TORONTO (AP) — Howie Mandel has been hospitalized in Canada with an irregular heartbeat, his publicist said. — MSN TV News OH GOD NO! WHAT WILL BECOME OF “HOWIE DO IT!” THE NEW HIDDEN-CAMERA PRANK SHOW?! Who CARES about this? Just let me know when he’s dead . . . Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Television
Stormy Weather
The first storm of the season is rolling through Southern California, which means it’s time to bring back the time-honored tradition of sending female TV reporters out to do live weather remotes. I saw a woman on TV this morning standing in a blizzard to tell me that it’s snowing in the Cajon Pass. Really?! It always snows in the Cajon Pass. She could have told me the same thing from inside a heated studio. Some day, one of these women is going to get pneumonia or frostbite and sue this whole sadistic practice out of existence . . . Read more →
Movin’ On Up!
BOSTON (AP) — Paul Benedict, the actor who played the English neighbor Harry Bentley on the sitcom “The Jeffersons,” has died. He was 70. — Associated Press Read more →
I’ve Got an Idea for a TV Show
It would be like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, but the twist is that instead of fixing people’s homes, we’d sneak around under cover of darkness and give homes an extreme makeover by burning them down, blowing them up, felling large trees on top of them, etc. For added poignancy, the victims will be cripples, retards, members of minority groups, impoverished people with way too many kids, or some combination of the above. Now that’s great television! Read more →
I Love Money
As my kid and I were watching Beverly Hills Cop on VH1 last night, we kept seeing ads for a show called I Love Money, in which fat, unattractive people are having a spitting contest for distance. Two questions: What is the target market for this — fat, ugly spitters and the people who love them? And a question I wonder about a lot: Were people this stupid before television? Read more →
Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?
Have you seen this program? My son clicked it on last weekend. The host asked a woman if she knew what a right triangle was. “Yes,” she said. “The triangle on the right.” I had to leave the room immediately. I felt like I was losing IQ points just watching it . . . Read more →
79 More
In memory of Heath Ledger, here’s a list of 79 more stars killed by drugs . . . Read more →
Why TV Shows Are So Stupid
Welcome to EppsNet, where the writers are not on strike! Striking writers are stupid. Pretend you’re a TV executive and your writers are on strike. Oh dear! What will I do? I’ll have to show reruns and only get 90 percent of the dimbulb audience I’d get showing new episodes. Boo hoo hoo! Television is the opiate of the masses, man! People will watch it no matter what’s on. They can’t live without it. We’ve got TVs in restaurants, health clubs, cars, you name it. They’re ubiquitous! The number of people like me — who think that if you want to eat dinner in front of a TV set you should stay the hell at home — is very small compared to the number of people who will not leave their homes if it means being separated from a television. Hey scribes! People are going to turn off their flat-panel… Read more →
Greed
The dog is sitting attentively watching my son eat a chili dog. “You’re not going to get any of that,” I explain to the dog. “He’s greedy. He makes Jack Welch look like Good King Wenceslas.” “And you,” the boy says, “make Donnie ‘We Found Him’ look like one of the Three Wise Men.” The boy going deep in the archives to pull out a Wild Thornberrys reference, in which Donnie — seen here hanging from a tree limb — was a feral boy raised by orangutans. Read more →
So Much for Dominating the White, Black and Hispanic Kids
My son and I are watching a Citibank commercial in which a woman in Japan drops her son off for his first day of school. As his mom starts to walk away, the boy looks back anxiously . . . “What’s the Asian kid nervous about?” my son says. “He’s going to get better grades than the rest of the kids anyway. Oh wait, all the other kids are Asian too. Ouch.” Read more →
Super Bowl Ads
Forgettable . . . although this Doritos ad was notable for the fact that it was made on a budget of $12.97. As my son said after one particularly unmemorable spot (I can’t remember which one): “They paid a trillion dollars to put that on my TV?” Read more →
Almost Famous
A friend of mine’s 13-year-old daughter will be appearing as an extra in an episode of My Name is Earl airing in a couple of months. I told my son, also 13, he should try to hook up with her before she gets too famous and the competiton heats up. He just made throat-cutting gestures and gagging noises, as he always does when the subject of the ladies comes up. Naturally, she’ll dump him as soon as she hits the big time, but that’s okay . . . I’ve got to believe that all these starlets put a lot more into pleasing their boyfriends before they were famous than they do now that a guy is lucky just to be with them in the first place . . . Read more →
Convergences
When 8th grade vocabulary words come out on the same day that Mr. T’s new show is on the TV, you may find your kid saying things like this: “I pity the fool who’s a debacle like you.” Read more →
Let the Rubes in on the Gag
If there’s any justice, David Letterman will one day be recognized as the father of our era. Like other great men, Letterman knew that Americans were dumb as rocks but still had their pride, so if you were going to feed them the intellectual equivalent of hogslop, you had better flatter their intelligence at the same time. . . . Let the rubes in on the gag. Call the pet tricks “stupid,” make the showbiz flash-and-rattle even stupider than it needed to be, and cheerfully represent yourself as the hollowest of hollow men, and the suckers would applaud not only your twaddle, but the label on the twaddle that said it was twaddle. — alicublog Read more →
Ed Bradley: 1941-2006
Ed Bradley died today following a lengthy illness. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Ed a few years ago: I’ve heard the words “compassionate listener,” “soft-spoken,” “instinctive,” “intelligent,” “maverick,” and “trailblazer” used to describe you. How do you define Ed Bradley? I guess all of those things fit. How about “untalented and unaware of it” or “surprisingly full of himself”? I’d have liked to buy him for what he was worth, sell him for what he thought he was worth and pocket the difference, which would have been quite a tidy sum. Read more →
15 People Who Make America Great
Ruby Jones, 67, worked in the hospice unit at Lindy Boggs Medical Center in New Orleans. Last August, as Hurricane Katrina was zeroing in on the city, she elected not to evacuate, but to stay with the eight dying patients under her care. She has been recognized by Newsweek as one of “15 People Who Make America Great”: Read more →
Lurch to the Right, Lurch to the Left
. . . we don’t need some great lurch to the right or lurch to the left or redefinition of the Democratic Party. — Sen. John F. Kerry Read more →
Gatsby 2005
Fitzgerald had to kill off his own famous striver because, to the author, Gatsby represented a dying American dream based on making it the hard way. But no such grim fate awaits today’s little Gatsbys. When they peer out at the universe, they don’t see a green dock light blinking from an unbridgeable distance where the Establishment folk live. This is the age of the red camera light, where everyone arrives sooner or later, if only for a moment, and nobody ever dies of ambition or shame. — The Wall Street Journal, “Gatsby’s Heirs” Read more →
My Dog Reviews How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
The Grinch is very mean to his dog, Max, not because he doesn’t like dogs, but he is very mean to everyone. You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch! Read more →
Pilot Season
Ignore the rumors. L.A. does have four seasons: earthquake season, fire season, riot season, and the most ravaging — pilot season. Network TV keeps groping to win over an America it despises — a viewing public it sees as a blurry, fat, brainless blob of uninsured, Hemi-powered, God-fearing Wal-Mart clerks. — Peter Mehlman Read more →