New(ish) on TV: Dancing With the Stars

It sounds like something that aired in the heyday of the DuMont Network, but it's one of (if not the) biggest unscripted hits of the summer. So what's the deal with ABC's Dancing With the Stars? The wife is hooked, so I took the opportunity last night to watch as well.

The premise is pretty simple: six "stars" (we'll get to that) are paired with six professional ballroom dancers. The "star" and their partner work each week to prepare a dance in a given style (last night they had the choice between jive and tango). They are then judged by a three-person panel and scored on a 1 to 10 point basis. At the end of the show, the viewing audience gets to phone in votes for their favorites. The couple with the lowest combined ranking between the judges and the fan vote gets eliminated.

There is an unusual wrinkle with the voting, though. The scores are this week's judges scores and last week's fan voting. I'm not sure how much I like this. I suppose it evens things out, as one bad week won't necessarily eliminate a couple. It also saves us a pointless results show, which may be the element that brings me over to liking this voting method.

Anyway, the "stars" recruited for the show: boxer Evander Holyfield, (super?)model Rachel Hunter, Joey McIntyre (of NKOTB fame), Kelly Monaco (of General Hospital), John O'Hurley (Peterman on Seinfeld) and Trista Sutter (of several other ABC unscripted shows). O'Hurley and McIntyre seem like the favorites, based on the judges comments and the wife's observations.

The judges are OK. It's the required three-person panel, though all three judges (two men and one woman, of course) are willing enough to compliment or critique that the Randy-Paula-Simon paradigm isn't achieved. That's a good thing.

For me, the biggest drawback to the show is that it's ballroom dancing. It doesn't interest me very much. There are clearly enough people who feel otherwise to keep this show going. To its credit, I did not feel like I was actively losing brain cells by watching, which is not a feeling associated with many unscripted programs.

Even for something I don't care for, I find it more interesting than The Scholar, and more interesting than any of the three upcoming unscripted shows advertised during it (Welcome to the Neighborhood, Hooking Up, and Brat Camp). Well, OK, Brat Camp has the attraction of punk kids getting their comeuppance.

If you like dancing, it's probably a solid tune-in. It's OK as programming you get pulled into by someone else.

A sometimes spirited evening of TV

The second episode of The Scholar had the kids competing to rev up school spirit for a USC volleyball game. Which, it being southern California, wouldn't seem like too hard of a draw, but from the footage shown volleyball is a tough sell wherever you are.

Part of the task was to get USC students to show up with a pennant of a given color, One team numbered their pennants and offered a lottery where the winner got a $100 bookstore card - not bad, but I think $200 would have been more enticing while allowing the team to buy the other stuff they needed. The other team, which won the task, did so by handing out the pennants to people as they entered the game. Which is less like generating spirit as hijacking already-developed spirit, but such details aren't important, apparently.

Both groups also did some sort of halftime cheer/spirit-building exercise. I thought the losing team did a better job, but the USC cheering coach didn't. Thankfully, she seemed more swayed by crowd reaction than the winning team's lame dance.

The second episode wasn't all that much different - or better - than the first. We did learn that the sole white admissions rep doesn't seem to care for the lone African-American male contestant, and that the admissions board is perhaps overly impressed by folks who know that the brain is part of the nervous system.

Seriously, if these folks are involved in admitting students to Ivy League institutions, then the whole legacy thing make a lot more sense.

There was much more spirit on Hell's Kitchen - perhaps too much - and pretty much all of it negative and expressed in yelling form. Gordon Ramsay's boot camp approach to teaching cooking finally got someone to actually quit - Jeff, who wasn't particularly well-liked by his team and who may or may not have been playing a kidney stone for sympathy (FWIW, having had one I can attest that it hurts, but I think that if he was in the sort of agony displayed on TV he should have gotten more serious medical attention, or at least something for the pain). Jeff is also the one who mouthed off to Ramsay, which made me kind of sad - I really wanted to see Andrew get eviscerated on national TV.

But his day may still be coming - Ramsay called him out as well and basically said that Andrew has no standing with him. Part of this isn't Andrew's fault, but his personality makes it easy to load up on him.

The third night of service again ended with a premature shutdown. Next week they promise something that's never happened before in Hell's Kitchen. I assume it's someone getting served dessert.

Maybe if he apologizes really nicely...

