This just in

Fox fired ANCHORWOMAN after just one  hour’s worth of airtime. Does anybody else find it ironic that they will replace the vacated timeslot with the sitcom TIL DEATH?

Just what IS an ubervixen anchor anyway?

Yeah, I did. I watched last night when FOX debuted an hour of what they are calling a reality/comedy hybrid. I decided to be open about a bikini model who would grab a chance to prove she was more than boobs…that she had brains. What better way to prove cerebral heft than reading from the teleprompter?

The site of the show is lovely Tyler, Texas. I know Tyler. It’s in east Texas, where folks go to church, host the old money Rose Festival, and drive to Dallas for shopping. Tyler itself is too small to have an entire Nielsen TV market to itself, so the good folks at the ratings company threw it in with Longview, Lufkin and Nacogdoches to make them all part of Market #111. At no time during last night’s hour-long premiere did the bikini model attempt to pronounce Nacogdoches.

If you’re to believe the General Manager of the station, a fellow named Phil Hurley, bringing in a blondiful, buxom babe was just the ticket to get more viewers to his TV station. And eyeballs to the station is what it’s all about. No doubt, having a national broadcast TV series focus 30 minutes a week on your operation isn’t going to go unnoticed, especially in a town the size of Tyler. Oh yeah, the station was also getting money to use his operation. Happens all the time in TV and film – producers pay to use sites and actors.

The key word here is acting. I felt the entire setup was a major act, and not a very good one. First, the bikini model in question is one Lauren Jones who has won beauty contests, been a wresting diva (did she put that on her tax form?), and feels very comfortable wearing skimpy bikinis and a lot of sequins. On the website for the show, somebody describes her as an ubervixen. OK, so she won’t be invited to talk at the Tyler Junior League. Did we think she would?

While Ms. Jones sports that trashy bleached white look some men find lustful, her inability to behave like she hadn’t been raised by wolves was outstripped by her inane comments. Among my favorites were “it’s not like I’m a bimbo”, “I need way better news clothes”, and “I could do this if I was wearing a bikini.” Sounds scripted to me. These are the kinds of lines one uses when one tries to write dialogue for a trashy bleached white ubervixen who is trying to prove cerebral heft.

We have all the characters represented in the show. The clueless boss GM from such previous TV hits as WKRP in Cincinnati, the earnest ingénue who struggles to accept giving her anchor seat to an obviously unprepared outsider, the tell-it-like-it-is chief photog who must have been modeled after the grumpy one on Lou Grant, a News Director who talks about integrity and urges the new anchor lady to “keep flirting to a minimum” on her first story. Sigh. There’s even shots of the staff ponying up cash for their bets before the anchorwoman’s first telecast. All formulaic. Even the opening of the show seems to be lifted from the old Mary Tyler Moore Show, right down the music which is very reminiscent of the theme music for the breakthrough, award winning MTM comedy.

What I find truly upsetting is the lack of teamwork exhibited by the staff at this station. Down to a person, nobody in the newsroom seems to agree that bringing this lady in from LA was a good idea. The News Director seems constantly embarrassed. The ingénue tries to talk to the GM and gets platitudes in return. You can almost hear the cell phones being dialed off camera – reporters seeking direction from family, agents or priests. It boils down to this: Decent management would never dream of treating their staffs like this. The head photog slams the ingénue on camera, which breaks the first rule of TV news: don’t say anything they can use against you if a mic is on. Even the weather dog, Stormy, tries to lay low and avoid being part of this.

What a pity that the real work and skill and talent involved in doing TV news is made to appear so cheap and easy by this show. What a pity that the terms ‘integrity’ and ‘credibility’ were bandied about without so much as a peek into their real meaning to the news business. Or is it just an example of how shallow and greedy and stupid local TV news can become? All I want to know is why there is Braille on the News Director’s office sign, and why did the editors kept using that Braille in transition shots?
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What? Nobody is reading?

