It’s pretty easy to cancel Kath & Kim, Lipstick Jungle or Viva Laughlin.
But what about Life? Or Chuck? Or Without a Trace?
That’s the problem plaguing networks right now — what defines a “hit”? Just 10 years ago, an average show pulled in about 15 million viewers a week. If you got less than 10 million viewers, you were as good as canceled.
Now The Office gets about 8 million and is considered a hit.
It’s a new deal right now, which makes this a tough time to predict what’s going to be back. Now matter how big their ratings are, shows with big price tags — Criminal Minds — are in more trouble than they should be. Shows with big price tags that do not get good ratings — Terminator — are gone.
Good luck trying to make sense of it when the networks announce their 2009-10 schedules in a month.
Even if you’re favorite show doesn’t get picked up, remember — there are potentially good ones to take their place.
You can say there hasn’t been enough coverage of a possible actors’ strike, because people were never talking about it as much as they were talking about the writers’ strike. Now you know why no one was talking about it — because it looks like it was going to be settled no matter what. The news here isn’t the settlement — it’s the contract’s expiration of June 30, 2011 — the same date as the contract for its splinter TV group and the writers. Hollywood may have broken the unions when they were separate, but it’s gonna be tough to break them when they’re all united. It’s clear the unions are setting up for the showdown that ends all showdowns, and in two more years, perhaps we’ll know a little bit more about where the Internet is going and all sides will have some projections. If it’s contentious, watch out — it could be one of the biggest, ugliest labor battles in American history.
Bad news, world — it looks like Zac Efron is going to be around for a while. His first non-High School Musical headlining gig ruled the box office this weekend. Not like there were a lot of choices out there, but it’s still somewhat worrisome that what has to be a glut of people actually decided to go see 17 Again.
Can’t remember the last time a headline on a story has angered me to the point that I actually banged my head off the computer. But guess what? This one did. It is NNNNNOOOOTTTT hard to be a judge on American Idol. It just isn’t. You can dissect it, slice it, analyze it, and if you come to any conclusion other than, “This is the biggest cake job in the history of civilization,” than you’re wrong. And shame on this lady for thinking anything otherwise.
I would not want to be Downey Jr. right now. He’s spending 12 hours a day or so filming Iron Man 2, then he’s gotta go out and promote The Soloist. As soon as he gets done with IM2, then he’s going to go into promoting Sherlock Holmes and he’s probably got a movie lined up at the same time. Now that’s hard work, you stupid Idol judge.
Guess what the upcoming cover story of Entertainment Weekly probably will be! OK, that’s not true since it’s the summer movie preview, but it will be in the News and Notes, for sure. I find this whole thing reprehensible. Utah isn’t the most plugged-in state, it’s true. But c’mon! How did you not hear of this stupid book series before you saw the movie? From your college roommate, no less? A girl in my high school class became a pretty big porn star, and within a week, I’m positive all of the 275 people I graduated with knew about it. A girl I never spoke with that graduated two years ahead of me in college was on a season of Survivor — and everyone knew about it. If any of my college roommates — two of whom I have no possible way of contacting right now — did something like write a multi-million dollar book franchise, I’d know about it. For this woman to somehow say the idea was hers but she didn’t know about it until the movie came out is preposterous.
If you’ve always wanted to make your own Simpsons couch gag — and haven’t we all? — then you’re in luck, because to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the show, you actually can do it. My idea would be Homer finding Peter Griffin sitting in his seat, so he picks up the couch, dumps Peter off and pounds him over the head with the couch. The end.