While I didn't care for Vanilla Ice's cover of "Survivor" on Hit Me Baby 1 More Time, I never expected, scant days later, to have Destiny's Child announce they're splitting up. I clearly underestimated the cover's insidious power.

Considering they're all from Houston, perhaps Ice can swing by Beyonce's house with a cake. It's a first step.

No advertising boner, this

OLN's Cyclism Sunday coverage has, like most sporting events, a critical event or time in the race which is highlighted at the end as a "play of the game," so to speak. It's name?

The Cialis Ultimate Moment.

Which, like most ED drug advertising, is suggestive without being interesting. Like that woman who keeps talking about Levitra. If it's so damn good, why does she have time to keep telling us about it?

Basically Cable

Tonight was the only night of the weekend where we watched any TV of note, and it was all on cable. Take that, networks!

Started out by flipping between Gladiator on TNT and cycling coverage on OLN. The Tour de France is about three weeks away, but OLN has been covering cycling leading up to it on Cyclism Sunday, where the follow races like the Giro d'Italia (Tour of Italy) and some of the shorter races in France. The Sunday package is pretty good - even the recap of a smaller race is better than the CBS recap of a week of the Tour de France - but I'd like to see OLN cover some of the larger races like the Giro and the Vuelta Espana (Tour of Spain) in the same day-to-day fashion. It wouldn't have to be live; an hour recap show would be great.

The only problem is that OLN's cycling coverage is pretty Lance-centered, and he uses the other races (if he even rides them) to prepare for France. Still, with the number of strong US cyclists out there now, OLN could build more of a following for cycling (and their coverage) without much more work.

Anyway, we later watched the latest episode of The Next Food Network Star, which was reasonably entertaining. They try a little too hard to create drama (this week over a contestant who had a little knife accident), but as I noted before the general lack of fake tension-building is refreshing. My only problem now is that I'm not crazy about any of the contestants. It's a short-run series (the finale is June 26), and I don't think that'll be enough time for anyone to really come out as a favorite for me.

Next was Bridezillas on WE, which is about what you'd expect - a series that follows difficult brides on their way to the altar. It's like a million other cable shows that's built around ordinary people, not particularly memorable but not particularly horrible, either. I am looking forward to the follow-up series Divorcezillas, where the husbands finally cut loose from the immature shrews they married.

Finally, some Family Guy on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. Thankfully, no American Dad. It took me a little while to warm up to Family Guy, and that process isn't happening for the new show.

New on TV: The Next Food Network Star

Put in SAT terms (or Miller's terms, as I don't think they have analogies on the SAT any more, do they?):

Hell's Kitchen is to Lord of the Flies as The Next Food Network Star is to Some book where people do things without a lot of cussing or pushing of plates into chests.

Of course, the aims of the two shows are different. Where Gordon Ramsay is taking his usual boot camp approach to find someone worthy of getting a restaurant, Food Network is trying to develop a new talent who has never been on TV before. And given that the TV angle is kind of important to having a Food Network show, a little more patience and guidance is required.

The basic premise is that Food TV picked eight finalists (actually, I think they picked seven and Internet voting picked the eighth) who compete in various challenges related to being a TV chef. There's no winning the challenges, other than impressing the host Mark Summers, any guest chefs who happen to be around (Bobby Flay tonight, Mario Batali in the next episode), and the three-person selection committee that decides who gets cut at the end of the episode (made up of a couple of Food TV execs and Gordon Elliott).

We missed most of the episode where the finalists were introduced, but did catch the second one, which focused on TV chef skills (cooking while reading from the prompter, swapping pans to show finished dishes, etc.). They also did a thing where each contestant had something go wrong while icing a cake, just to see how they reacted to the unexpected.

Unlike most unscripted shows, where such things would be handled with high (edited-in) drama and vituperous contestants, the proceedings here were more civil. It's a refreshing change to see an unscripted show that, on some level, actually cares about the process and people involved in finding a winner.

If you tune into unscripted programming for the backstabbing and such, The Real Gilligan's Island is probably more for you. Foodies, I think, will get a bit of a kick out this show, though.

