly, as I watched the U.S. series' first handful of episodes.

Since our annual TeeVee Awards For Excellence in Televisual Excellence were posted, we've received an absolute flood of four or five emails complaining that Kristen Bell didn't win Best Hour Actress, since we chose instead to give it to, um, nobody.

In at attempt to forestall any future emails, let me first say that we appreciate the apparently-fanatical devotion with which you are following our goofy, meaningless awards. If you could see the literally minutes of thought and debate we put into them, you'd be appalled. Really. And don't you think Kristen Bell has gotten enough plaudits without the praise of a website of which she has undoubtedly never heard? The woman got to sing at the Emmy Awards! And she lost to Donald Trump and that squeaky woman from Will and Grace, which seems like a greater outrage.

Now, to the subject at hand: why didn't we give Kristen Bell the award? Well, speaking just for myself, I hadn't watched her show yet, so I felt more qualified to vote on categories like Best Cartoon (incidentally, Justice League Unlimited just started its new season, and if you liked the cavalcade of random heroes as much as I did, be sure not to miss the Legion of Doom arc, which promises to drag villains out from even greater depths of obscurity). But you're thinking, "Hey! Isn't there someone who writes for you who really likes Veronica Mars, even to the point where we're all getting a little sick of the running gag where his name is linked with it?" Well, yes. But, um, he didn't have a vote yet. He does now (as does Laurel Krahn, who watches more hours of Actual Television than half the rest of us combined), but a fat lot of good that does anybody, what with there being nothing to vote on at the moment.

My point is this: We can only reward the shows we see. And with an increasing number of the staff becoming parents, you're just lucky we're not subjecting you to essays comparing Bear in the Big Blue House and Spongebob Squarepants in their ability to keep toddlers from wrecking up the house. But at least a couple of us will be watching Veronica Mars when it debuts on Wednesday, September 28 on UPN, and if Kristen Bell continues to be great, we'll do our best to remember that in the byzantine awards nomination process.

Now quit emailing us.

Faithful TeeVee reader Mike Morris has more stomach than us, and so he actually watched The War at Home, the inexplicable new live-action sitcom shoveled into Fox's Sunday-night line-up. Here's Mike's report:

NBC's My Name Is Earl (premiering Tuesday) is getting a lot of accolades as one of the best new comedies of the fall. I haven't seen any to compare it to, but I'd grade it as an incomplete -- it's got potential, but as with many shows, its pilot's got some flaws.

Jason Lee is Earl, a ne'er-do-well who wins the lottery and gets hit by a car in short succession, teaching him (with a synergistic assist from Carson Daly) a little about Karma. Thus changed, Earl decides to right wrongs -- in his case, the wrongs he has caused others in his years as a ne'er-do-well.

Not a bad premise for a sitcom, and Lee's up to the task of playing earnest-but-dumb. In the first episode, he devotes himself to helping a kid he used to beat up in school, and although his plan of getting the guy a prostitute veers wildly off course, in the end he's done right by his past victim, who sweetly discharges him of his duties.

Not so successful are the show's supporting characters, who are broadly drawn and in many parts, poorly acted. Earl's brother Randy is an idiot, which could be fun, but Ethan Suplee seems strangely uninspired. Catalina (played by Nadine Velazquez and sadly described in NBC's press materials as a "very sexy maid" -- ouch!) is a cipher who shares one particularly poorly-acted scene on a hotel bed with Randy. Jaime Pressly plays Joy, Earl's skanky ex-wife, and she's a shrill, one-note golddigger that isn't remotely funny. Eddie Steeples, on the other hand, has some promise as "Crab Guy" Darnell, Joy's longtime boyfriend and the father of Earl Jr.

So, to sum up: Earl is worth a shot, and for more than just the pilot episode. Whether it's worth it in the long haul remains to be seen -- it largely depends on if the supporting cast either figures it out or fades into the background, and if the writers can manage to keep the show slightly more sweet than sour. As for Earl himself, he's pretty solid. Jason Lee's worth watching, even if the jury's still out when it comes to the people surrounding him.

They’re handing out Emmy Awards tonight in Los Angeles, and excuse us if we greet this momentous occasion with the same enthusiasm we might have for a Wal-Mart grand opening. Actually, that’s not really a fair comparison — a Wal-Mart grand opening at least holds the promise of nominal savings for crafty shoppers. All the Emmys ceremony does is suck away four hours of our lives, and leave us the empty feeling the comes from seeing the likes of Will & Grace and the hollowed-out shell of The West Wing honored as the best in their industry.

Our beefs with the Emmys are ancient and well-chronicled. They rubber-stamp the same winners year after tedious year. They shoehorn hour-long programs with just a hint of humor into the same category as 30-minute sitcoms because heaven forfend that voters be forced to think outside the limiting Comedy and Drama divisions. And whoever votes on these things apparently has a really crappy cable provider — how else to explain Emmy voters’ apparent inability to realize that F/X, WB, and (gasp) even UPN have a couple award-worthy shows that are going to spend a statue-free Sunday night.

So bag the Emmys, we say. Why waste your time with an award show that has to jostle with the inconsequential likes of the People’s Choice Awards and ESPYs for relevance? Instead of a program where the honorees are selected by rote, devote your attention on awards that are handed out by people who actually bothered to watch television sometime during the past 12 months.

We speak, of course, about our awards.

Sure, the TeeVee Awards lack the notoriety and prestige of the Emmys. Heck, our awards lack the notoriety and prestige of the Honors Student of the Week column in your local fishrag. And the next actor or actress who calls up demanding one of our trophies — operators are standing by, Sarah Michelle! — will be the first. Which is probably just as well since then we’d actually have to, you know, physically build a trophy instead of just whipping up the JPEG equivalent of one.

But consider, for a moment, the advantages our humble little awards round-up enjoys over the inexplicably more popular Emmys.

• We don’t pretend that Desperate Housewives has anything in common with the likes of Everybody Loves Raymond, Scrubs and Will & Grace, other than all of those shows are produced by and star carbon-based life forms. And whatever Sean Hayes is.

• We will never, ever force you to sit through any lavish musical tribute numbers — especially after Boychuk’s ill-fated medley saluting the legal dramas of David E. Kelley back in 2000.

• There is no awkward, forced banter between the presenters handing out our awards. Frankly, we can barely stand speaking to one another as it is.

• Have you heard one peep out of Joan or Melissa Rivers since you started reading this article? You’re welcome.

• No matter how long this introduction prattles on, you’re still going to be done with our awards long before Leah Remini is brought out to introduce the clip from the technical awards ceremony held two weeks ago.

So yeah, we’ll stick with our awards, thanks very much. Even if we should have gotten around to presenting them months ago.

Without further ado then, here are the winners of the Ninth Annual TeeVee Awards.

