tvguide.com

Wow, Macrovision really wanted to get rid of the print edition of TV Guide, didn’t they? Hot on the heels of news that they sold the 55-year-old print edition to OpenGate Capital is the news that the selling price was $1. No, I did not forget to write “million” or “billion” after that $1; OpenGate bought the title for about the cost of a cup of coffee (food cart coffee, not the fancy-schmancy Starbucks kind).

According to the article in Ad Age, not only did Macrovision dump the title for a third of the cost of a single copy of the magazine ($2.99), they’re loaning OpenGate $9.3 million — at 3% interest — to operate it.

It’s no secret that Macrovision was looking to get rid of the print version soon after they purchased “the Guide” in January. And it’s also no secret that the print copy has become mostly irrelevant, especially since it shed its listings in 2005 and became a TV-centric version of Us Weekly. But a buck? Damn, had I known it was going to be that cheap, I would have bought it myself, just to get access to the archives.

CBS

Bob Schieffer is used to wrangling politicians as the moderator of CBS’s Face the Nation. So maybe he thinks that he has a better handle on what people who watch the presidential debates want to hear. It sure seems that way, as he’s determined to moderate a debate that’s actually informative and interesting; something that, mostly for format reasons, neither Jim Lehrer nor Tom Brokaw could provide.

He wants a “freewheeling” debate, he tells David Bianculli of Broadcasting & Cable. “They’ll each have two minutes to answer, then I’ll try to encourage them to question one another. I’m going to do my very best to keep them on track. And if they try and get off track, I’m not going to be bashful about saying, ‘Gentlemen, that was not the question,’” he says. The intimacy of the format, in which Schieffer will sit at a desk with Senators McCain and Obama, should lend itself to more conversation and less bloviation, and he will use that to his advantage. Heck, he cited that intimacy, among other things, to his CBS colleague Jeff Greenfield, who wrote about Schieffer’s methods at Slate.com.

But, let’s get real here; if Lehrer and Brokaw couldn’t get real answers out of the candidates, how is Schieffer going to do it?

Read the rest of this entry »

ABC

Fringe was “meh.” Gary Unmarried was unmemorable. Worst Week wasn’t the worst, but it wasn’t the best. Kath & Kim was a disaster, and The Ex List was a piffle. 90210 was neither interesting or salacious enough. But last night at 10, we finally got a new show whose pilot was well-done enough to get me excited about what’s next. That show was Life on Mars.

Let me preface this by saying that I never saw the original British version of this show, so I’ve got nothing to compare the American version to. But all the mishegas surrounding the show — David E. Kelley came and went, the original pilot was scrapped, the locale was moved from LA to New York, there wasn’t a first episode ready to show as recently as three weeks ago — made me wary of what I was going to see last night at 10. But at the end of the hour, I was glad I tuned in. Read the rest of this entry »

www.vw.com

I just love it when ads are odd. Not so odd that you don’t know what’s being sold, mind you. But odd enough that the first couple of half-assed times you’re watching a commercial, you have no idea what’s going on, but are intrigued enough to pay attention the next time it comes on. Then, when you finally watch the commercial in full-assed fashion, you’re amazed, fascinated, or repulsed. But by that time, you’re hooked.

That’s what happened when I saw VW’s new Routan campaign the first few times. In it, Brooke Shields talks in somber tones about how people are having babies just to “get German engineering.” The couple standing by the new VW minivan would bellow back “We wanted to have kids anyway!” or something else that completely refutes what Brooke was saying. I was wondering what the hell Brooke was getting at; is it just another quirky VW ad? Sure, but one with a theme. Video after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

FOX

Something’s just not right with J.J. Abrams’ latest baby. I’ve been watching Fringe for three weeks now, and something about the show just isn’t adding up to me. Unlike his more compelling shows, like Lost and Alias, Fringe just sits there like a lox and doesn’t offer any excitement whatsover. It’s to the point that I’m about to dump the show and watch The Mentalist instead.

And I think I’ve touched on the problem with the show: it’s mystery-of-the-week theme. Abrams and company wanted to have these mysteries in place so that viewers could jump into and out of the show and enjoy it without needing to know anything about The Pattern or any aspects of the show’s underlying mythology. But what we’re getting are bad Murder, She Wrote mysteries laid on top of tired corporate-government consipiracy theories that people were sick of before the first X-Files movie. Read the rest of this entry »

AP

You’d think that someone like me, who loves TV and writes about it for a living, would have stared at the TV, riveted by last night’s Emmycast. Well, you’d be wrong.

Since I wasn’t assigned to do anything Emmy-related last night, I watched the final regular-season game at Yankee Stadium instead (how optimistic that they still say it’s the “last regular-season game.” It’s the last game, folks, period).

I have a good reason for that, and it comes in the form of a quiz: Quick, who won the major lead acting Emmys last year? Can’t name more than one of them, can you (and, no Alec Baldwin didn’t win last year)? How ’bout from the year before? Didn’t think so. The Emmys have some the most quickly-forgotten awards results, right behind the Tonys and just ahead of the People’s Choice Awards. So it makes me wonder why all the tsuris that occurs leading up to the ceremony even happens.

Read the rest of this entry »