This explains the Governator

Tonight's line-up on Hit Me Baby 1 More Time:

The Knack ("My Sharona," covered "Do You Wanna Be My Girl" by Jet)
Haddaway ("What Is Love," covered "Toxic" by Britney Spears)
Tommy Tutone ("867-5309," covered "All the Small Things" by blink-182)
The Motels ("Only the Lonely," covered "Don't Know Why" by Norah Jones)
Vanilla Ice ("Ice Ice Baby," covered "Survivor" by Destiny's Child)

The Knack sounded really good, and to our minds was the best of the five. Haddaway proved that he could sing dance tunes, and even did a little Boutabi head nod at the start of his song. Tommy Tutone could have gone the way of A Flock of Seagulls, but held it together and may have done better on the cover than on their original song. The Motels did an interesting rockish cover version of the Norah Jones song. Vanilla Ice is now a combination of Kevin Federline and Fred Durst, and didn't so much cover "Survivor" as us it to deliver some autobiographical material.

Care to guess who won?

A large part of the problem, to my way of thinking, is that the audience probably only remembers Vanilla Ice and Haddaway (at least if the people they showed were a representative sampling). And when told to vote for a favorite, who are they going to go for - an act they remember or one that is musically better but something their parents listened to?

The fraughtness level on this whole exercise just got bumped up a couple of notches.

Ashton Kutcher + "social experiment" = Egads

Yahoo! had a link yesterday that actually used the phrase "social experiment" to tout Beauty and the Geek. I'm not sure which is worse, the Ubermensch vibe to such a statement or that something so full of fluff counts as an experiment. It would, however, explain how the whole Vioxx situation happened.

Anyway, second episode on last night. Women had to do car stuff (check oil, change tire, etc.), guys had to learn massage. Both groups did reasonably well at their assignments, and once again the same pair won both contests. The two couples they sent to the Elimination Room had the beauty and the geek who hooked up on them, meaning that one part of the pair was going home.

This elicited some strange dialog from the woman, as she made it sound like she was never going to see the guy again. Which makes me think that:

a. Once out of the house, she'll go back to dating hot guys, even though they've not treated her well in the past, or

b. Once her boy toy is out of the house, she's going to look for more geek lovin', or

c. She doesn't know of the telephones of which we speak, where one person can contact another even though they're not in the same room, or

d. She didn't read the rule and thinks that the losing couple is banished or executed or something.

In any case, she'll have plenty of time to ponder this as it was her couple that lost the elimination round. Part of the problem was that her geek didn't know what a loofah is, making this the second-most famous case of sponge illiteracy (paragraph 78).

And at the end, we had the losing beauty and geek talk about how people in the other group aren't just beauties or geeks, that there's more to them as people. Which, for the self-absorbed or socially demented is the sort of epiphany that comes a good decade too late.

It's New to Me: House

For most of this year, the wife and I were bombarded with House promos during American Idol. We never bothered to tune in; for my part, the repetitive nature of the promos didn't inspire much confidence. Every week it was:

1. Person has unusual medical condition that defies diagnosis.
2. Dr. House, either on his own or with the help of his assistants comes up with some cure, potentially fatal.
3. The hospital administration hems and haws, fearing a lawsuit.
4. Dr. House winds up treating the patient anyways, or at least gives that impression.

Now that the summer doldrums are upon us, and there's bugger all on TV most nights (especially given the way the Red Sox are playing), I thought I'd give House a viewing. Between press on the show and word of mouth, it sounded like I was missing something.

Turns out I was.

House manages to combine elements of ER, The West Wing and CSI in what is a very positive and entertaining fashion. Some of the medical stuff is a little graphic, but otherwise I found myself really enjoying the episode.

Hugh Laurie as Dr. House is an engaging, enigmatic lead, whose compassion is well-hidden behind his intellect, sarcasm, and mouth. In a way this would be a perfect compliment for Hell's Kitchen, as House could be the medical equivalent of Gordon Ramsay (though House is much less likely to curse, though even if network standards allowed it he seems like a guy who prefers more artfully constructed rejoinders than the average four letter word). Hugh Laurie is dead-letter perfect in this role.

The supporting cast is solid, and includes the likes of Omar Epps, Robert Sean Leonard, and Lisa Edelstein. They're a perfect compliment to House, both when on screen with him and when they get to interact without him.

I also liked the way that the supporting stories aren't so obviously supporting. In lat night's episode, a subplot regarding a litigation-happy STD carrier provided just enough of a relief from the main story. It was funny without necessarily being treated as such (as compared to the STD subplot on Grey's Anatomy that was mostly comic relief).

House goes into the regular rotation. It should go in yours, too.

Gay ball!