Biggest Disappointment: We give HBO a lot of credit. While other networks will yank a show for retooling at the first hint that viewers have let their eyeballs wander, HBO can set back and let its programming build an audience at its own pace. The cable network can afford to — since it gets a nice chunk of subscription fees every month, it can tell the bean-counters over at AC Nielsen to go pound sand if executives there like a show well enough. But this year, Carnivàle proved there are limits to even HBO’s patience and that if you want to remain on the air, there are a few simple elements you need to provide. Like plot advancement. And coherent narrative. And, eventually, a goddamned point. Look, we get that Daniel Knauf was going to take his sweet time telling us what the deal was between Clancy Brown and that filthy Oakie. But we’re busy people. And two seasons of mumbo-jumbo with little to no payoff is about a season-and-a-half too much for our tastes.

Worst Actor and Worst Hour Show: Perhaps it’s just our inability to willingly suspend our disbelief, but we don’t buy, for one second, the performance the actor who plays the boastful billionaire Donald Trump at the center of NBC’s The Apprentice. For one thing, Trump is stiff and unconvincing as a billionaire. His judgments are so puzzling, his demeanor so unlikable, his hair so obviously constructed out of straw and bailing wire, that we just can’t buy into the notion that anyone would trust this guy to mow their lawn for beer money, let alone broker mega-real estate deals. If Mark Burnett has any eye for talent, he’ll recast the Donald Trump role immediately with someone more suited to the task.

Hmmmm? That actually is Donald Trump? Well, he’s just dreadful.

Though not nearly so dreadful as his show has become in the past year. The first season of The Apprentice was surprisingly good, a sort of Survivor in the urban jungle of New York City. The cast was at turns winning and (hello, Omarosa) completely insane. Donald’s sidekicks, George and Carolyn, were good additions. Then the show got a whiff of success and went right into the crapper with its second and third runs, with the producers making bad casting decisions (Book Learnin’! Street Smarts!) and the Donald making a series of seemingly random firings. And with that, a formerly quirky and classy reality show crumbled into a crass morass.

Worst Half-Hour Show: If it’s any consolation to Seth MacFarlane and the rest of the folks that have made American Dad such an unwatchable eyesore, we recently had occasion to watch repeats of the first couple episodes of Family Guy, the other animated series about an idiot patriarch and his long-suffering family. And you know what? Those first few Family Guy episodes were pretty terrible, too.

Wait — that’s probably little consolation at all.

What we mean is, early installments of Family Guy suffered many of the same problems currently dogging American Dad. The characters weren’t fully formed yet. The writing was pretty spotty. The episodes were curiously paced and altogether even. We didn’t notice it at the time because Family Guy felt new enough with an original take on a very familiar premise. But we are noticing it with American Dad because it feels like… a Family Guy knockoff.

There’s plenty of room for improvement, especially after the show’s disastrous post-Super Bowl premiere. Family Guy eventually found its footing and developed such a following that Fox was forced to bring it back from the dead. It’s possible American Dad could undergo a similar renaissance. (Step One: More of the teutonic fish. Step Two: Less of the Paul Lynde-esque alien.) Until it does though, we’ll stick to repeats of the first flawed Family Guy episodes. At least we know that show will get better one day.

Worst Actress: You wouldn’t think that a procedural drama, an over-hyped dramedy, and a silly sci-fi program would have much in common. But CSI, Desperate Housewives and Stargate Atlantis all hold the distinction of employing three actresses who set our teeth on edge.

Marg Helgenberger’s character on CSI has always been one that works better the less you think about it. (“She’s a former stripper… turned crime scene investigator!”) However, this year, audiences had no choice but to wallow in the preposterousness of it all, as Helgenberger was handed one ego-stroking gratuitous Emmy clip scene after another. Our personal favorite: the episode where Helgenberger investigates a series of deaths related to cosmetic surgery and spends the episode wondering if she might use a little nipping and tucking, only to be assured by most of the men folk on the show that she’s pretty enough not to need it — this despite the fact that even a cursory examination of Ms. Helgenberger’s face indicates she’s probably been on the business end of a doctor’s scalpel more often than Ken Griffey Jr.’s knees.

We haven’t bought into the Desperate Housewives hysteria that’s seemingly gripped the rest of the nation’s TV watchers. Where other people see an original, incisive satire of modern life, we see a trite rehashing of toothless observations about suburbia that have been around in one form or another for the last 30 years. (You mean the suburbs are full of people leading lives of quiet desperation? Good God, man, who knew?) As silly as the proceedings are, at least most of the actors participating in them seem to be striking similar tones — all except for Marcia Cross who appears to be acting in an entirely different series requiring broad, over-the-top, “goes-to-11”-style emoting. It’s a wee bit annoying.

Over on the Sci Fi channel, the producers of the long-running Stargate SG-1 TV series decided to spin off a new series, Stargate Atlantis. The spin-off’s actually not bad, but one of its two leads is horribly miscast. Canadian actress Torri Higginson is way out of her depth as Dr. Elizabeth Weir, earning her the title of the most wooden actor currently on Sci-Fi. It’s not entirely her fault, of course — Weir may be the most useless character on television today, a dithering second-guesser who is theoretically in charge of the Atlantis team but tends to do nothing except quibble over the decisions of the show’s other lead, played by Joe Flanigan. So to sum up: wooden acting, useless character, waste of space. And a share of the Worst Actress trophy.

Most Annoying Fans: Consider yourselves fortunates, fans of reality TV show fame-whores Rob and Amber. We were all set to give you this award for your ceaseless devotion to the couple that single-handedly ruined the last season of The Amazing Race. But then we flipped on an episode of Celebrity Poker Showdown on Bravo and were appalled that a hand of poker couldn’t be dealt without some cementhead in the peanut gallery shouting out some supposedly uproarious bon mot. So, instead, our award for the Most Annoying Fans goes to Celebrity Poker Showdown Audience Members Who Think They’re Hilarious. Because they’re not.

Worst Host: There are many things that are horrible wrong about ESPN right now, chief among them the network’s odd decision to move away from sports coverage and into the nebulous realm of entertainment programming. This is sort of like executives at Animal Planet waking up one day and exclaiming “Bag these animal shows — let’s do more soap operas!”

But there are other problems at the Worldwide Leader in Sports besides its newfound addiction to game shows and reality programming. It has fully embraced style over substance, favoring anchors and personalities who detract from the simplest highlight by littering the airwaves with “Hey! Look at Me!”-type catch-phrases.

No one embodies these ESPN-wide maladies more than Stuart Scott. Besides his singularly awful work anchoring SportsCenter, Scott has also extended his special mix of no-talent and faux-attitude to hosting duties on Stump the Schwab (a game show), Teammmates (another game show) and Dream Job (a reality show program tasked with the horrific mission of finding a new generation of catch-phrase-spewing Stuart Scotts to detract from Pacers-Spurs highlights). It takes a special sort of host to ruin four programs. Runner-up Ryan Seacrest is content merely to ruin one.

Unjust Cancellation: We dreamed up this award a few years back as a way to tweak networks for any boneheaded or short-sighted decision to pink-slip superlative programming before its time. True to their mission to thwart our hopes and dreams at every opportunity, network executives threw us a curve ball this year by not actually canceling any undeserving show.

