COMMENTARY
Jeff Simon: Unfortunately, some TV types get swept away
Published: November 20, 2009, 12:30 am
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My vote is “no.” I don’t like any of it. What the November Sweeps have so far meant all over the tube is a lot of good-byes. In the case of the announced endings of “Dollhouse,” “Hank,” and “Eastwick,” let us sing “hallelujah” in response. (And now turn to Page 28 in your TV Guide for the Benediction.)
Otherwise, if you must know the truth, in almost every case, I disapprove, so I think I’ll just stand here and tap my foot angrily. If anyone had driven up in a Studebaker and asked, I’d have advised against them:
For instance:
• Lou Dobbs: He was on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” trying to explain why the week before he announced on the air that he and CNN—where he’d been a fixture for almost 30 years—were parting company. All Dobbs got to say was that CNN honchos wanted a more “middle of the road” approach, which Dobbs, with his “advocacy journalism” couldn’t provide.
The rest of the time, Stewart battered him into silence with wisecracks—that, of course, (in so many words) everything Dobbs advocates is ridiculous, but CNN is even more ridiculous to muzzle him and opt for blandness and a kind of radio formatting rather than allowing him to continue on his merry way carding the president and guarding our nation’s borders.
To hear Dobbs’ actual part of the “interview,” you had to switch online to “The Daily Show” site. Other than the fact that Stewart wouldn’t let the blabbermouth talk, I’m with him on this. The willful extinction of personality and elimination of advocacy on CNN isn’t the way to combat the eye-and-ear- catching blunderbusses and lunatics of Fox News (where it’s a decent bet Dobbs will end up).
In the current ideological Days of Rage on cable TV news, CNN, it seems, wants to be Switzerland, of whom Orson Welles, as Harry Lime, immortally said in “The Third Man”: “In Italy, under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace—and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.”
• The Mentalist: “Red John” came back Thursday night. And one cast member got popped—for good, supposedly. Bad move, I say. No one’s expendable to me. I like the whole cast—every blasted one of them. One of the reasons the show is such a Nielsen bell-ringer is that every single role on the show is both well-acted and written (in that sense, it’s like the original “NCIS” these days). Even Bosco, the new addition— as a hard-nosed old admirer of Lisbon—makes for a nice splash of Angostura bitters in the cocktail (although, I must say, his existence does make sexual tension between Jane and Lisbon a bit awkward).
Far be it from me to tell actors how to make a living, but when a show is cresting the way “The Mentalist” is right now, you stay on it. And if you’re a writer and producer, you keep inventing new wrinkles—other than death—to keep everyone busy.
• CSI: Miami: Adam Rodriguez is out, Eddie Cibrian is in. I don’t like that one either, although I must say this particular tradeoff in Hunkville doesn’t really concern me much. These “CSI” and “Law and Order” shows are notoriously fluid in their casts (has anyone seen Rory Cochrane, formerly of “CSI: Miami” anywhere lately—in anything?). And “CSI: Miami”—with David Caruso’s lunatic neo-Jack Lord performance in the middle— has got to be harder than most on fellow cast members. After two or three scenes with Caruso as Horatio Caine, a cast member without a sense of humor is likely to either want to strangle him or get their agent to find the nearest dinner theater production of “Mamma Mia.”
I do think that Rodriguez added a nice bit of hangdog soulfulness to the show, just as Khandi Alexander as M. E. Alex seemed to be the only cast member willing and able to trade absurdly misplaced word emphases and performance tics with Caruso. In football hot dog terms, their scenes together were like watching Terrell Owens and Chad Ochocinco run fly patterns on the same team.
Eddie Cibrian may up the lady killer quotient on the show (the returns are still out), but, so far, the Cibrian-for-Rodriguez trade hasn’t been so hot.
• Dancing With the Stars: Joanna Krupa, apparently, traded a Playboy magazine spread for a shot in the finals. It was, this week, goodbye Joanna and hello—SAY WHAT?—Donny Osmond and Kelly Osbourne with Mya in Monday’s finals.
Which only goes to prove that a veteran entertainer and TV star like Osmond is more than a bit of a ringer on a show devoted to dance amateurism. It also proves, too, that Osbourne had a bit of a leg up in the audience loyalty department.
Imagine how annoying it all might be if the show, in any conceivable way whatsoever, actually mattered.
jsimon@buffnews.com
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