The new Queer Eye for the Straight Guy season starts tonight with their make-over of five members of the Boston Red Sox. So far there's been precious little making over, as the Fab 5 have mostly hung out with the players' wives and visited a devistated Little League field (which Dunkin' Donuts is paying to have renovated, in return for copious product placement).

In fact, the show is quite the name-dropper, as we've had shout-outs for Home Goods and BJ's Wholesale Club (and an appearance by the sporting equipment company Mizuno). I've not watched the show regularly in some time, so I'm not sure if this has become typical based on the show's success or if the nature of the episode has led to more shilling (though without, sad to say, any Schilling).

I will say that I'm getting quite a bit of an Extreme Makeover: Spring Training Edition vibe, and next week's episode suggests Nanny 911. Perhaps they'll do the entire season ripping off unscripted shows. That'd actually be kind of neat.

Cooking was not berry berry good to him

Dewberry, the high-strung pastry chef who dodged getting sent home last week on Hell's Kitchen, managed to get his walking papers this week thanks to an attempted walk-out on his team. A combination of a late-running kitchen and Gordon Ramsay's vitrol led to Dewberry's snapping, but the rest of his team got him to stay. Not that it helped; stopping to talk Dewberry down put the team even farther behind. Suffice it to say that it was an easy decision for Ramsay to make, as quitting on your team is about the worst thing he can imagine.

Jeff, last week's crappy waiter, was the other nominee for getting let go. He spaced pretty badly in the kitchen, which he blamed on kidney stones. Why he didn't get himself to the hospital for some pain medication is beyond me. Then again, the mentality of contestants on these things seems to be that the competition is more important than one's health. I can accept that when it's a cold. When it's kidney stones, go get checked out.

A second win for the blue team led to some increased cockiness in some of its members (Andrew of the "absolute penne" and Jessica, a bleach-blonde whose response to most things seems to be "whatever," were most notably portrayed). Andrew was also shows in a weasel moment trying to curry favor with the team's sous chef, who had none of it. Next week promises some sort of confrontation between Ramsay and a contestant; editing intimates it's Andrew, which would be no great surprise.

For an unscripted show, it's odd that it's biggest drawback is exposition. The first five minutes of the show were the introduction (which explains who Ramsay is and the point of the show) and a recap from last week (made even less necessary by the repeat of the first episode right before this one). The narrator was omnipresent, leaving no occurance in Hell's Kitchen uncommented upon. Even the obvious ones.

I'd still say that this is the best unscripted show this summer (which isn't saying much). BBC America may be looking to capitalize by bringing back Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, which airs tonight at 9 pm EDT. It's the same first episode BBC America showed the first time they aired the series; we can only hope that there are more than the four they repetitively aired over the winter.

New on TV: The Scholar

ABC got into the unscripted summer series fray last night with The Scholar, where ten high school students are vying for a full-ride scholarship to the college of their choice.

The show started by assembling the ten students and giving us a little background, though not enough to really help me keep everyone straight. At times I'd be watching and swear I was seeing kids who we'd not met before. Eventually, the students are brought over to USC to meet with the host (who is mildly toolish) and the "admissions board" that will make decisions during the show as to who makes the final challenge each week. Two of the three admissions reps are listed as being from "Ivy League" schools, which is vague enough to make me wonder if either (a) they are folks who previously worked in an Ivy's admissions office, or (b) their school of employ would rather not be named, in case the show is crap.

Anyway, the first challenge is a matching test to put moments in space exploration history with the year in which they occurred. The top two students (based on number correct and time taken to complete the test) become team captains, and pick students playground-style to fill out their teams.

The teams then face a group challenge, which this week consisted of running around the USC campus to solve brain teasers. The captain of the winning team gets a free pass to the final round, while everyone else has to meet with the admissions board, which will choose two of them for the finals. Those finals are kind of like the final round of The Weakest Link, with each person taking a question on turn in a given subject (19th and 20th century American lit for this week). You miss the question, you're out. Last person standing gets a seat in the finals and $50,000.

Based on last night's viewing, I can't say whether I like the show or not. It's refreshing to see an unscripted show that values intelligence, though the host and admissions folks seem a little overly-impressed at what the kids know (given that the students all have sky-high GPAs and all). The admissions board is way too self-important, bringing a little more gravitas to this than is probably strictly necessary. That and there's an Apprentice-style boardroom vibe that permeates their interviews with the students, which doesn't work at all.