Oh, we thought about giving this award to JAG, which was shown the door despite being one of those shows ostensibly built to air until the sun is a burnt-out cinder. And there was a small movement to lament the passing of Tru Calling, which had the honor of getting renewed for a second season and then getting cancelled before any episode of that second season ever hit the airwaves after Fox executives sobered up and realized their mistake. But both shows were hardly the standard-bearers for quality TV — though Tru Calling’s so-awful-it’s-actually-entertaining ethos is a kind of quality — so instead we’ll just go with No Award.

Best Animated Show: We were not big fans of Justice League Unlimited when it replaced the original Justice League on the Cartoon Network. Whereas the original Justice League wisely concentrated on the exploits of just seven superheroes, Unlimited expanded to a… um… unlimited cast of characters. Entire episodes were devoted to introducing yet another superhero from an increasing obscure subsection of the DC universe.

Ah, but this season, Justice League Unlimited found its purpose. It stopped the parade of superheroes in favor of an actual plotline — a compelling story arc about a shadowy government agency fretting that the Justice League might go rogue and taking steps to destroy Superman, et. al. And it developed a sense of humor — an episode featuring pretenders to the Justice League throne (complete with a shout-out to the horrible Wonder Twins) was set in the old Hall of Justice building from the 1970s Superfriends cartoon. These qualities helped push Justice League Unlimited to the top of the animated series heap, just barely edging out the sublimely ridiculous Robot Chicken for our meaningless award.

Best Reality Show: Yes, Freddy and Kendra proved to be intensely unlikable winners of the sixth version of The Amazing Race. And while Joyce and Unchenna were slightly more acceptable winners in Race No. 7 — largely on the basis of not being Rob and Amber — this past season of Race won’t go down in the record books as our favorite. (Ah, Amazing Race 5, how we miss you…) We keep spending barrels of virtual ink thinking up ways to improve the show, for heaven’s sake.

And yet… The Amazing Race is still so far ahead of any other reality program in terms of quality, entertainment value and overall watchability, it’s not even an argument that this show deserves our award. (We hope we can say the same thing after the sure-to-be ill-considered Family Edition hits the airwaves). In fact, we’d even call it the best hour show on television were it not for…

Best Hour Show: …The Wire and Lost. If you are not sending a large chunk of money to HBO each month for the privilege of watching The Wire, we question as to why you’re even bothering with TV in the first place. The Wire, a complex drama about the Baltimore drug trade, is everything a television program should aspire to be — sweeping, literate, and planned out so far in advance that seemingly minor plot developments from season one emerged into full-blown story arcs by season three. The Wire’s cast of characters is so immense that even Tolstoy would have trouble following along. And yet, even the secondary and tertiary characters are so well-drawn and fully realized, you’ll want to invest the time to immerse yourself in The Wire’s universe. Which is good, since it’s nearly impossible to watch any episode from season three, without having watched the entire first two seasons of The Wire seconds beforehand. On the bright side, with season four of The Wire slated for arrival in 2006, you’ve got plenty of time to familiarize yourself with the backstory.

Lost takes a Wire-like approach to story-telling, and so it shares the award for Best Hour Show. There is some magnificent acting on Lost (more about one performance in particular in a moment) that, coupled with the program creators’ obsession with character development and backstory, has produced something unlike anything else you’ll find on network TV. Yes, Lost can be a little bit perplexing at times with its scattered plot points and seeming inability to adequately resolve some storylines while advancing the overall narrative. In fact, we halfway suspect that the show’s writers are just making things up as they go along. But in the end, Lost is a hell of a roller-coaster ride, even if the only place it winds up taking us is back to the station where it started. Sometimes, you just have to enjoy the ride. Speaking of which…

Best New Show: Also, Lost. That piercing scream you just heard was Veronica Mars Fan Supreme Nathan Alderman vowing ever-lasting vengeance against us.

Best Hour Actor: Throughout this year, as we marveled at the unspooling of the first season of multi-TeeVee Award winner Lost, we often found ourselves screaming at the television set. No, we weren’t screaming about the length of time it took to open that damned hatch, or screaming for Evangeline Lilly to take off more of her clothes. We were screaming one simple phrase: “Hand Terry O’Quinn The Emmy Right Now.”

Well, we can’t hand Terry O’Quinn an emmy. But we can give him our Best Hour Actor actor award for his amazing portrayal of John Locke on Lost. O’Quinn’s been really good for a long time now — in supporting roles on shows like Millennium, Alias, and the blink-and-you-missed it Harsh Realm. But with Lost, he’s been given the role of a lifetime. Locke is a mystical figure who spouts philosophical phrases that would be ludicrous coming from anyone else, but O’Quinn sells Locke’s lines with his steely-eyed, slightly crazed delivery. Lost is a showcase for acting, thanks to its remarkable focus on flashbacks, but amid the show’s gigantic cast, one cast member shined far brighter than the rest. Give Terry O’Quinn the TeeVee Award Right Now.

Best Hour Actress: We were tempted to say equally nice things about Evangeline Lilly in this category. But in the end, “has a pretty mouth” isn’t much of a basis for handing out a credible award. So, in the absence of any other contenders, we’re afraid we’ll just have to list this one as a No Award as well.

Best Half-Hour Actor: In keeping with the grand TeeVee Awards tradition of not reaching any kind of definitive conclusion, we’ve decided to split the honors in our Best Half-Hour Actor category. Joint custody of the trophy is given to a pair of actors who pulled off the heady feat of standing out amid a strong ensemble cast on their respective programs.

On Scrubs, Zach Braff may be the lead actor and John C. McGinley may be given the juiciest lines, but this season, Donald Faison turned in the best acting work. Faison is an incredibly under-rated actor — his comedic timing is impeccable, he throws himself head-first into Scrubs’ trademark fantasy sequences, and just check out his reactions to other characters’ lines some time. It takes a lot of skill to be able to get a laugh without even saying a word. Faison deserves special accolades this season as the writers opted to saddle him with that most tedious of plot developments, the ol’ Marriage-on-the-Rocks storyline (thus fulfilling the well-known TV mandate that no married couple can ever be contented with their relationship). Faison handled this stinker of a plot twist with aplomb and also navigated similarly mawkish plot twists — his character developed diabetes — without ever stooping to hammy over-acting. He’s the best thing about a very good show.

It takes a lot to stand out in a cast that features both Jason Bateman and Jeffrey Tambor nailing their respective parts, but Will Arnett did exactly that on Arrested Development this year. Arnett’s GOB is a fun role to play — the idiotic blowhard who half-suspects that he’s overmatched by the world around him and desperately tries to hide that fact from everyone else — and a lesser actor could turn in a fairly competent performance. Arnett owns the role. From Arnett’s delivery to his body language to the glint of manic desperation in his eye, you simply could not imagine any other actor inhabiting this character. One of our happiest memories of this past season will be the sight of Arnett using an ether-soaked puppet to drug unsuspecting family members. It’s an absurd sight, sure, but in Arnett’s hands, it strangely works.

Best Half-Hour Actress: Speaking of memorable performances on Arrested Development, how could we not mention Jessica Walter, the drunken, acid-tongued matriarch of the Bluth family? Few actors are willing to play a character so unrelenting unlikable as Lucille; even fewer are capable of injecting that character with the humanity that Walter does — we end up enjoying Lucille Bluth in spite of ourselves.

