Lovin’ BACK TO YOU on FOX

I’ll admit that when I heard KELSEY GRAMMER was coming back to network sitcom TV I was thrilled. Then I heard he was going to co-star wtih PATRICIA HEATON. Not so thrilled. Then I heard they were going to be anchors on the sitcom, which was going to air on FOX, and I decided that Kelsey just wasn’t worth the effort. Being an open-minded sort, I tuned in to see the pilot and now I am a BACK TO YOU fan.

Besides Grammer’s perfect voice and impecable delivery, the writing of Exec Producers STEVEN LEVITAN and CHRISTOPHER LLOYD was witty, funny, and unexpected. Such a stretch from the dullard three camera sitcoms that are running elsewhere. Nor is this one of those silly shows that think milk snorted out a nose is worthy of yucks. The writing was the best of what I like to call snappy banter with a healthy helping of double entendre thrown in. It takes talent to write that kind of comedy, and Levitan/Lloyd comes through with flying colors.

Well directed by JAMES BURROWS, an old friend of Grammer’s, the cast boasted very strong and quite funny supporting characters. If you have ever spent time in a TV newsroom, you’ll recognize the oversexed weathergirl (“I prefer to be called a meteorologist.” “But you’re not.” “But I PREFER it.”), the wet behind the ears (or in this case, under the arms) News Director who’s a geeky website recruit, and the ambitious, good-looking reporter who has his eye set on that anchor chair. In the hands of AYDA FELD as the weather bimbo, JOSH GAD as the flop sweat boss, and TY BURRELL as the reporter with the last name nobody can pronounce, the characters are surprisingly fresh. Of course their dialogue is a work of art.

A standout is Sportscaster FRED WILLARD who is always delightful, even when he’s a stuck-in-a-rut guy doing the same job with nothing on his horizon. Still no fan of Heaton, I wish someone would ask her to tone down the nasty edge. Even TINA FEY’s MEAN GIRLS weren’t this shrill.

I applaud the story twist that I didn’t see coming. I stand and applaud the smooth way the dialogue and the storyline wove together like a fine Bottega Veneta purse strap. Finally a comedy that doesn’t give me eye strain and yet stretches my love of that long-missing snappy patter.

Emmy in the Round – motion sickness

The Emmys just ended. Late. I was ready for them to wrap it up from the moment I saw the stage. For those of you who were otherwise entertained, this year the Emmys were done in the round. Like when you go to the theatre. Only this was an award show in the round. With cameras. From the looks of it, the cameras were in one spot and the only thing that was different from a regular stage show awards event was that a good one-third of the audience got to sit and watch the back end of the actors on stage. No matter how comely those rears are (hey, I’m talking to you Adrian Grenier), it just wasn’t a good idea. Didn’t anybody realize this BEFORE the little red lights on those cameras came on? I mean, the entire cast of UGLY BETTY was the backdrop. I wonder if their agents are going to ask for some coin for that performance – I would. Best comedy show used as a backdrop goes to….

There was nothing I liked about this year’s Emmy show. You heard me – nothing. Ryan Seacrest is a friendly enough guy, but as a host…not so much. It seemed that there was a lot of wasted time when he was trying to decide who he was on that stage. He referenced Johnny Carson, Ellen and others who had passed on hosting. Perhaps that list had seen the stage concept.

The nervous Nelly who was in charge of the panic button outdid themselves. Having worked in talk radio, the concept of a six second delay button is ingrained in my producer DNA. The button gets hit when a caller says one of George Carlin’s ‘words you can’t say on TV’. My particular button was, indeed, red and was called the panic button.  During the Emmy ceremony, I counted at least three times when the person on stage suddenly and awkwardly cut to – well, I can’t tell you exactly what it was they cut to, because I just couldn’t make it out. Ray Romano was there (rambling on and on) and suddenly he wasn’t. I knew he wasn’t being cut for whining – that’s his shtick. Then Sally Field, during her acceptance speech, got the panic button treatment as well. This is what Sally was saying when she was cut off: “If mothers ruled the world, there wouldn’t be any god-damned wars in the first place.”

All this panic about words is because the FCC under its current direction is all hot and bothered that a ‘bad’ word might slip out and therefore ruin the impressionable minds watching a TV award ceremony after 10 pm on a Sunday night in the comfort of their own homes. Hooookay. The nervous Nelly who jammed that panic button must not be aware the Commission has ruled that god-damned is NOT a word subject to a fine.

In a year when fashion took a major leap forward, it saddens me to think the production of the show fell apart. Let’s be brutally honest here…the pre-Emmy arrival show was better.

It amazed me that the folks who contributed to the business and had died over the last year got what seemed to be a short changed segment that, if memory serves, wasn’t even introduced. The musical number by the one-and-only Tony Bennett and songstress Christina Aguilera was ruined by bad direction. This isn’t an episode of “24” calling for a shaky camera and abrupt cuts. It’s a musical number and I wanted to see them lip sync damnit! When the Jersey Boys rocked down the house with their tribute to the Sopranos, I wanted to see the Sopranos clips. Didn’t happen. The clips were on screens around the auditorium, but the director was too busy auditioning for an MTV music video to think about what he was really up to. I didn’t get to see Da Family and it saddened me.