I'd like to get to know the individual students better. Right know I only feel like I know the three finalists reasonably well. One of them, a kid from Memphis named Davis, is being set up as the heel. Many of his interviews paint him in an arrogant light, and most of his fellow scholars seem to have taken a dislike to him (based on things we never get to see).

The show is completely successful as advertising. The University of Southern California is getting a ton of exposure, and looks great. Intel, a major sponsor, had its name or logo mentioned or shown at least a dozen times in the episode. Hardly surprising, of course.

Future episodes promise non-academic challenges (going for the fully-rounded Scholar) and there's a hint of romance in the air between Davis and the one woman in the house who can stand him. I suppose I'll keep watching, in the hopes of this all becoming more interesting.

The end of the crazy?

I was saddened to see that Twiggy is replacing Janice Dickenson on the America's Next Top Model judging panel. Janice was often the highlight of the show, as her no-holds-barred comments and descents into madness perked up what could be a fairly by the book episode.

Janice seemed crazier this past season (excuse me, "cycle"), as she made moves on both Nigel Barker and Tyra Banks (all in the name of modeling demonstrations, of course!) and mixed it up verbally with Nole Marin (who is a waste of space; I'd rather have both Janice and Twiggy than him). I could be reading to much into this, though I've also read talk that Janice and Tyra didn't always get along. I could see how Janice's larger than life personality (and occasional grope) could get frustrating, or perhaps take too much attention from the host.

And that's where my main concern is regarding Twiggy: will she be original and engaging? She's got a tough act to follow, certainly.

Were I given my druthers, the panel would be Janice, Nigel, Tyra, and J. Alexander, runway diva extraordinaire. Of course, I'd also give Jay Manuel a cycle off so he could get his skin tone to a less orange shade. Might as well swing for the fences.

No es bueno

While I didn't get to see much TV over the weekend, I was a little surprised when some pre-sleep channel surfing dredged up the 1979 classic Americathon - on Telemundo. How NAFTA critics haven't capitalized on this I don't know.

In My Face

No less than five minutes after posting about the lack of musical entertainment on Hit Me Baby 1 More Time, Arrested Development comes out and does a really interesting hip hop cover of Heaven by Los Lonely Boys. I have no idea how it worked, but it did.

And next week: Haddaway. Haddaway!

New on TV: Hit Me Baby 1 More Time

I suppose the price we pay for the lack of new unscripted shows this fall is the glut of them making up new summer programming. The downward trend in such shows that debut this week continues with this NBC offering, where has-been musical acts try to recapture the magic. Five acts face off, doing one of their own songs and a recent song (or, more accurately, parts of each). The audience votes, and the winner goes on to some sort of final.

Tonight's acts: Loverboy, CeCe Peniston, A Flock of Seagulls, Arrested Development, and Tiffany. It's been slim pickings, though I think the women have a slight edge going into the clubhouse turn (Loverboy is singing Julio Iglesias's "Hero" as I type this, putting it into some sort of power ballad context that might have worked if this were 1984).

The host is some guy named Vernon Kay, who I have never heard of. The IMDB suggests that he's some sort of professional TV host/presenter, and he's got the smarmy personality to be successful - if annoying - in that role.

CeCe Peniston is singing some sort of Faith Hill song now. Not my cup of tea, but probably not bad if you like divas.

Anyway, this show is only running like 3 or 4 episodes, which is probably just about right. Next week promises the return of Vanilla Ice, which will hopefully be good for laughs, given that the show is pretty much a failure as musical entertainment.

PS - A Flock of Seagulls is singing some Ryan Cabrera song. Honestly, I don't think they've performed together, or maybe even individually, since their last song slid off of Billboard. Painful.

B-O-R-I-N-G

ESPN's got the National Spelling Bee on this afternoon, and it's not exactly compelling television. I'm not particularly pro- or anti-bee, but these rounds watching kids spell words that the folks at the OED would have trouble finding doesn't do whole lot for me. Though it would be good if some combo of the bee's popularity and the Ken Jennings phenomenon would mix to get quizbowl back on TV. Perhaps ESPNU or CSTV would be willing to spare an afternoon?

Also, I missed the ceremonial release of the bees. Always a dramatic moment.

I will say that Chris McKendrie and the analyst, the 1979 champ, are doing a game job of covering this thing. It's just that watching 11 year-olds repeatedly asking for etymologies and sentences is hard to spin.

