The 30 Rock backlash begins

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 11:53 AM - 20 Comments

30 Rock is starting to get some critical pushback these days. It didn’t really deserve its third Emmy (I would say it was the third-best of the nominated shows, personally), and its extreme unevenness — great episodes alternating with weak ones, bad jokes and good jokes bouncing up against each other in the same scene — is getting out of hand. As the show begins what looks to be an equally uneven fourth season, some critics are saying not that it isn’t a good show (it is good) but that it falls short of greatness.

- Alan Sepinwall says that this season, the rapidly-improving Parks and Recreation is better than 30 Rock, and

- Todd at the AV Club fears that the show is showing signs of decline, and compares it to another guest-star-ridden sitcom with weakly-defined characters, Will and Grace. (By the way, the AV Club comment section is, for the most part, distinctly unhelpful and full of people who are easily offended by any criticism of a show they like or, worse, good words for anything they consider uncool. It almost makes me glad to have few comments on most of my posts.)

Anyway, my own view on 30 Rock is that it has never been a truly great show (though it has been a very good one, and that’s enough), but it’s probably as good as it’s ever going to be. The show really only has two fully effective characters, Jack and Liz, mostly because they have the only fully developed relationship on the show, and good comedy depends on effective character relationships. (The writers tried to come up with a similar relationship f or Tracy and Kenneth, but they really didn’t make it.) The show is totally dependent on the jokes; a good episode is one where a lot of jokes land. Two good characters, some good jokes, and some fun satirical shots is enough for an entertaining show; I think that a show needs to offer more than that to be genuinely great.

But remember, 30 Rock is really the salvaged wreckage of a weak premise. Faced with an idea that wasn’t working and was too close to another then-new show, Studio 60, Fey and the other writers decided to solve the problem by pumping the show full of jokes, distracting attention from the fact that their original premise was not working for them. By the end of the first season, they had the problems worked out and had re-tooled the premise, but all the characters were left over from that original premise, and most of them had no point to their existence. If the show were to try, now, to turn Pete or Jenna into interesting comic characters, it would probably fail: not only are these characters not strong enough to support any exploration, but the writers committed themselves to a never-ending cascade of crazy jokes, and they can’t thin out the joke rate for the sake of some character development that wouldn’t work anyway. The high joke-per-page rate is the premise of 30 Rock by now; it’s Family Guy with better writers, or a middle-period episode of Night Court without the corny serious bits at the end. There’s nothing really wrong with that. It just means that it will always be mostly a showcase for joke-writing skill. It’s a first-rate showcase, and has also allowed Fey to make some interesting points about corporate life and TV that most shows wouldn’t make; to become a genuine ensemble show about more than two actual humans (and there are some episodes where Liz is so insane that Jack becomes the only human) it would have to re-tool itself again, and it’s not going to (shouldn’t!) do that.

The problems 30 Rock has had in developing the non Liz/Jack characters (if you see them as problems; I do, but not everyone needs to) may be exacerbated by something that’s inherent in the modern single-camera filming setup. Namely, a lot of the actors don’t spend a whole lot of time working together. One-camera film isn’t usually about forming an ensemble, unless the director has enough clout to demand a lot of advance rehearsal. Scenes are shot in bits and pieces, which is great if you’re looking to get big-name guest stars — who can work one day on an episode, instead of being there for the whole week — but not great if the writers are trying to pick up clues about which characters work best together, or learn new things about the characters from their interactions on the set. One reason Jack and Liz have the best relationship on the show may simply be that they have frequent scenes together, really on the set at the same time interacting, in every episode.

The Office has formed a genuine ensemble where any character can get a laugh, and I don’t think that’s unrelated to the fact that due to the documentary format, the show actually requires the cast to be on the set together more than most such shows. (The Office people can’t even leave the set during other people’s scenes, because they have to be at their desks in the background; only the writer-actors, who sit in the back, get to skip scenes.) As it is, Liz and Jack are not merely the only great characters, but the only ones who have genuine chemistry. On a great ensemble show, in the words of the producers of NewsRadio, “every character had a different relationship with every other character.” 30 Rock has one great relationship, a few decent ones, and that’s enough for a good show. Great, maybe not.

Pepsi apologizes for iPhone app

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 11:31 AM - 4 Comments

An iPhone application to promote Pepsi’s Amp Energy drink is creating a stir on Twitter, where users have labeled it sexist. The app is meant to help men with dating and suggests pickup lines for 24 types of women, putting them into categories with names like “nerd,” “cougar,” and “treehugger.” “Our app tried 2 show the humorous lengths guys go 2 pick up women,” the company posted to its Twitter account. “We apologise if it’s in bad taste & appreciate your feedback.” A spokesperson for the company said it is considering pulling the app, but hasn’t made a final decision.