It’s no secret that the TV industry takes a Logan’s Run approach to older actresses — whatever screentime they receive is usually of the “Oh grandma, you say such crazy things!” variety. Thanks to Walter’s unmistakable talent, her character is more than just a footnote — she’s a central part to a great, great show.

Best Half-Hour Show: So when you’ve got the Best Actor and Best Actress winners on your show — and really, we could have recognized any one of half-a-dozen other cast members without looking silly — taking home the Best Half-Hour Show trophy should be a slam dunk. And, despite our tendency to hand out these things without rhyme or reason, it is — Arrested Development takes home the big prize.

There’s the funny, gifted cast. There’s the tightest-written scripts in the business. What more do you need? Try a recurring guest spot by Henry Winkler as the world’s most incompetent attorney. Or a plotline involving a hand-eating seal. Or the strange career revival of Liza Minelli. Arrested Development is so funny, so good, that even the myopic Emmy voters took notice and gave it the Best Comedy trophy last year; it’s not outside the realm of possibility that the show could be a repeat winner tonight. That alone may be enough to drag the Emmy awards kicking and screaming back into relevancy.

Well, no, it won’t be… but we try to be charitable every now and again.

If you only look skin deep, Fox's Bones is yet another frustrating example of the Just Good Enough TV Drama -- rote and predictable enough not to scare away lazy couch potatoes, but peppered with juuuuuuust enough smarts and originality to avoid viewers' outright contempt. But underneath the surface, there's at least the skeleton of a good TV show here. If Bones, inspired by the books of forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs, doesn't get everything right -- and it definitely doesn't -- at least it absolutely nails the things it needs to get right.

Steve Lutz: Jason, I come to curse you for making me watch Prison Break. Now I’m hooked on a show that makes me feel slightly retarded.

Philip Michaels: I agree with Steve. It’s the conspiracy show that the entire family can unravel!

Monty Ashley: The show’s only been going a few weeks, but I’ve already noticed the rigorous formula: The first fifty minutes are devoted to solving the Seemingly Insurmountable Problem from the last episode, then the last ten minutes introduces a new Seemingly Insurmountable Problem as a cliffhanger.

Jason Snell: I liked the pilot because I liked the concept of the one guy knowing exactly how everything would go down. Sadly, when he gets knocked off track it’s actually less dramatic. I liked it more when he was this omniscient puppet master.

SL: I wasn’t so hot on the omniscient puppet master thing, because if he had all the answers for 23 weeks, it wouldn’t be much of a show. In fact, I got kind of jazzed when his best laid plans started to go awry, only to have my hopes dashed when I realized his responses to the various monkey wrenches thrown his way were going to be so dumb.

JS: I love that the off-screen mobster snitch is named Fibonacci. “More math jokes than Numb3ers!”

MA: I will bet twenty dollars that later in the season, his tattoo gets damaged in some way (probably involving a shiv) and now he doesn’t have access to his map. Like, what if his toe had had the essential part of the plan? Now what?!

JS: The show is very high on the “it seemed extraneous at the time” factor.

PM: Just once, I’d like to watch a show on Fox that isn’t about corruption at the highest levels of our government. Prison Break. 24. American Dad. Don’t the people who produce Fox shows watch Fox News and know that the government is benevolent now?

MA: By showing fictional governments as Evil, they condition people to like the Real government.

JS: I find it amazing that the government has it so together that they can plan this entire crazy set-up, when we know for a fact that the federal government can’t even respond to a category five hurricane when they see it coming. Also, the ex-girlfriend stuff makes me wish for death.

PM: The ex-girlfriend reminds me of Demi Moore. And that’s bad since I hate Demi Moore. I call her Semi Moore. Or Demi Less.

MA: I would like more Prison Breaking and less Stacy Keach’s Marital Problems and Sucre’s Girlfriend Doesn’t Understand Him.

PM: And don’t forget about Lincoln’s messed-up son.

JS: Oh, god, the son.

SL: He’s a plot point. He’s not in this episode. He’s a plot point again. Hey, where’d the son go this week?

PM: What the producers of that show need to realize is that they’re doing a caper show. Like "Ocean’s Eleven." Only in prison.

MA: And with only one guy.

PM: Right.

PM: Though I think Dino and Sammy should have been cast as a pair of swinging cellies.

MA: A pair of swinging dead cellies.

JS: Okay, so I guess what I’m saying is, even though I sort of thought I liked it, once I spent enough time away from the reality-distortion field, I discovered that it left me with a headache. Sort of the mental equivalent of eating lots of halloween candy. Sometimes I wonder if the producers of 24 put the producers of Prison Break up to it, specifically so that by comparison their show would no longer seem ludicrously unrealistic.

SL: I like the show in spite of myself. I love the Peter Stormare character, and I dig the sadistic prison guard, if only because his just comeuppance is so clearly forecast.

MA: Also, I keep wondering if “the vice-president’s brother” was the most important person they were allowed to have killed.

PM: The writing is generally acceptable, the pacing is good, the show is awful pretty to look at… But the acting by the three leads… man. Semi Moore, we’ve already discussed.

JS: I don’t quite get where they’re going with Stacey Keach. But I do find it funny that when they were putting together a show about prison, they thought of him.

PM: Well, if anyone knows about prisons… They should have had a cast entirely of ex-felons. Tom Sizemore. Martha Stewart.

SL: But why, oh why, must the main character’s plan to get out of prison be so pedestrian and dumb?

MA: Pedestrian? He’s using toothpaste to make acid. Can *you* do that?

SL: He didn’t use toothpaste, he just used the tube.

MA: I thought he combined the black stuff from the masonry room with the regular toothpaste.

MA: I may not have been paying full attention to the MacGyver details.

JS: If Rywalt were here, he could explain how this would make a kick-ass text adventure.

SL: Nope, he mixed the black stuff with something else; weed killer, I think.

PM: For a guy who’s about to get put to death in a month, Lincoln sure seems very subdued… or like someone just asked him a math word problem. And the Michael character… he seems to be handling the adjustment to prison life well for a guy with no priors.

JS: This is where I’m torn. On one level, I like it that he seems to have everything figure out. On another level, it’s completely ridiculous that he’d have even the faintest clue about how prison works.

PM: I guess I’d like a few more “What in God’s name was I thinking” moments instead of him dealing with potential prison rape with aplomb and a one-liner.

SL: I just feel like the writers are grasping so hard to put together this ingenious plan for the main character to escape, but they’re not up to coming up with anything that’s actually brilliant. Every episode has had at least one thing that’s incredibly dumb. Episode 1: The big episode ender turns out to be the most ridiculous use of CGI I’ve ever seen. Episode 2: Michael’s brilliant plan, for which he requires every last iota of his structural engineering background, is to pull a long screw out of the bleachers.

MA: Doesn’t he seem to have too many details in his tattoos? Did he really need to remind himself of the brand of toilet, and that he needed an “Allen” wrench? Surely he could have skipped some of that. It’s too bad there weren’t any other screws anywhere in the complex.