Thank god this isn’t a book, or you wouldn’t be reading it. The most alarming poll came out the other day, and it had nothing to do with politics, although there was an interesting political aspect to it. On Tuesday, the Associated Press-Ipsos Poll about reading found that one in four Americans…a full one fourth, didn’t read a book last year. Not a Harry Potter book, not a religious book, not a book on how to get a better job or run a company better, not even a sex manual. No books were opened or read. One in four – zero reading of books.

I wholeheartedly admit to being a huge reader. Always have been. My earliest memories of my father was sitting in his leather chair, reading a paperback mystery shared with him by a family friend who taught math and was a member of several book clubs. Dad polished off a book a night. Front to back. All of it, while the family was doing homework, watching TV, fooling with the dogs and no doubt making a lot of racket. But that didn’t bother him. He read right through it.

His job was intense and required him to be sharp; he was the head estimator for a large general contractor who built huge projects around the world. He could write words with his left hand while writing numbers with his right. So when I read that people were not reading because they were tired from their jobs, I wanted to ask these folks just what they did for a living. I’ll go out on a limb here and bet they don’t use as much cerebral power as my dad did on a daily basis.

So what’s with the lack of reading? Are we spending all our time doing email? Are we stuck in traffic too much that our lengthened commute and increased inhalation of exhaust has damaged our thinking process? Surely we can’t blame TV, since that distraction has been around since the 50’s. Although stats found that reading has steadily gone down the toilet since TV, but that’s another blog for another time.

I have a theory about why books are not being picked up like they have in the past. The idea came to me in a story written for the AP by Alan Fram. And the quote that got me interested was from, ironically, someone in construction. “Fiction just doesn’t interest me,” said Bob Ryan, 41, who works for a construction company in Guntersville, Ala. “If I’m going to get a story, I’ll get a movie.”

Perhaps that says it all. We are getting our stories in new ways. No longer reliant on books and the printed word, we can now get stories from the Internet, from YouTube, from our cell phones and iPods, and even from talking audio books. Perhaps we are going back to the oral tradition of sharing stories. The Cherokee feel that only in telling stories can they retain their magic; once written down, the magic is gone.

So instead of looking at this lack of reading books as a bad thing, perhaps we need to look at is as a signal that we’re still telling stories, just delivering them in a different way.

Connect me – speed isn’t that important

Seen those new Sprint commercials? They’re very fetching. Bright, colored luminescent EFX are used to make the subjects movement turn into shapes, like circles and flowers. It could be based on those fun ‘glow-in-the-dark” necklaces and jewelry the hip clubs were handing out along South Beach a few years ago; your local county far has them for your kids. Very upscale and very hip without offending those who are neither.

But these spots will NEVER work. First, there’s no human connection to them. Nobody in the spots that anyone can identify with. Just blurred people making pretty luminescent shapes in an overnight world. No faces. No people that I can look at and say “nice chap” or “sweet girl”. None of that. Just blurs in the world of night. I know there’s an entire life happening when the clock goes past midnight, but those folks are NOT watching TV when I am, so that means you’re preaching to a choir that doesn’t understand your song.

Secondly, all the pretty visuals are to sell the speed of the phone service. Uh…the speed? Yep. The speed.

Now, I’ve had a cell phone for 8 years and I’d easily be classified as A Talker. Started in first grade and I just never had been able to get a handle on it. As A Talker, I use that cell a lot. For business, for pleasure and for silly fun things like sitting outside a restaurant and calling them to ask what their soup of the day is before I go in.

In all my 8 Talk-filled years, I never once said ‘Gee, I wish this phone was faster.’ Never. What I have said, and it’s getting to be more and more a mantra, is “wha the F?” when the call was dropped. And THAT happens at least once a day. Don’t even discuss what happens when I hit the mountains. And there’s no service from Taos, even though I was promised it.

So the question here is: why spend TONS of cash producing these beautiful spots and then more TONS putting them on air (and they are everywhere) when the message is SO wrong? Even a Wall Street analyst piped up with the same complaint. When the numbers guys are able to spot a badly conceived campaign, it’s time for Sprint to look for marketing help from a different source.

I tried to call and tell them that, but you know what happens when you dial your cell carrier!