The Guardian

The other e-health scandal

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 11:30 AM - 12 Comments

Another province, another scandal breaking around government attempts to create a system of electronic health-care records. Two senior B.C. health bureaucrats are on the hot seat after a stunning series of revelations suggesting they and their family members have been taking favours from a Fraser Valley doctor selling software to health authorities. Police are also investigating allegations the civil servants were planning to take cash kickbacks from the physician. E-health: West Coast edition features many of the issues at the centre of the Ontario scandal. What it lacks is the element of a nervous premier trying to get ahead of the bad news. Indeed, Gordon Campbell’s government seemed to be hoping the whole ugly business would go away after the press got a whiff of it earlier in the summer. Instead, the RCMP read about it in the papers and decided to investigate. Uh oh.

The Province

Berlin brothel cuts rates for environmentally conscious clients

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 11:28 AM - 1 Comment

In the aftermath of the economic crisis, a Berlin brothel has come up with a novel way to meet its cash-strapped clients’ needs—and do its part for the environment at the same time. The Maison d’Envie, located in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg, a Green party stronghold, is offering discounts to clients who get there by bicycle or public transit. According to Regina Götz, who runs the brothel, the scheme has so far been successful: about 10 per cent of customers have presented their bike helmets or transit passes to get a five-euro (CAD$7.70) break on services, which normally cost 30 euros for 15 minutes.

The Telegraph

Nostalgia

By Paul Wells - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 11:23 AM - 109 Comments

From May: Exclusive: The Liberal Plan to Respond to the Harper Ads. A highlight:

The Conservative advertising campaign against Michael Ignatieff has spurred the federal Liberals to sharply accelerate their fundraising activity so they can pay for a “focused response to the personal attacks” on the new leader, Maclean’s has learned. The Liberals are rushing ahead with a major change to the party’s organization, which only two weeks ago they had planned for the autumn, so they can be ready for a much more robust summer of activity. Emergency meetings of the Liberals’ various governing bodies are underway, with more planned for next week. The goal: a $25 million annual war chest and a vastly expanded grassroots organization to pay for it.

All this excitement was designed to allow a “focused response” to the Conservative “Just Visiting” ad campaign, then 10 days old, and a “much more robust summer of activity.” The average of public election polls in April put the Liberals two points up on the Conservatives. Since then there has been about a 17-point swing to the Conservatives.

Done messing yet?

Where To See It…

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 11:13 AM - 2 Comments

By the way, the Python Documentary on IFC will not be shown on IFC Canada, but on Bravo (not the U.S. version of Bravo, the Canadian version) starting October 24 at 9:00 p.m.

You can't keep a good vampire down

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

Everybody and his brother seems to have become involved in the vampire writing business, one of the most lucrative genres around, or at least, that is, everybody and his great-grandnephew. John Polidori may have kicked off the bloodsucker craze when he wrote Vampyre in 1816, but it was Bram Stoker who gave it its enduring imagery, rules of engagement and iconic figure with Dracula in 1897. Now Stoker’s descendent Dacre Stoker, along with co-author Ian Holt, a Dracula-obsessed screenwriter, has picked up the tale in Dracula: the Un-Dead. The younger Stoker is a Montreal native—one of Bram’s brothers immigrated to Canada in 1910—and a godson of the other famous Stoker, H.G. Dacre Stoker, who won a DSO for his extraordinary submarine actions at Gallipoli in the Great War and later became a prominent actor.

In Dacre’s sequel, the story is set in 1912, the last year of Bram’s life, when the older Stoker—a theatre manager when he wasn’t writing penny dreadfuls—is attempting to adapt Dracula for the London stage. With a nice meta-fictional touch, Dacre has the original “characters” find themselves in gruesome peril. (That, naturally enough, astonishes Stoker, who thought they had all been invented by the crazy old man in the pub who told him the tale in the first place.) They have all been scarred by their first battle with the Count decades before: Van Helsing, now an old man, lives in the past; John Seward is a morphine addict; the Harkers’ marriage is troubled by secrets they have kept from their son Quincy (the main protagonist of the sequel). Now they learn that the evil is stirring once again.

The entire combination works like a charm, propelled by a fast-paced narrative (airplanes! the Titanic!) that ramps up the sex and gore—this is a novel that makes passing reference to “the intoxicating aroma of seared human flesh”—to levels Bram’s sublimated Victorian prose couldn’t even hint at. Publisher Penguin has certainly got into the spirit of it, putting on its own one-night stage show at Toronto’s Bathurst Theatre. In costumes by award-winning designer Alex Amini, 18 actors will meta-dramatize the meta-fiction. And for Halloween, conveniently close to publication date, the publisher hooks up with Canadian Blood Services for a Dracula Blood Drive. All good, clean, bloody fun.

A powerful motivation to hand-wash: shame

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 10:55 AM - 3 Comments

The BBC reports that people are more likely to wash their hands once they’ve been shamed into it, according to new research from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Using sensors, the team measured people’s reactions to hygiene messages in various service station toilets, and found the one that produced the highest rate of handwashing was, “Is the person next to you washing with soap?” Other messages included “Water doesn’t kill germs, soap does” and “Don’t be a dirty soap dodger,” which flashed onto LED screens near the entrance of the bathroom. Of the 250,000 people counted using the toilets, whose use of soap was monitored by sensors, only 32 per cent of men washed their hands with soap, while 64 per cent of women did. Hand-washing, according to the American Journal of Public Health, is the best way to stop the spread of disease, and can help stop transmission of deadly illnesses like diarrhoeal disease and flu, as well as infections like Clostridium difficile.