PM: And not just any bleachers… but the bleachers occupied by the deranged sex maniac!

SL: For this, he needs to both tattoo Allen Schweizer on himself, and transcribe it to a handy post-it note. In case, y’know, he forgets what an Allen wrench is.

JS: Stop, Steve, you’re making me despise a show I only mildly disliked.

MA: Maybe he has that Memento deal where he has no long-term memory.

SL: It’s so obvious they were trying to impress the audience with a Kaiser Soze moment, but it just makes Michael look like a buffoon.

PM: Just last week, I got an Allen wrench and a hex-head wrench confused. Maybe I need an elaborate prison tat.

SL:Episode 3: Anybody want to explain to me where the hell you get an authentic looking cell phone made out of soap? In prison? I couldn’t find one of those on the outside, and I have free access to Spencer Gifts.

MA: That was a reference to the time Dillinger bluffed his way out of prison by carving a bar of soap into a replica of a pistol and dyed it with shoe polish.

SL: I didn’t see any intense soap-whittling scenes.

MA: The soap-whittling will be on the DVD.

JS: So, any bets on how the first season will end, if we get that far?

PM: Not to repeat myself, but I doubt the producers have any idea. But… since the tag line has been “escape is just the beginning,” I’m betting they’re out of prison by episode 8 or 9. And the remaining 4 episodes of the season are them on the lam. With some sort of showdown as the season cliffhanger.

MA: I think the brother gets executed, Scofield’s sentence gets extended, and now he needs to escape from Death Row. With no hands.

SL: I would watch that show.

MA: Maybe they escape just as the lady lawyer proves the conspiracy, so now they have to sneak Lincoln back in.

SL: If they get out by episode 8 or 9, the show’s done for, because the outside stuff just plain sucks.

MA: It seems like the escape tunnel will be really elaborate. Scofield has to get to both Abruzzi and Death Row, and then get outside.

SL: I’d be more willing to watch this show to the end if the producers would come out and say it was a one-season and out deal. We could learn a lot from British TV in that respect. Not every show has to be milked until it’s irrelevant.

MA: If you really liked the show and the characters, wouldn’t you make an online petition to not have a second season, so he’d be more likely to get out and stay out?

JS: In fact, the producers claim they have a multi-year story arc planned.

SL: Crap.

MA: All producers claim that.

JS: They plan on following various characters as they escape.

PM: That’s just nutty.

JS: I agree, it seems kooky to me.

SL: That in itself makes me want to stuff watching.

MA: Eventually the prison is just the warden and the mean guard looking at a bunch of empty cells.

PM: “Hey, where did everybody go?”

SL: The show’s amusing, but I already know I’m not good for more than a season.

PM: Yeah, this is one-year-and-out for me, whether the producers follow along or not.

SL: Also: can we please call a stop to the extreme closeups of the lawyer lady’s face? The woman looks like she was assembled by Picasso. Every time they pull in close to her and her eyes start to bug out in fear, I swear she’s about to have a stroke.

PM: And yet, though we’ve spent the past 10-15 minutes ripping the show, I still plan on watching it. I guess I’m really starved for entertainment.

SL: As am I. It has enough good moments, and enough potential, to warrant a few more episodes. I may feel differently when there are new episodes of genuinely good shows to watch.

PM: Yeah, you have to have the prison break in under 13 episodes — otherwise, it’s Hogan’s Heroes 2005. “We could break out any time, you know.”

MA: I bet he’s got a super-elaborate plan that involves breaking out, breaking back in, and then digging a huge — Damn, Phil got to Hogan’s Heroes before I did.

PM: But we’ve got to save Klink from getting sent to the Russian front.

MA: But I still wouldn’t be surprised if he goes back in after he gets out.

SL: I’m looking forward to the day when one of his helpful notes-to-self — perhaps the one that says “keep cheeks tightly clenched” — turns out to be covering up a crucial heating duct.

MA: Maybe he puts on weight, and that changes a vital sketch

SL: It’s a good thing he stopped the ink at his waistline.

MA: All I’m saying is that so far, his plan is not so complex as to require that many notes.

PM: I’m guessing Mr. Anti-Death Penalty guy is in on the conspiracy. But that’s only because it’s being telegraphed.

MA: How come the Secret Agents didn’t want people seeing the video tape? It’s incriminating! And if they hated it so much, how come it wasn’t classified, or accidentally erased? It seems easier than leaning on everyone who gets a copy.

SL: And if they were going to pick one Secret Agent that looks like Tom Hulce, why couldn’t they find a partner for him that looks like Stephen Furst?

PM: Your secret agent name is Flounder.

SL: That’s a pointless reference that I could get behind. And speaking of getting behind… Is it possible that butt sex will remain only a vile rumor for the entire season?

PM: Of course it will — this is network TV.

MA: Yeah, if they don’t break it out for sweeps, it’s not happening.

PM: As I said to Lisa, this is the least rapiest prison in all of America.

MA: These menacing prisoners just hold hands with you.

SL: Or pockets.

PM: Hell, on Oz, they usually had about 12 rapes before the opening credits ended.

PM: Lisa explained to me that the pocket thing is actually a real thing. Drawing from her extensive experience in the joint, I guess.

MA: I’d like to see a guest shot from an Oz character who just looks around and laughs at everybody. Even Beecher’s too tough for this place.

SL: I just want to go back for a moment and point out that the word “rapiest” needs to get added to Webster’s dictionary immediately.

PM: “most rapey” might be more grammatically correct.

MA: If I were saying it out loud, it would be “rapin’-est” (like with Rootin’-est, Tootin’-est), but it looks weird written down.

SL: This here’s the rapin’-est jail in the wilderness.

PM: Not something you’d hear on your next Disney excursion.

MA: Hang on to your hats and glasses! And stay out of my molasses.

SL: Ewwwwew.

PM: So to summarize: Drop all the subplots and focus on the prison break aspect of the show. Teach the leads to act.

JS: No more ex-girlfriend lawyer!!

PM: I, for one, will not be disappointed if the sweeping government conspiracy succeeds in offing Demi Less. And, for God’s sake, come up with an ending.

SL: And let us know that we’ll actually be able to stop watching this crap at some point.

MA: When trying to come up with an ending, consider using the one from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” Or “Bonnie and Clyde.” If I were guaranteed that everybody in the show would get brutally machine-gunned at some point, I’d definitely keep watching.

JS: More outrageous prison stereotypes.

PM: The prison stereotypes actually work in this show. Because it helps them do all the exposition in about 5 minutes in each episode. Oh, right, you’re the white supremacist sex fiend. I remember you from Shawshank Redemption. Hey, you’re the distrustful black guy from “The Defiant Ones.” All they need is the prison rodeo from Stir Crazy and we are good to go.

SL: My summary: Prison Break is dumb fun. But mostly dumb.

JS: Heavy on the dumb.

SL: Bigtime dumb.

PM: Fox dumb.

SL: And that’s dumb.

