Kelsey Grammer and Lisa Kudrow by Alberto E. Rodriguez/ WireImage.com
Ashlee wasn't the only famous Simpson celebrating last Saturday in L.A.'s San Fernando Valley. The yellow cartoon clan, its creators, and celebrity fans like Lisa Kudrow, Hannah Montana's Mitchell Musso and director Kevin Smith were having a big day of their own at the grand opening of The Simpsons Ride at Universal Studios. "This might be better than winning an Emmy because lots of shows win Emmys every year but not many can say they have a ride based on their show," series creator Matt Groening told TV Guide just after taking the day's first spin with Kudrow, L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Kelsey Grammer. "This ride is the culmination of 20 years of The Simpsons and it has a little bit of everything. It will make you scream. It will make you laugh. It will make you gargle. Even if you have a short attention span, and whether you have never seen the show or you are a fanatic, you will be rewarded on this. " The event began with a yellow carpet, donuts with pink frosting and s...
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Patricia Heaton and Kelsey Grammer in Back to You by Sam Jones/Fox
Having sitcom stalwarts Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton in starring roles wasn't enough for Fox to bring Back to You back to you, the viewer, for a second season. "This was not an easy decision," said Fox Entertainment chief Kevin Reilly. "But with that kind of top-profile talent and...proximity to [American Idol] in the second half of the season, the expectations were higher."Reilly emphasized Fox is working to develop a live-action comedy franchise, but Back To You didn't seem to fit that bill. "The show did not seem to be strking a chord, and in terms of creative direction...it was a pretty mixed bag," he said. The show did go down with a fight. It got off to a strong start when it debuted last fall, attracting more than nine million viewers. Two episodes that followed Idol in April each brought in more than 12 million sets of eyeballs. While that's respectable — it won its timeslot on those two occasions, in terms of viewers and the highly coveted adult 18-49 group —...
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The Simpsons courtesy Fox
The past few weeks have been trying ones for anyone who cares about TV and the potentially devastating impact the ongoing writers’ strike could have on the current season and beyond. Which is why, being a cockeyed optimist and all, I’ve been cautiously thanking the fates ever since hearing that the Writers’ Guild and the producers’ alliance are going back to the negotiating table on Monday. No guarantee, of course, that this will mean a quick end to the standoff that has shut so much production down already. But hey, it’s Thanksgiving week, so let’s stay in a thankful and hopeful mode, OK?In that light, here are 10 more reasons to be thankful about the current week in TV as we head into the Thanksgiving break.1. We’re still in a sweeps month, which has allowed us most nights to live blissfully in denial that a strike is even happening, since new episodes continue to abound (including over most of this long holiday weekend). Depending on what happen...
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The good folks at WURG sure know their slapstick. It's been quite some time since I've seen good physical comedy on television, so what a thrill to see it make a comeback. Good slapstick, good slapstick. Now let's get to the better banter.I'm not sure we've had an episode yet that puts the whole crew in one situation, so this week was a change of pace. Little Gracie's 11th-birthday party was basically over before it started, because the only one of the six adults there who had steeled herself to find and catch the raccoon in the attic was Kelly, and Chuck wasn't about to let her do it. I understood his reasoning (Kelly's done everything for Gracie and Chuck wants to contribute, even if she doesn’t know he's her father), but that part felt a little far-fetched. Chuck strikes me as the kind who'll let anyone take a fall for him — in poor Ryan's case, quite literally — even Kelly, so why take a stand on this thing that he was obviously scared of?Either way, the guys on t...
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There is nothing more terrifying than having your 10-year-old classmates meet one (or both) of your parents, and I know this from experience. I felt for poor Gracie Carr, who so obviously wanted both her bully and her mother to disappear from this class trip to the station. She was probably thinking that the only upside was not having to have class.If only Kelly and Chuck knew that they were probably just making the situation worse for their daughter by wanting to confront the bully, whether through a "conflict resolution" session or the terrifying way that Kelly ended up going about it. (I'm well out of elementary school, but if tomorrow Patricia Heaton said to me, "I will come into your room while you are sleeping and I will rip your head off," I would probably faint.) As soon as Xander Tucker gets over his fear of Kelly, he's going to start bullying Gracie sevenfold. Perhaps by then Chuck will no longer be blinded by Xander's gorgeous, divorced mother and will actually be able to...
