17 of 189

A new Nielsen report reveals that the average American household gets 189 TV channels today, up 45% from the 129 they received in 2008, but that consumers each watch an average of only 17 channels each, a number unchanged since 2008. 

You can read more on NBC News HERE.

1906 San Francisco Earthquake: Four Days Before

A massive earthquake famously struck San Francisco on this day back in 1906, an anniversary that brought to mind this excellent 60 Minutes piece about stunning, digitally-restored movie footage of San Francisco taken just four days before that earthquake (and subsequent fire) nearly destroyed the city. The camera is mounted on the front of a streetcar rolling down Market Street, vying with horse-drawn carriages and automobiles and pedestrians. "The film is a time traveler's glimpse of a joyous city on the brink of disaster," explains Morley Safer."The odds are, some of the people you see have just days to live."

Al Jazeera America's Low Ratings

"Al Jazeera America is averaging just 15,000 total viewers, roughly half those who tuned in to its predecessor, Current TV, according to Nielsen figures... The channel draws fewer than 6,000 viewers in the 25-to-54-year-old target audience for news."  You can read more in the New York Post HERE. "The network’s financial backer, the government of Qatar, paid a hefty $500 million in January to purchase Current TV and gain US distribution."

Saturday Night Live: iPhone Complaints

I thought this skit from "Saturday Night Live" a couple of nights ago, where techies complain about the new iPhone 5 to the Chinese workers who assemble them, was funny.





I also liked this parody of a ubiquitous TV commercial for a new Gillette razor.

"Inside The Actors Studio" Remix

If you've ever watched the TV show "Inside the Actors Studio" you'll probably remember that the host, James Lipton, would end each episode by asking whatever famous actor he was interviewing a set of questions designed to solicit one word answers (i.e. "What's your least favorite word?")

A new 2 minute video posted on You Tube HERE has blended together and juxtaposed many of these responses, revealing how startlingly identical many of the celebrity answers were.

What's Guantanamo Bay Watching?

"Librarians at Guantanamo Bay’s prison detention center have had to up their stock of the popular 1990s TV show 'The Fresh Prince of Bel Air,' starring Will Smith... The 168 captives currently residing at the U.S. prison base in Cuba have access to an extensive entertainment selection: the main library houses 18,000 books, 2,730 movies, 390 video games, and 1,235 magazines."

"In 2005, an American Forces Press Service report noted that Arabic translations of Agatha Christie novels were hot commodities on the camp library’s shelves, according to a security official. Since then, the Harry Potter books enjoyed a period of success, as did the self-help book 'Don’t Be Sad,' which discusses happiness from an Islamic perspective. The library even stocks video games like Madden NFL."

You can read the entire ABC News article HERE. 

Big Taxes On TV Game Show Prizes

"Consumerist.com gives the example of a 'Price is Right' winner (name withheld) whose haul included a new truck, a washer and dryer, an Apple computer, a poker table and a trip to Washington, D.C... 'I won $57,000-worth of items. I had to pay around $17,000 or $20,000 in taxes.'
Some winners, he said, decline to take their prizes because they don’t want to pay the taxes."

"Another catch: You’re paying taxes on the item’s full retail value – in the case of a car, say, on the manufacturer’s suggested retail price, rather than on the discounted price a buyer on the open market might pay. Win a really big prize, and the income might be enough to lift you into a higher tax bracket, further increasing the cost of your good fortune."

You can read more from ABC News HERE. 

"Saturday Night Live" Last Night

I haven't thought that Saturday Night Live has been very funny so far this season.  Last night, however, I did think that THIS fake commercial for a motionless mattress was really funny.

"Prohibition" on PBS Sunday, Oct. 2

The new TV show I am most looking forward to this fall is will air on PBS starting this Sunday, October 2.  It's a three part, 5 hour documentary titled Prohibition that, "tells the story of the rise, rule, and fall of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the entire era it encompassed."  It's by Ken Burns, who made the famous Civil War documentary all those years ago. At the PBS website HERE you can watch a 2 minute trailer for it, as well as a separate interview with Ken Burns.

New "Walking Dead" October 16th

Halloween is not too far away now.  How can I tell?  Displays of mini-candy in grocery stores? Maybe.  Or maybe it was that AMC released this 90 second trailer yesterday for the upcoming second season of its highly rated 'zombie apocalypse' drama The Walking Dead.  You can watch it on You Tube HERE.  This trailer doesn't give away anything (as least as far as I could tell).  In fact, it looked pretty much identical to season one, to me anyway.