Additional contributions to this article by: Steve Lutz, Philip Michaels, Monty Ashley, Jason Snell.

For months now, I’ve read the hype about the WB’s new Supernatural, the high-concept darling of its fall lineup, in which that one handsome guy who used to be on another WB show and that other handsome guy who used to be on another WB show drive across the country in a really bitchin’ muscle car killing monsters. Time after time — sometimes from critics, but usually from WB suits — I’ve seen it compared to The X-Files, the previous pinnacle of spine-tingling TV chills.

Since the WB was kind enough to stream the entire first episode of Supernatural via Yahoo for interested viewers, I can safely say that Supernatural is a bit like The X-Files. You just have to remove any wit, charisma, intelligence and actual scariness. (So, kind of like the ninth season of The X-Files.) Supernatural isn’t so-dumb-it’s-fun bad. It isn’t even delightfully-cheesy-horror-movie bad. It’s just bad.

Unless, of course, you like shows about sexy hunks abandoning their sexy girlfriends to hunt sexy ghosts. Sexy ghosts who get lingering close-ups on their sexy ghost cleavage. Sexy ghosts who want to make out with you — to death!

Surely, in the wake of Tarzan, the WB learned the error of casting your lead actors based solely on their pretty, pretty faces? (If Tarzan showrunner Eric Kripke’s presence as the creator and writer of Supernatural is any clue, probably not.) Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles sort of stumble through their lines, squinting and smirking and not really making any effort to convince the viewer that they’re anything but handsome. These two sucking charisma voids seem to have breached the laws of physics and created negative acting. If they shared a scene with, say, scenery-chewing god Christopher Walken, they might actually reduce his screen presence to that of your basic Ashton Kutcher or Rob Schneider.

Padalecki is at least the likeable one, although he played a guy named Dean on Gilmore Girls, and plays the brother of a guy named Dean here. Given Gilmore Girls fans’ existing love of elaborate wordplay, that could lead to some downright dangerous “Who’s On First”-style conversational Mobius strips. (Seriously, they couldn’t have changed the name?) Ackles’ character is, well, kind of an Ack-hole — smug, obnoxious, and stupid enough to think that ordinary bullets from an ordinary pistol are going to hurt a ghost. I’ll admit he delivers an amusingly weary “I’m okay!” when dragging himself out of a river (long story), but it doesn’t quite compensate for him bellowing “That Constance — what a BITCH!” in reference to the Ghost-of-the-Week.

Granted, the writing does neither lead any favors. Kripke’s script shovels the show’s entire premise gracelessly into dialogue within the first five minutes, lest the audience be kept in any kind of confusing suspense that might lead them to get bored and switch channels. (“After Mom died, Dad trained us to hunt monsters in hopes of finding the thing that killed her. But we don’t find it, so we just keep killing everything we can.” I kid you not.) When they’re not speaking entirely in cliches, our Ken Doll heroes seem to confuse second-grade insults and punches in the arm for characterization.

They’re not exactly deductive geniuses, either, seeing how all the clues for the episode’s central plot — a ghostly “woman in white” luring drivers to a vaguely horrible fate — are helpfully provided to them by other characters. Seriously, they don’t have to do anything. A girl they meet tells them exactly what’s doing the killing. A suspicious sheriff literally hands Ackles their father’s clue-packed diary. And the vengeful ghost shows up in Padalecki’s headlights, plunks herself in his back seat, and pretty much insists on being his next passenger. It’s not that they solve the mystery so much as have the mystery solved in their general vicinity. Even the gang from Scooby-Doo had to work harder than this.

The ghost’s modus operandi is to throw herself at guys, make out with them, then literally rip their hearts out. (Kind of like at least one of my ex-girlfriends, except that the ghost is apparently considerate enough to clean up after herself.) Actress Sarah Shahi was pretty cool on the first season of Alias, but here she appears to have been doped with roofies. She never seems like much of a threat, honestly — the special effects make her blink in and out a bit, and sometimes she sports a makeup job that seems left over from Michael Jackson’s Thriller, but mostly you’re just trying not to laugh at Padalecki’s noble attempts to refuse to suck face with her. (No, no, anything but that!) And then Ackles shoots at her, and Padalecki drives his car into her old house, and the ghosts of her murdered children show up to drag her down to Hell in an explosion of bad CGI.

There is, at least, the very good-looking Adrianne Palicki playing Padalecki’s girlfriend. She spends about 90 percent of her screen time in either a sexy nurse costume or revealing sleepwear — not that I’m complaining — and apparently wears a push-up bra to bed. All of which makes it even harder to believe that Padalecki would abandon her, even for a weekend, for a life of monster-killing and credit card fraud with his imbecile brother. (Hint: When a character asks his girlfriend, “What would I ever do without you?”, chances are he’s going to find out.)

I’ll confess that there were a few moments in its opening and closing sequences when Supernatural had me in suspense despite myself, feeling like something really scary was about to happen. Except that when it did happen, it wasn’t scary at all. The fate that befalls our heroes’ mother in the opening flashback is too random and nonsensical to actually be frightening. When it happens again to the girlfriend character in the pilot’s closing minutes, for no apparent reason besides its convenience to the premise of the series, it’s just plain ridiculous.

With the success of The O.C., executive producer McG had pretty much managed to atone for the godawful excess of Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle — or, as I like to call it, “Why the Rest of the World Hates Us, Exhibit A.” Between last season’s North Shore and this lazy, creativity-free excuse for a TV show, I’m afraid he’s right back where he started. The only thing scary about Supernatural is the notion that someone might actually want to watch it.

I picked up the Lost Season 1 DVD last night and gave it a quick once-over. Lost junkies have probably already run out and gotten their own copies, but in case you're on the fence about whether to spend your hard-earned cash, here are a few things to consider:

The trouble began, as should not be surprising, with a hard-drinking, chain-smoking Englishman.

Writer Warren Ellis has earned a rabid fan following for his dark, stylish comic books. Most of them also happen to feature hard-drinking, chain-smoking Englishmen (or women), along with a great deal of sneering attitude, mind-boggling concepts, and snarky turns of phrase. Ellis' work is good, but it's rarely subtle. Sometimes it's just plain obnoxious. (After a rash of school shootings in the U.S., he wrote a potent but tasteless comic suggesting that American schoolchildren's lives were so horrible that they wanted to be shot. It was pencilled, inked, lettered, and set for publication before someone thought to kill it.)

And yet, in recent years Ellis' work has revealed a great big bleeding heart beneath all that too-cool-for-school attitude. Take Global Frequency, just one of the dizzyingly high concepts he's turned out for DC Comics. It revolved around a worldwide network of 1,000 experts in every field imaginable. At any moment, any of them could be called away from their everyday lives by the enigmatic Miranda Zero and her punky dispatcher Aleph to pit their knowledge and talents against a world-threatening disaster. That was the beauty of the premise: Your neighbor, your best friend, your spouse -- they could all be on the Global Frequency. Ordinary people could save the world.

