Chris Matthews by Lisa Berg/NBC
Chris Matthews recently celebrated his 10th year as the host of MSNBC's Hardball, and he spent a few decades in politics before that tenure. He's distilled his observations into a new Random House book, Life's a Campaign: What Politics Has Taught Me About Friendship, Rivalry, Reputation and Success. Ah, but can politics teach you how to handle Daily Show host Jon Stewart when he calls your book "sad," as he did when Matthews recently appeared to get a plug? Matthews tells The Biz how he survived what he called "the worst interview I've ever had in my life."TVGuide.com: What made you think your experience in politics would make a good advice book?Chris Matthews: It's what I know. You write what you know. I've spent 36 years watching politicians, and I've learned the traits that work with people. The absence of those traits usually suggests the failure of a career. I'm talking about people who get elected time and time again and succeed in American politics: Generally they have a set ...
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The ApprenticeFor supposedly smart financial wizards, the Apprentice candidates sure did some dumb things this week. Honestly, it's hard to pick out the worst idea of the bunch. Was it Team Gold Rush planning an entire event to promote the Chevy Tahoe without a theme? Maybe it was Synergy deciding to have a Dick Cheney-style skeet shoot in a public park. No, then it had to be Lenny, the Mad Russian, not renting a generator to run a revolving stage, right? (His response, "It's not my problem," was priceless. Who's problem was it, exactly?) How about Tarek digging post holes so the Chevy-dealership guys could pretend to play golf on a dirt track? For her part, Charmaine hired a foulmouthed comedienne for the event, then proceeded to pay
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Jon Stewart did his best, but it wasn't good enough. There are limitations in being a clever, self-deprecating master of irony, when what the job of Oscar host truly demands is being a showman. Which Stewart would probably be the first to admit he's not.
His humor, politically barbed but never obnoxious, was possibly a bit too sophisticated for that cavernous room. But what really defeated him, as it has almost every modern-day Oscar host except for Billy Crystal, is the deadly monotony of the Oscar show itself. What a fossiled relic. The Oscar broadcast is a classy but inert dinosaur, and this year's was more forgettable than most.
Stewart gamely tried to deflate the evening's pomposity whenever he could — after a montage on message movies, he quipped, "and none of these issues were ever a problem again" — but still, we had to sit through it all anyway.
Even with a last-minute shocker, as Crash
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Ray Wise
Tonight's two-hour 24 "event" (beginning at 8 pm/ET on Fox) will host a parade of faces new and familiar, including Elisha Cuthbert's return as Jack's beleaguered daughter and the debut of C. Thomas Howell as Kim's (overdue, if you ask me) therapist. The evening also introduces us to Vice President Hal Gardner, who has been choicely cast with Ray Wise, a star of the Oscar-nominated Good Night, and Good Luck and who is familiar to TV fans as Twin Peaks' very bad dad, Leland Palmer. TVGuide.com welcomed the chance to ask Wise about his 24 VP, working with George Clooney
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Ray Wise
Monday's two-hour 24 "event" (beginning at 8 pm/ET on Fox) will host a parade of faces new and familiar, including Elisha Cuthbert's return as Jack's beleaguered daughter and the debut of C. Thomas Howell as Kim's (overdue, if you ask me) therapist. The evening also introduces us to Vice President Hal Gardner, who has been choicely cast with Ray Wise, a star of the Oscar-nominated Good Night, and Good Luck and who is familiar to TV fans as Twin Peaks' very bad dad, Leland Palmer. TVGuide.com welcomed the chance to ask Wise about his 24 VP, working with George Clooney
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In an exclusive Fox News Channel interview that aired Wednesday, Vice President Dick Cheney broke his silence about the accidental Feb. 11 shooting of his hunting buddy, Harry Whittington. As part of the sit-down, Cheney said that it made "good sense" for him to let the hunting-site owner break the news via a local Corpus Christi newspaper, rather than have the White House brief the nation. Good call. It really proved to be a "B" story, after all.
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For those like me who have an early bedtime, here's a recap of the best potshots taken at Vice President Dick Cheney, who errantly filled hunting buddy Harry Whittington with buckshot on Saturday. David Letterman: "The sad part is that before the trip, Donald Rumsfeld denied the guy's request for body armor." Jay Leno: "When people found out he shot a lawyer, his popularity [rose] to 92 percent." And Jon Stewart, with my fave: "Moms, dads, I can't emphasize this enough. Do not let your kids go on hunting trips with the vice president. I don't care what kind of lucrative contracts they're trying to land or energy regulations they're trying to get lifted, it's just not worth it."
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