New on TV: Beauty and the Geek

The combination of executive producer Ashton Kutcher and the WB television network is unlikely to win any Peabody Awards (come to think of it, neither is either component on its own), but it has come up with a reasonably inoffensive summer unscripted show in Beauty and the Geek.

Seven geeky guys, ranging from a medical student with a penchant for nosebleeds to the vice president of The Dukes of Hazzard fan club to a guy described by one woman (not inaccurately) as "a white Urkel," pair up with seven attractive but non-scholarly women. The pairs will compete over the coming weeks in a series of challenges to see what each person can learn from the other. The pair that seems to do the best job of this wins a quarter million dollars, according to host Bryan McFayden.

The first set of challenges are relatively straightforward: the women will go back to fifth grade for a little quizzing, while the men have to learn how to dance. The winning individual wins for his team the right to choose a couple to send to the Elimination Room. What this means isn't readily apparent.

The women are quizzed spelling bee style in front of an audience gathered, I imagine, under some sort of false pretense. Most of the questions for the women are in geography, which only serves to underscore the woeful state of geographic education in America. The winner took the competition by knowing that 'IA' is the postal abbreviation for Iowa.

For the dancing, each man comes out with their partner and cuts a rug. Remember that guy with the penchant for nosebleeds? Lets just say he could have used a hazmat team during his performance. The winner here, the partner of the woman who won the quiz, takes the crown by following his partner's advice by aiming for comedy rather than proficency. Shades of Napoleon Dynamite abound.

The winning pair engage in some strategery and pick two couples to send into the Elimination Room. Turns out that the elimination process pits the individuals of the same gender against each other in quizzes on politics and history (for the ladies) and popular music (the guys). Total number of right answers wins. One of the women predicts that they'll be sent packing thanks to her geek's complete lack of musical knowledge. If you've ever watched an unscripted TV program, you know what that means.

Outside of the competitions, we also have the first blossoming of romance, as one of the women gets a case of the hots for a geek - who is not her partner. While it's not a dating show, you can imagine that the guys probably feel a little particular about their partner (she being the closest they've been to a woman in some time, by the guys' own admissions). In this case, the cuckolded guy keeps it together, a good thing given that they are one of the couples involved in the elimination. This love connection gets explored next week in more detail, which has me brimming with apathy. Too soon for the hanky panky.

Even so, the show is a model of restraint given the sorts of night-visioned scenarios Fox would have come up with for this. Though some of the couples do have to share a bed, so perhaps the natural inhibitions of the men (and the inbred prejudices of the women against geeks) are playing a role here, too.

The show has all the usual flourishes of a low-grade unscripted show, from the overly-dramatic music to the attempts at dramatic commercial breaks to contestants whose names I cannot remember for the life of me (though I do remember that one woman, Caitilin, pronounces her name "KITE-ah-lynn").

I can't say that Beauty and the Geek is a good show, but I can say that I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't a train wreck or produced in such a way to embarass the contestants (at least any moreso than their sometimes painfully frank descriptions of themselves). Future episodes seem to promise lessons learned by both beauties and geeks, and isn't this what we've been looking for ever since Gilbert Lowell argued for the end of nerd persecution?

As they've got nothing else to show this summer, the WB will be re-running the first episode tomorrow (Thursday) night. While I'd not say it's appointment TV, if you've got an hour and are by a TV when it's on, you could do worse things than tuning in.

Isn't that all of them?

The Comcast guide listing for Whose Wedding Is It, Anyway? on the Style Network, tonight at 8 pm EDT:

"A L.A. wedding planner has her hands full with a mother and daughter."

And then Gilligan messes up a plan to get off the island.

Slim Pickings

Not much on last night, we left it on baseball (Sox-Orioles) or had it on Cold Case Files on the Bill Kurtis Channel, which for some reason is still listed as A&E.

This reminded me of one of the few funny skits I saw on SNL this past season. Darrell Hammond is playing Kurtis, and he's doing voice overs. He and the folks in the booth are having a discussion on typical stuff - places to eat, how common acquaintances are doing, etc. - which he interrupts to intone things like "Police discovered a gorilla suit made entirely of pubic hair."

I know some of my laughter came cheaply, but on some level I think Kurtis's days are like this. Spend the morning talking about rapists and serial killers, then decamp to TGI Friday's for lunch. That and I do appreciate Hammond, his generation's Phil Hartman.