It's not remarkable that Hollywood got its paws on such a meaty idea. The remarkable part is how they didn't even remotely screw it up. Survivor producer Mark Burnett, apparently feeling the need to give a little something back to the world in exchange for all that naked Richard Hatch, tapped comics fan and screenwriter John Rogers as showrunner. Then Rogers enlisted Ellis himself as a producer, to consult on the script and hang around the set smoking cigarettes. They shot a pilot that got Ellis' vocal approval. They lined up a fairly dazzling staff of potential writers, some poached from Joss Whedon's freshly cancelled Angel, plus Babylon 5's J. Michael Straczynski as an executive producer. Buzz was good. The network liked it. A midseason slot seemed certain.

And then, apparently, the WB remembered that it was, in fact, the WB. These things happen. Perhaps it was the lack of a single-word title (Twins, Related, Smallville, Supernatural), or the absence of people named Gilmore. Maybe it was the executive shakeup in the network's ranks. The show fell off the schedule, and that was the end of it.

Except that it wasn't. Somehow, a grainy but watchable copy of the pilot found its way onto the Internet (as all things seem to, sooner or later). People -- tens of thousands of people -- downloaded and watched it. By all accounts, they loved it. Raved about it. Wanted more. John Rogers, on his blog, condemned the illegality of the pilot's escape onto the Net, but was thrilled by the response, and hoped it might help get the show back off the ground.

The WB, reportedly furious, dug up the show, killed it again, and then buried it twice as deep. With a lot of concrete on top. (So says Ellis on his blog; Rogers, at last report, still has his fingers crossed.) Apparently, the former Frog Network's ratings are good enough that they can afford to turn away interested viewers.

Now, I'm a Law-Abiding Citizen. I would never illegally download a TV show, even one that I could never possibly see through conventional means. But if I had -- and this is purely hypothetical, mind you -- I'd be able to tell you that in this case, the WB is demonstrating some seriously questionable judgment. Global Frequency's pilot is a bit hokey, not quite original, and requires frequent and copious suspension of disbelief. But it works like gangbusters, combining slick visuals and thumping techno music with a rare sense of humanity.

In a brisk 44 minutes, played out almost in real time, we follow scruffy ex-cop Sean Flynn (Josh Hopkins) and high-strung physicist Dr. Katrina Finch (Jenni Baird) as they track a human bomb through the streets of San Francisco. Alexander Putchekin is a Soviet-era psychic super-weapon who fell in love with the country he was supposed to destroy. Now, thanks to a failing chip inside his brain, he's letting loose uncontrollable, ever-escalating bursts of lethal electromagnetic energy. In less than an hour, he'll wipe out the city.

Characterization and exposition are established on the run. The mostly witty dialogue gives us just enough about skeptical newcomer Flynn and twitchy veteran Finch's personalities to help us fill in the gaps ourselves. Straight from the comics, we also get the cheerfully fatalistic Aleph (Aimee Garcia, who lived in my dorm back in college) and Michelle Forbes as Miranda Zero -- or, as Ellis and Rogers began referring to her during the filming of the pilot, "Miranda F--ing Zero."

In everything from Star Trek to Homicide, Forbes has reliably proven to be the most interesting actor on screen at any given moment. She's no exception here. Miranda's out to make amends and save her soul after a lifetime of unspecified dirty deeds; suffice to say, she Knows Where the Bodies are Buried. Forbes sells even the clunkiest lines about the sanctity of life with steely-eyed conviction, and badasses her way through the infiltration of a secret government prison with such panache that you don't really mind the whole thing being ripped off from The Matrix. You get the sense that Miranda earned her surname by being just that cool.

Two things elevate Global Frequency above the ranks of pleasantly diverting action shows. The first is the depth to which it humanizes its supposed villain. The show spares as much time as it can to make Putchekin a genuine, tragic human being -- sick with horror at what he's become, and desperate to hurt as few people as possible. Ultimately, Flynn is forced to put a bullet in his head to destroy the chip and save the city. The way Putchekin grabs Flynn's hand at the last minute and adjusts his aim, sighing, "You would have missed," is downright haunting.

The second is the potency of its concept. As Aleph calls on experts around the world to apply their knowhow to the problem, it's hard not to feel at least a little thrilled. When our heroes need to navigate a tight space and a large gap to reach a crucial electrical switch, Flynn shows up at the door of an ex-girlfriend (who happens to be captain of the UC gymnastics squad) and begs her to help him save the day. And she does, in her pajamas, in arguably the most enjoyable example to date of the "unlikely triumph via skill on the parallel bars" cliche.

Global Frequency, in typical Ellis style, argues that we can't trust our governments to save us. Too often, they're the problem, not the solution. We have to save ourselves, the show says -- and given a chance, we will. In the horrific aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we've all witnessed the appalling failure of state, local, and federal agencies to help people in desperate need. All of which makes Global Frequency's we're-all-in-this-together message pack an even greater punch. (That's my cue to urge even the most cynical TeeVee readers to donate to the Red Cross if you haven't already.)

If it wanted to bolster its Stridex-intensive lineup with a smart, accessible series full of ratings potential, the WB could do a lot worse than Global Frequency. (After all, Gilmore Girls must be getting awfully lonely in the dwindling ranks of the WB's quality shows.) Heck, rather than getting mad at some light-fingered studio tech for unleashing its secret shame upon an eager viewing public, the WB should embrace this new technology. The Sci-Fi Channel's enjoyed a certain degree of success in streaming entire episodes of Battlestar Galactica over its Web site. Why shouldn't the WB (or any network) post the pilots it didn't pick up for fall online and let the viewers vote on the shows they want to see for midseason? Would it be so terrible to get free word-of-mouth and valuable viewer-demographic information?

Oh, wait. I just found out that The WB will, in fact, stream the pilot to Supernatural via Yahoo, free, for anyone who wants to see it. Well played, WB. Maybe it's time to extend that concept to include the hit shows you don't even know you have yet. In the meantime, if we're lucky, perhaps Global Frequency will eventually see the light of day on another network -- or, perhaps, as a pioneer in direct-to-DVD television.

But until then, remember: The Global Frequency is a myth. There's no such thing. And you definitely shouldn't use any underground networks to see that for yourself.

Bob Denver, TV's Gilligan and Maynard G. Krebs, has died at age 70. I believe that leaves only the movie star, the Professor, and Mary Ann alive out of the seven stranded castaways.

Rest easy, little buddy.

I came home from a football game Saturday night and flipped on the news, as I've been doing a lot this week in the wake of what CNN calls Killer Hurricane Katrina!

CNN has been my first news choice for a long time. Fox News Channel is unacceptable, not because it's biased but because it's so bad. But I admit that I've been surfing around a bit during this story, because each network only has so much material that it then endlessly recycles.

But to my horror, CNN was showing a rerun of a Very Special Episode of Larry King Live wherein celebrities tell you how important it is -- and it is, don't get me wrong -- for you to donate money to hurricane relief efforts. I rolled my eyes as always, because I find Larry King unwatchable even under the best of circumstances. He and his phone callers get in the way of real news. And this was a rerun of a pre-taped show!