Final "Andy Rooney" This Sunday

A couple of years ago I shifted to watching CBS's 60 Minutes online, instead of on TV, because I found that I enjoyed only about 1 in every 3 stories they did.  On the CBS News website you can watch the show story-by-story with only one 30 second commercial.  As a result, it's been a while since I've seen an Andy Rooney segment.

I've watched 60 Minutes pretty regularly for the better part of 25 years, and I even liked Andy Rooney well after many others called him "tired" or "annoying."  But this 30 second segment from the NBC Nightly News, about the announcement yesterday that this Sunday would be the 92 year old Rooney's final appearance on the show, came as little surprise (if a bit of a shock).

It did make me wonder, though, what was the unspoken, triggering event for his abruptly-announced retirement now.

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"Happy Days" Lawsuit: What 'Merchandising'?

Did you hear the news recently that several of the actors from the 1970s sit com "Happy Days" are now suing CBS claiming they have not been paid their contractual share of merchandising revenue received by CBS in recent years?

When I first heard about this, I was surprised because every news source seemed to recite the same laundry list of licensed merchandise that didn't seem right to me.  When was the last time you saw "Happy Days" comic books, or trading cards, or lunch boxes?   Those particular products just couldn't be the genesis of the suit in 2011, I thought. Well, as it turns out the real driver was the licensing of "Happy Days" slot machines, as you can read HERE.

SNL: Tina Fey's Tribute To Great Women Writers

Tina Fey hosted last weekend's Saturday Night Live.  I really like "30 Rock," and I really enjoyed this 3 minute segment from SNL:

Lost Gold of the Dark Ages

A month ago I wrote HERE about how a middle-aged British hobbyist with a metal detector recently stumbled upon one of the largest finds of Dark Ages gold ever discovered. It lay just beneath the surface of an unprepossessing English farm adjacent to a major roadway.  ("In coming days, I just couldn't keep the objects from coming out the ground.  It was frightening, in the end.")


Last weekend I watched a new National Geographic Channel documentary about this find called Lost Gold of the Dark Ages.  It details many fascinating aspects of the horde, including how authorities attempted to keep it quiet initially while rushing to dig it all up in plain view at a site by the side of a freeway.  (The farmer who owned the land, who was in on it, told neighbors that police were looking for a dead body.)  The show also examines multiple theories about how the gold got there and what exactly the impressive, but mysterious, artifacts may have actually been. It airs again next Sunday, August 15th apparently.   Here's a 2 minute preview:

Headline News' Chuck Roberts Retired Yesterday

Chuck Roberts anchored CNN's Headline News from it's very first broadcast in 1982, until he retired yesterday. You may not know his name, but you'll almost certainly recognize his face (and/or voice) if you watch this 2 minute clip HERE of his sign-off. 


From the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s I watched Headline News almost everyday, sometimes twice a day.  Back then it ran repeating half hour news broadcasts 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Each was a complete news broadcast in 30 minutes.  They ran at a clipped pace, with news at the top and sports 18 minutes in, I remember.  There was also a slot for business news and entertainment news, as well as weather. 


It can be hard to remember today why that was so compelling back then. Before the internet it was more-or-less the only way to get 'immediate' news and sports scores. The internet made that obsolete, however. So Headline News (now "HLN") has morphed itself several times since to try to make itself more relevant in the internet age.  Most recently their prime time line-up has been populated with opinionated 'personalties' like Nancy Grace, who hosts their top-rated show. 


Through it all Chuck Roberts persevered for almost 29 years, with his his more traditional 'anchorman' style.  Until today.

The Origins of "Yo Gabba Gabba"

If you're a parent of a child under, say, 7 years old, then you almost certainly know of a popular children's TV show on Nicklelodeon called Yo Gabba Gabba. It's jarringly different from other, similar shows aimed at pre-schoolers, which tend to be very banal and non-threatening.  This show takes a very different, "alternative" approach.  It has these trippy special effects that look like they were originally created for a rave party.  It features musical guests who are real life indy rock bands.  And the songs they sing and lessons they teach are phrased in a this uniquely blunt, borderline sardonic way. ("Don't, don't, don't bite your friends," goes one jingle.) As a result, the show has now also become wildly popular with kids' parents, as well as college kids.


