Pilots Gone Wild

It's not often one gets to say it, but VH1 stole my idea.

Kinda.

I won't get into the specifics of my idea (patent pending), but the premise of Acceptable.TV is pretty good: 5 shows crammed into a half hour show. There's some interactivity involved too, which is less interesting, but the idea of short shows that cycle every week is very appealing.

For one thing, it keeps things fresh. And sketches like "Operation Kitten Calendar" (The Apprentice, but instead of business, contestants compete in the art of kitten photography) are if not inspired, entertaining.

But it also allows for dead weight to drop away. How often have we seen shows stick around only because there's not enough reality shows waiting in the wings to take their place (I'm looking at you , Yes Dear)? This way, crap goes away and something else takes its place. Now more than likely, it's stunningly crappy. But them's the breaks--I'd rather have something that might be good than something I know is terrible.

So a tip of the hat to VH1: you've figured out that Americans have short attention spans and bad taste in television. You're way ahead of the game.

.5hr news hr

For good reason, I'm tough on FoxNews. I was especially hard on The Half Hour News Hour (HHNH) when it was on. I believe I referred to it as "a crime against comedy".

Now, generally when things are pitched as "Just like X, but for Y!", danger is ahead. HHNH was supposed to be "The Daily Show, but for conservatives". Instead, it was more like "A bludgeon to the head, but for idiots!". Look, I'm sure there are funny conservatives out there. South Park has some nice libertarian strands to it. Drew Carey is supposed to be a raging Republican. Dennis Miller's on Fox, and he was pretty dang funny in 1991. But if your punch line is "Vice President Ann Coulter", that's not funny. It's not even offensive. It's just offensively unfunny.

HHNH is so historically pungent, it's probably worth about 6 posts (heck, it managed to get me back to the blog). But it makes its appearance in TayVay for coming back with new episodes. Yes, after two epic stinkers, FNC picked it up for a 13 episode run, the first of which was last night (a Saturday).

The scheduling alone is genius. Really. Think about it, this is a show with no audience AT ALL. Liberals and apolitcal people aren't going to watch because all it does is make jokes written by 4th graders. Conservatives aren't going to watch because they have other, more "Foxy" shows (i.e. Hannity & Idiot) to watch. So it pretty much has to go on a weekend night.

BUT if you put it on when no one is watching, it can just soak up the ratings from people who have FNC on in the background. So while the audience will only be a few hundred thousand, it'll have a like 6 share because there's nothing else on. I call this the Crossing Jordan effect. So it's fantastic for people like Rush Limbaugh who want to talk up how funny and great conservatives are ("Just look at the ratings!") while avoiding the reality that the show is putrid.

But alas, I am too harsh. For the first time, HHNH had a decent joke, so kudos. I'm not saying I laughed, but lines like "The queen was in town this week with a net worth of about 800 million. Upon hearing this, she was immediately hit on by John Kerry" show a lot more thought than the rest of the show.

In other news, the female anchor Jennifer Robertson seems like she could be really, really good. Like if you were a director and you needed someone to look constipated for a solid 22 minutes, but still deliver stale jokes. Or if you had a character who had a colostomy, and whose bag was full but had a leak in it, so the character knows she needs to take care of her crap, but she has a job to do, dammit. Jenn would be awesome for that.