Just a thought: If the strike lasts much longer, do you think CBS' Big Brother house has room for all of us? I joke, of course, but I also fear that if things don't get resolved soon, it's going to be a long, cold winter indeed for fans of good old everyday regular non-reality TV.In the last few days, we’ve seen cliff-hanger episodes of Desperate Housewives and Heroes that felt like season finales, and for all we know, that’s what they might be, if production doesn’t resume early in the new year for the back half of their seasons. For the first month of the writers’ strike, viewers didn’t feel much pain (except for fans of late-night comedy, the first casualty) because we were in a sweeps month chock-full of original episodes. Life went on as usual. That’s about to end. There are scattered episodes of many series yet to air in December, and a few leftovers for early 2008. But come the new year, the TV landscape’s going to start looking mighty diffe...
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Question: I enjoyed both Extreme Makeover and The Swan. Why are they no longer on the air?
Answer: The trend in reality moved away from these sorts of physical makeover shows, although ABC has ordered four special editions of Makeover to air in the future. (When Extreme Makeover: Home Edition exploded in the ratings, ABC went with the numbers.) As for The Swan — and I don't mean to be insulting — but even the bottom-feeders in Fox's reality division must have realized they couldn't milk this ghastly freak show more than twice. (Second time around, the curiosity factor had ebbed, thankfully.)
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(Warning: Do not read if you haven't watched the Shield finale and intend to do so.)
Easily the most shattering episode of this TV week came from a show that has delivered the goods for the last 11 hours of what has been arguably The Shield's best season yet.
I'm talking about the cliff-hanger finale of The Shield's split season (10 more episodes are scheduled to air early next year), which really seems to me more like a season finale. The producers have yet to declare the back half of this fifth season The Shield's series finale, but given the enormity of what transpired in this latest episode, my gut tells me that the best creative decision would be for them to wrap the show in these next 10 episodes and go out on a dramatic high.
The dramatic stakes have rarely been more intense as poor Lem (the excellent Kenneth Johnson
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Question: With all this talk about Fox's schedule and how there isn't enough room for The Simple Life to return and how Prison Break won't return until May, don't you think it's time Fox got with the program and became the real fourth network, after 18 years (truly an appropriate age to finally grow up and be an adult). Shouldn't the network move the local 10 pm/ET news to 11 to make way for original programming?
Answer: This question has come up a lot lately, especially in the wake of the Prison Break situation, so this is a good time to remind everyone once again of the "business" side of the TV equation. In Fox's early days, it programmed a limited number of hours for regulatory reasons (most of which no longer exist). But even if Fox desired to program a 22-hour weekly schedule, which many months of the year (when American Idol is absent, say) would seem to be more than this network of The Swan, Stacked and Killer Instinct could handle, it's a fact that Fox's local affiliates ...
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If you can't stand reality shows then this one is probably akin to one of Dante's circles of Hell. But for unscripted-TV fans this is the equivalent of giving a junkie crack. The show combines reality "stars" from nearly every show, like Joe Schmo, The Amazing Race, Survivor and even The Swan. While it's missing the charm of the original '70s series — less hair flipping makes a big difference — it still includes all the silly games like the dunk tank and the obstacle course. Just good old-fashioned fun. And I think that the cast members of the Real World/Road Rules Challenge, like Mike the Miz and Coral, have an advantage because they've been doing contests like this for years on MTV. But the real problem with this show is the fact that teams have to vote to evict one of their players each week. Because fan favorites like Charla and Chip's wife, Kim, are nice compared to the brute force of so
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