Entertainment Weekly has published an article on the origins of the show that you can read HERE. The show's two founders are 38 year old former skateboarders and failed indy rockers.  (The Yo Gabba Gabba characters Muno and Brobee were originally featured in one on their band's stage shows.)  And here's a section from the article that describes how the show's creators found the show's host, DJ Lance:

"There was only one thing missing: a host. Majestic had toured with a group called the Ray Makers, and Schultz thought one of the members just might work. One day, they visited him at his day job at trendy L.A. record store Amoeba. 'We went down and met him,' says Jacobs. 'He comes out and he's wearing this '70s getup, like he would have been on Electric Company or in Sly Stone's band — a huge beard and a giant Afro and these rainbow-colored striped pants. He had a big smile on his face and said, 'Hey, how ya doing? I'm Lance.' It was like lightning struck.' When the Yo Gabba crew offered him the job, Lance Robertson didn't take it that seriously. 'I was kind of like, whatever,' says the self-described ''big music nerd,'' 44, whose one-bedroom Hollywood apartment is stuffed with some 6,000 records. 'I did not ever dream it was going to be what it is now. But I could tell that these guys were doing something positive. I just went with it.'''

Will School Lunches In America Ever Change?

It seems like school lunches have always been lambasted in America for being unhealthy. (Remember the infamous "catsup counts as a vegetable" controversy during the Reagan administration?)  But as childhood obesity rates have risen steadily in recent the years, concern about the health impact of serving kids pizza and french fries for lunch every day has become more and more acute. 


The same exact problem plagues Britain.  So a few years ago, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver did a TV show there where he went to one particular elementary school to try to show the school administrators and the kids' parents that they could eat more healthfully for the same amount of money.  I watched that show and found it captivating: sometimes hilarious, but also quixotic and at times a little sad. I remember one 10 year old boy who didn't even know what broccoli was when it was shown to him.  When he was offered a bite, he recoiled like it was a rod of plutonium. Then they went to his house and found that his heavy-set mother served him take-out fast food literally every night for dinner his whole life (mostly fish n' chips), claiming that she couldn't afford to do anything else.


Well, Jamie Oliver has now replicated this approach in a West Virginia town for a new TV show here in the United States that premiered on Sunday on ABC.  I've embedded a 2 minute clip from the show below. In it, Jamie works with the middle-aged lunch ladies in the school cafeteria as they ambivalently prepare "mashed potatoes" by rehydrating a pre-packaged product called "potato pearls."  ("Is it really potatoes," he asks? "I hope so," one cafeteria lady responds casually, then adding "they're a cook's best friend.") The only urgency or care they demonstrate while doing this prep work is that Jamie Oliver pour the watery goo in the serving tray more quickly, before it hardens like concrete in the mixing bowl.

Jimmy Kimmel: A Charlie Brown Valentine

You may have seen that ABC aired the animated special A Charlie Brown Valentine earlier this week.  Jimmy Kimmel did a 1 minute parody of it on his show last night (embedded below)  in which Snoopy begins writing valentines based on Tiger Woods' lurid text messages.

John Edwards In Haiti: Bad Idea Jeans

As it turns out, John Edwards was in Haiti when his written admission that he is indeed the father of Rielle Hunter's two year old child was released to NBC News yesterday.  This randomly brought to mind one of my all-time favorite Saturday Night Live parody commercials (starring Phil Hartman, Mike Myers and David Spade) because it happens to include a line about Haiti.  It's for "Bad Idea Jeans," and it's embedded below:

The Human Target: 1992 Version

A new TV show called Human Target, about a professional bodyguard who impersonates his clients in order to 'smoke out' their would-be assassins, premiered last night on Fox.  If you've watched any of the NFL playoff games on the Fox network over the last couple of weekends, I'm sure you knew that already (even if you didn't watch the show), because they relentlessly promoted it during commercial breaks. 


But did you know that the show was actually based on a comic book?  That's right. The Human Target was originally created in 1972 by Len Wein and Carmine Infantino, and ran as a back-up feature in some Superman comic books. In fact, almost 20 years ago a prior TV adaptation ran on CBS starring Rick Springfield.  Yes, the Rick Springfield of "Jesse's Girl" and General Hospital fame. It was pulled off the air by CBS after only 7 episodes because of poor ratings. I've embedded below the 1 minute opening credits from this 1992 version, as well as a teaser for the current series that premiered last night.