So I turned over to MSNBC, where I discovered a banner headline that read: CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST DEAD. Blink. Turned to Fox News: REHNQUIST DIES. Wow. Big news. Back to CNN: Larry King talking to Sela Ward about how she used to live in New Orleans. Oh my.

Every since Dave Chappelle apparently lost his mind and ran away to South Africa (or, depending on your point of view, came to his senses and ran away to South Africa), Comedy Central seems to be under a lot of pressure. I’m not saying that Mind of Mencia, Too Late with Adam Carolla, and D.L. Hughley’s Weekends on the D.L. were all conceived as desperate replacements for Chappelle. I’m sure at least one of them was just an attempt at copying Dave Chappelle’s success while he was still on the air.

Unfortunately (and inevitably), while the new shows get the “controversial” and “race-baiting” elements, they’re a little light on the — what’s it called? Oh, yeah — humor. Take Adam Carolla’s show — please! Sorry about that. I just thought it might be interesting to revisit the golden age of comedy, when comedians told jokes. These days, you’ve got people doing “rants”. And not the entertaining kind of rant, where you froth at the mouth and end up twitching on the floor; these are just long monologues where Carolla occasionally pauses, hoping to hear laughter. And, frankly, he doesn’t hear much, even from the studio audience.

For example, a few days ago, I watched Too Late (see? I do research for these things!), and he was going on about the trail mix they serve on airplanes. It’s basically the same thing as the old don’t-you-hate-the-peanuts-you-get-on-flights bit. And that’s not even a bit! That’s just an example of hack comickry! It’s like he’s purposely doing the worst job he can possibly think of. Except that would be kind of entertaining.

Carolla’s guests vacillate between his buddies (Sarah Silverman, now that Jimmy Kimmel doesn’t need her to guest every other week on his show) and the absolute bottom of the barrel (Matthew Lesko, that annoying book author in the Riddler suit). And no one really cares what Adam Carolla has to say to either his friends or random guys who happen to be desperate for publicity. Although I do like the fact that on my next trip to Los Angeles, I could probably talk my way onto his show. He’d be delighted to see me; at least I’ve heard of him, unlike the Yin-Yang Twins.

Now, I don’t hate Adam Carolla. He seems like somebody who’d probably pretty funny in a writers’ room (which would explain why Bill Simmons loves him so damned much), but his material isn’t working. It could be that he’s running out of things to say. It seems to me that he works best when someone throws him a topic and he does four or five reasonably funny off-the-cuff minutes on it. That was his job on Loveline, where some kid with a weird problem would call in, Adam would do a few minutes of schtick, and then Dr. Drew would get around to answering the question. Actually, did you know that show’s still on? I guess that’s because he’s good at it.

The problem is, he’s dying on the show. Dying. And he’s getting punchy. I think it’s getting to him, because he’s used to either riffing in the Kimmel writers’ room or doing The Man Show in front of a crowd that’s heavily beered up. Even on Loveline, he’s got Dr. Drew, who seems to enjoy him. But here, even his good bits die. And then when he does something that doesn’t work (like this “wheel of stereotypes” thing, which I can’t describe because I don’t think I fully understand it, and I’m not convinced Adam did either), he’s like a deer in the headlights. I mean, he’s still kind of likeable, but he’s just not bringing the funny.

I think that might be the key to his success (and I’d put sarcasm quotes around that, but let’s face it: he’s got a show and I don’t): people want to like Adam Carolla. It’s my theory that on The Man Show, he was along to soften the Kimmel Factor. But when his show isn’t funny, it doesn’t result in people laughing; it results in people shaking their heads sadly and feeling bad for him.

So that’s Too Late with Adam Carolla. As you can see, I don’t think it’s a very good show, but at least I watched it a few times. In fact, I can’t guarantee I won’t watch it a few more times before giving up. I have trouble even getting through a single episode of Mind of Mencia. Carlos Mencia relies way too much on saying “shocking” things. This time, you’ll note, I went for the sarcasm quotes, because he doesn’t succeed in creating actual shock. And that makes his show feel really oddly paced, since he spends at least half his time doing the “Yeah, I said it!” style of reveling in the alleged gasps of his audience.

It just doesn’t work when the comedian on stage is saying, “Oh, Carlos! You can’t say that!” if the audience doesn’t care. Also, I don’t think “Beaner” is used as a vicious insult that much once you get away from the US-Mexico border, so his attempts to “reclaim” it just come off as weird. In much of the country, it’s not used, so it’s not going to elicit that reaction he needs.

Next up on the presumptive Chappelle-replacement list is an actual black man, D.L. Hughley, with Weekends on the D.L. Now, that name makes me think of two things: either the time on America’s Next Top Model that Tyra Banks claimed she’d been singing “on the Down-Low” (and we all saw how well that went) or this Oprah I saw where they explored “the world of the D.L.”, which turns out to be married guys who sneak out at night for gay sex but claim they’re not gay. It was a little confusing. And that’s what I’ve got in my head when D.L. Hughley’s show is mentioned.

At this point, I should theoretically go on to talk about Mr. Hughley’s show. It starts with a monologue so unfunny, it could go directly to Jay Leno. And Hughley laughs at his own jokes more than, um, some other terrible talk show host. I’d come up with a joke here, but I’m watching D.L. right now, and it’s so bad that it’s actually sucking the funny directly out of my brain. I’m positive I’d be funnier in this paragraph if D.L. Hughley weren’t here, filling my bedroom with crap.

Aside from the monologue, it’s basically a straightforward sucking-up-to-celebrities (or at least sucking-up-to-people-who-will-return-D.L.-Hughley’s-calls) deal. If you’re hungry to see Tracy Morgan or John Salley sitting on a couch while D.L. Hughley convulses in extremely generous laughter, this is the show for you. Until another guest comes on, and it’s basically just E-Level Celebrities (because I’m pretty sure that even Kathy Griffin is too big to appear on this) convulsing at each others’ “wit”. The only good things I can say for it are:

a) At least the audience is applauding and laughing, making it less uncomfortable to watch than Carolla’s thing. Even though I don’t agree with their assessment, it’s nice to see that at least someone’s willing to pretend to like it.

b) There isn’t much D.L. Hughley. That means that if the Random Guest Generator comes up “Louis C.K.” there’s a chance of some comedy slipping through. Although not much, because a man named Earthquake was sitting next to him staring in blank astonishment at the things Louis was saying.

Let’s see. There’s also Stella, which I should like but can’t get into. It’s not really a Chappelle Replacement, though, since it doesn’t rely on “Oh, no, he di’in’t say that!” Really, it seems to rely on “Huh? What did he just say? What’s going on now?” I like the actors, I just don’t dig what they’re doing.

Anyway, it won’t be too long before The Colbert Report shows up. I know it won’t be as good as The Daily Show; I just hope it’s not as bad as what they’re showing now.

After much secrecy and anticipation, the catch phrase to be uttered by Martha Stewart when she dismisses an applicant on her version of The Apprentice has finally been unveiled. The winner: “You don’t fit in.”

Those of us who have been rooting for, “Blow it out your ass,” were sorely disappointed.

--Steve Lutz
September 1, 2:23 PM