In this morning's Entertainment News, both Matthew Perry (The Whole 10 Yards, Serving Sara) and the comedy team Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant have secured pilots for new TV shows. It's a feud! I mean, it's not a feud, but we can pretend it's a feud. PUNCH HIM! KILL HIM! So, here is Perry's new project, from the Hollywood Reporter:
Perry, who turned 40 in August, conceived the comedy, in which he will play a self-involved manager of a second-rate sports arena who begins to re-evaluate his life on his 40th birthday.
And here is the new project from Lennon and Garant, also from the Hollywood Reporter:
Clearly, this is your sitcom. "It just speaks to me." That's what you tell your lady friends over lunch at an outdoor cafe with a bottle of the second cheapest white wine on the menu. Oh, btw, you are a woman, and that is why this show speaks to you, because it is just telling it like it is. FWBW, says your sweatshirt. In any case, the "Vodka and Fudge" mousepad is going to take 4-6 weeks to ship to your house, but it will be well worth it, because then all the other girls in the secretarial pool will know that you have something that you actually care about. That your life has depth and meaning.
Look, Flavor Flav on TV is like eye sausage. (Eye candy is for baby eyes.) It's satisfying and bad for you, and you do NOT want to know where it comes from. "Well, first we take this drug-riddled, borderline-retarded casing, and we stuff it with ground up racial stereotypes." STOP! Just put the sausage in my eyes! (That is what she said, because she is so confused about how "it" works.) But as great as the Flavor Flav eye sausage (it really is a gross metaphor and it makes me barf every time that I type it) has been so far, the latest Flavor Flav eye sausage (shudder) might be a sausage too far. From the Hollywood Reporter:
The original basic-cable ladies man is teaming with producer Eric Ortner to shop a new series to networks in which he returns to high school to receive his diploma.
Yiiiiiiiikes. No, sure, yes. There's absolutely no way that this could possibly be anything other than uplifting and positive, I'm sure.
Teacher: I'm sorry, Flavor Flav, but you got an F. Flavor Flav: Why you sorry? F is my favorite letter because it is in my name twice! FLAVOR FLAAAAAAAAV! Teacher: OK, well you got a Fail. Is Fail in your name? Flavor Flav: HAaaaaAAAAAAAAAA
I'm pretty sure producer Eric Ortner recently changed his name from Michael Bluth, because he's made a terrible mistake. This is the best part, though:
[Julie Klausner is a former writer for Best Week Ever with Paul F. Tompkins and author of the forthcoming book, I Don't Care About Your Band. She is also Videogum's Senior Melrose Place correspondent, but today she analyzes the first episode of Courtney Cox Arquette's new show, Cougar Town]
What is funnier than a middle-aged woman who wants and enjoys sex? Literally nothing. It's like a dog wearing a sombrero! Such is the premise of the new ABC sitcom, Cougar Town, Population: Cougars (the subtitle of the show was "eighty-six'd" in pre-production stages). That's right, it was "eighty-six'd." Also, "23 Skidoo!" and "Say, kid! Wanna do that dance where we put our hands on our knees and squat, then alternate our hands to the tops of our other knees?"
In the pilot episode, Courtney Cox-Arquette plays 40-year old Jules Cobb, a real estate agent who moves to Sarasota, which has changed its name to Cougar Town (not really), with her 17-year old son after a divorce. Jules is, to paraphrase Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption, ready to "get busy datin' or get busy dyin'." Because she's so old, she could easily do both.
Modern Family is one of the most hyped new shows this fall. Did you watch last night's premiere? The show follows three tiers of a (modern) family. There's the middle-class long-married parents of three incipient-teenage children. There's the grumpy patriarch who has remarried a much-younger, "fiery" hispanic woman. And there is the gay son (of the patriarch, brother of the mom) and his gay partner, who have just adopted a baby from Thailand. The cast is decent. The whole thing is filmed in the overused mockumentary style of our time, but the mockumentary style is overused because it works pretty well. The show seems to have pretty much everything it needs to be a great show.
I checked out the Jay Leno Show last night, just to see if there had been any egregious bumps in the premiere that might have been ironed out for day two, or any refinement of the show's tone as it hits cruising speed (of 88 miles per hour, taking us deep into the future). Nope! Not only were no kinks worked out, nor any shift in tone, but the show was actually worse. Someone call the editor of Duh Aficionado Magazine, we have a cover story. I mean, Jay Leno has been doing his late night schtick for 17 years, and this new show is simply a brutish, man-handled extension of that. What is there to work out? What about the tone do you dislike? This show hit the ground running. Or at least hit what it thinks is the ground to do what it calls running.
No matter how bad things get in one's life, there is always the held-out hope that they will eventually get better. We all dutifully push our own shopping cart through the falling ash as we carry our personal fire to the proverbial coast. But there are certain larger truths about the world we live in with which we must come to some sort of peace. And one of those truths is that this world was not made for us. We can find our own tiny, enshadowed corners to curl up in, but outside of those resting places it is an endless nightmare. I'm not saying that Jay Leno's new 10PM talk show is an apocalyptic wasteland through which we have to trudge in the hopes of finding a lost world, but I am saying that Jay Leno's 10PM talk show represents the cannibalized hopes and gray-wash dreams of a ruined society.
Well, here we are. We stand at the precipice of an enormous crossroads. After months of speculation about how Jay Leno would forever change the face of late night television (or of prime time television? I'm not a Television Scheduling Scientist), all will be answered tonight. For the most part I think we know what to expect, though, right? It's going to be tepid, toothless humor aimed at Brawndo sipping Buy-N-Large customers. But with more race cars.
I would like to say that I am curious, but I am not curious, because Jay Leno has built his career on a lack of curiosity. There is no ambition* or innovation in Jay Leno's work. What we have always seen is what we have always gotten. There is no suggestion that this will be any different. Tonight will not be New Leno, it will be Classic Leno, and Classic Leno is awful. "No desk" is not innovation just as "talking to Jerry Seinfeld about expensive cars we own" is not funny.
Nevertheless, I will be watching. And we should take what little enjoyment we can find in this world where we can. So might as well have fun with it, right? After the jump, the rules for the Jay Leno Show Drinking Game.
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