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Is it 1994? I think it must be, because lately Tia Carrere is popping up everywhere — well, if not everywhere, at least on two shows I cover, and I only cover three, so if she shows up on Friday Night Lights, I know something's up. Between her hanging out with Larry David (cocreator of Seinfeld, coincidentally on in 1994) and Kelsey Grammer (Frasier, also on in 1994) in recent weeks, I just have to wonder if I've been witness to a time warp. She did a cute job tonight, playing a woman — not a hooker, apparently — who almost managed to seduce Chuck, so it's a shame she was rather underutilized.Of course, had she actually managed to "take a ride on the Chuck wagon," as Montana so delicately put it, we wouldn't have been able to see that Chuck is, at heart, a decent guy. Sure, he only took Ryan out to dinner to prove to Kelly that he didn't donate the rude gene to Gracie, and yes, he did repeatedly try to hurry up and ditch this dinner to be with Carrere's unnamed hottie...
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Fred Willard, Back to You
On Back to You (Wednesdays, 8 pm/ET, Fox), the Kelsey Grammer/Patricia Heaton sitcom vehicle, Fred Willard plays freewheeling sportscaster Marsh McGinley, whose lead foot alarms a coworker tonight when they carpool together. Marsh is the latest in a gallery of grinning goofballs that Willard has given us over the course of a career that spans 40 years.
TV Guide: What do you enjoy about Marsh?Fred Willard: I love it that he's a sports guy and that he says whatever comes to his mind. He doesn't think things through too much. Nothing seems to perturb him. It's pretty much opposite to the way I am in real life — I tend to overthink things.
TV Guide: You have so many TV credits. An
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Well, I'll say one thing: This is the first time in recent memory I've heard the phrase, "Recorded in front of a live studio audience" outside of a 20-year-old rerun. In fact, it made me think I was too hard on last week's episode. It's a retro show in its own way, and perhaps I needed that jolt of perspective that Kelsey Grammer's little intro gave me.The newsroom of WURG certainly was all a-twitter this week. After Chuck overheard some network brass (who were in Pittsburgh for a program at Carnegie Mellon on "The changing face of network news") talking about how he's gone from one of the biggest markets in the country to being Kelly's sidekick — even going so far as to say, "I'd put a gun to my head" — Chuck decides to take the lead story for the day's news: A family that went missing while camping was finally found. To say he steals it out from under Kelly's nose wouldn't even be an overstatement, and he leaves her with the less enviable, "Building on fire!" headline....
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Clunk. That's the sound this episode made as it hit the air. You may be wondering how a show could make a physical clunk sound, but (and imagine some dramatic flare here) they found a way! It's almost as if after last week's great momentum, the powers that be decided that they didn't want to give us too much funny too fast, and so they churned out an awkwardly paced and plotted car boot of an episode.On the upside, Fred Willard's Marsh was on fire tonight, and doing his proprietary shtick that I've loved since Best in Show. From his opening where, after reporting that Jason Shaw, a Steeler, was dating a supermodel, and exclaiming, "Now that's one person I'd like to trade places with for three hours," only to insist on explaining that he meant he wanted to exchange the football player, and very emphatically not the supermodel, I knew he was back in fine form. In fact, Marsh and Gary's shared scenes were, to borrow a term, "the adorablest," of the episode. Gary's robotic delivery in r...
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An alternate title for this episode could have been, "One fish, two fish, overfed fish, fried fish." I doubt PETA will be particularly thrilled with the outcome of the story. Me? I just kind of want to go out for seafood. While the fish-as-child metaphor was not exactly subtle (or original — they did it on Frasier in the episode "Flour Child," leading to Niles' wonderful line, "After all, a real child would have cried before it burst into flames"), it did create an almost Stooge-like backdrop for what was actually a pretty heavy topic: Is it healthy to everyone involved for Gracie to spend time with Chuck? It's obvious they will, and luckily for her, small as she might be, Gracie won't fit in a coffee cup.The writers could have had no idea that a story about tasers would be so relevant when this episode was in development, so this was quite fortuitous timing. I'm glad there's a force out there bringing such screamingly funny physical comedy around once in a while, reminding us...
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