As a matter of fact, a lot of what I wanted to see didn’t happen. At no time was there any viewer benefit in what they did to produce this show. And isn’t that what the whole point is? Get viewers across the country to get pumped at their favorites? Any answer other than “yes” will find you asked to be the panic button operator.

Touted as the first “green” Emmy show, I can only say that someone needs to ask for a rebate on that carbon credit they got.

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!

Where are all the characters on TV?

Sunday morning, MARVIN ZINDLER passed away in his hometown of Houston, TX, a brawling city that sits brazenly on the Texas Gulf Coast and boasts workers who call themselves “Roughnecks” and “Rowdies”. Houston is a very blue-collar place despite the mansion-sized homes that stretch to the west of the city, many housing the best oncologists in the country. A place where traffic is part of daily life and where entire sections of the city have emergency evacuation plans just in case the oil refineries catch fire. Houston of the broad shoulders embraced Marvin Zindler.

With a bright white pompadour toupee that shouted 1970’s and dark aviator sunglasses that would make Jack Nicholson’s look like the kind you pick up at Toys R Us, Marvin had his own look. Nobody else came close, even if they wanted to. You know you’re a real one-of-a-kind when you can go to a Halloween party and see others dressing like you. Loud jackets, outrageous ties, and a voice that would give today’s news consultants a major coronary…it was Marvin.

He did more than just look different. He was the man who pioneered crusader reporting on TV. People didn’t have to live anywhere near Houston to know Marvin – he was one of the main characters of “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas”. You know the one – the flamboyant TV reporter who shut down the pleasure parlor. In real life, Marvin did indeed shut down the state’s legendary whorehouse in La Grange where real Texas Longhorn and Aggie football players frolicked as young men do. It was called the Chicken Ranch and it was a major stop on the Texas Old Boys Network.

But Marvin wasn’t one of those self-righteous types. He was a law-abiding guy who began life as a sheriff, his strong convictions of what was right and wrong already established before he began his career on TV at the age of 51. Yes, 51. A middle-aged guy in a toupee and sunglasses took Houston by storm because Houston recognized the fun Zindler was having. He loved his job. Loved being recognized when he went out to eat. Knew where not to eat because he was the man who, every Friday, told Texans what was going on behind the kitchen doors of their favorite watering holes. If you ever heard Marvin report on “Slime in the ice machine”, you’ll understand why nobody can ever say those five words like him again.

So where are the “new” Marvin Zindlers? Where are those unique characters on TV that bring more than facts to a story…who bring their own sense of style and communication? Where are the folks having fun in front of the cameras? Surely, if we can’t think of any, it’s time to rethink the whole process. Marvin Zindlers bring in viewers. Isn’t that the point?

Knickers In A Twist

So, let me get this straight. My imbedded source in Londontown reports the Brits have their knickers in a twist over the newly unveiled 2012 London Olympics logo. I mean, those knickers are twisted over this. The new design is polling lower than Shrub’s latest ratings in the US, that’s how much the Brits seem to hate this logo.

Why? Well, first off, there’s the issue of the seizures. It seems that when the animation of the new logo was shown on the telly, it reportedly triggered 22 epileptic seizures and was the cause of an unknown number of migraines and vomiting. Come on…can it be THAT bad? I have seen a lot of bad graphics in my life, but none actually made me hurl.

With the Brits so unhappy, it’s a good thing the designer was one of their own. London-based brand consultants Wolff Olins designed the controversial logo and got paid handsomely for it. $800,000, which would be more if that were Euros and not dollars. I need to nail that amount down, because a seven-figure amount was also kicked around the day the 2012 was unveiled. I guess for that kind of coin, one would expect a lot less vomiting and absolutely no seizures. It’s just not good business to make people physically ill when they see your logo.

The question of it being downright ugly is also part of the gripe. It’s not like Wolff Olins is a new kid to this Olympic design world. They were the firm that did the Athens Olympics logo. Their work is worldwide and includes such prestigious clients as Tate Modern and UNICEF, GE and Lloyds TSB, one of the biggest banks in the UK. None of their work has proved to be a health hazard until now.

What happened then? One word – expectations.

The Brits did not expect the logo they got. They expected to see something that made them proud, made them comfortable, made them feel part of the larger whole that is Britain. They expected something BETTER. Not something jumbled and ragged and odd. Not something they consider jarring and so…so…so UNBritish! Brits can’t be proud of this and Brits love to feel proud. They revel in pomp and pageantry. The Brits invented the jolly good show, after all.

The marketing lesson we have in this is simple. Knowing what the buyer expects has to play a major part in the marketing product, whether it’s a logo, a color combination, an animation, music, dialogue or actor cast in a role. Wolff Olins either wasn’t given good direction, wasn’t managed along the way, or they delivered a logo that met the expectations of someone who doesn’t understand the reason they had the logo done in the first place.

And that’s what Dunne said about that.