BBC News

The geography of unemployment

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 10:45 AM - 1 Comment

The past seven years have been an economic and employment roller coaster, as illustrated in this time-lapse map of job losses and gains in 20 Canadian and 100 American centres. The map—developed by MITACS, a national research network focused on connecting university researchers and private and public partners—is powerful proof that all economics, like all politics, are local. Watch the expanding, contracting and ever-shifting blue dots for employment gains, and red dots for job losses. It begins in August 2001-2002, when the U.S. was in a dot-com bust and a post-9/11 recession and Canada was growing jobs. Enjoy while it lasts the explosion of blue across the continent—the good times that we thought wouldn’t end. Pay attention to the Louisiana of 2005 and the red blot of unemployment that blooms like a mushroom cloud after Hurricane Katrina. In retrospect, it seems a portent of the economic disaster to come. “Between 2007 and 2009, the map turns from blue to red as almost every city was swept up in the great recession,” says Prof. Peter V. Hall, of the Urban Studies Program at Simon Fraser University.

MITACS

Flu shots: coming to a place near you

By Cathy Gulli and Tom Henheffer - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 10:45 AM - 23 Comments

Deciding whether or not to get the flu shot is never easy—only one in three Canadians do each year. With the H1N1 vaccine being rolled out in a few weeks, the decision is even tougher. In the midst of mixed messages about who needs which shot and when, the majority of Canadians are planning to skip the vaccine altogether. Complicating matters is an unpublished report revealing that among people who received the seasonal flu shot, their chances of contracting H1N1 are 1.5 to two times higher. That research, coupled with a growing consensus that H1N1 will be more prevalent this fall and winter than the seasonal flu, has prompted many provinces to revamp their vaccine schedules. Below, Maclean’s gathers the details from each provincial government. Additional information is available from the Public Health Agency of Canada.

Newfoundland
Nova Scotia
Prince Edward Island
New Brunswick
Quebec
Ontario
Manitoba
Saskatchewan
Alberta
British Columbia
Yukon
Northwest Territories
Nunavut

RELATED ARTICLE:
Swine flu fiasco — Everyone needs the H1N1 vaccine. Few plan to get it. What you need to know. What you need to do.

He gets by with a little help from his friends

By Kenneth Whyte - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 10:40 AM - 52 Comments

Q: I read somewhere that when you were a young musician you had a problem with your hands shaking. When you walked out on stage last Saturday at the National Arts Centre with Yo-Yo Ma and a big audience, were you a little bit unsteady?

A: Well, can I tell you the whole story? It’s true I had that problem when I was young. I took piano for 10 years. I got my Grade 9 Royal Conservatory. I had a bit of talent but never enough to think about it professionally. My big problem was that, while I didn’t appear nervous, my hands shook, which obviously was fatal for any kind of pianist. I never did that well on my exams for that reason. Indirectly, this led to where I am now because at a very early age, almost from the first time I ever gave a public speech at school, I spoke without notes so nobody would notice I was nervous.

Q: You just kept your hands at your side or in your pockets or something?

A: Yeah. Or just put them on the podium. They didn’t shake so bad that you’d notice it unless I was holding papers or something. So that was one fear. I haven’t performed music in front of a crowd since I was probably 11 years old, so I was worried, “Jeez, will this come back? Will I get this shaking?” But no. I mean, I was nervous, don’t get me wrong, but I didn’t have any hand shakes. I was just a bit stiff. Now, the band had told me—when we were rehearsing, they said, “Look, if at any point you get uneasy about the piano part, or your hands, just sing. Nobody’s going to care, just sing.” So that was the backup plan. But no, in the end my hands were okay. Continue…

The real problem in Iran

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 10:40 AM - 10 Comments

In the four months since Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole the June 12 presidential election, thousands of Iranian opposition supporters have disappeared into the maw of Iranian prisons, where many have been beaten and raped. Among these uncounted victims, the detention of three young brothers is particularly significant. Mohammad Mahdi Montazeri, Sadegh Montazeri, and Mohammad Ali Montazeri were detained in the holy city of Qom last month. None is said to be politically active. But they are all grandsons of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri.

Hossein Ali Montazeri, 87, was a leader of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and was once the designated successor to the Islamic Republic’s founding supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Montazeri clashed with Khomeini in 1989 over abuses committed by the government, particularly the execution of the 13-year-old daughter of a colleague who was suspected of belonging to an opposition group. He’s been a firm government critic ever since, but has remained politically powerful. Despite a period of house arrest from 1997 to 2003, his influence and prestige among Iran’s most senior clerics afforded him some protection. Continue…

Separated at birth?

By Paul Wells - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 10:36 AM - 89 Comments

Voter support for the Liberal Party of Canada in today’s Ekos/CBC Poll: 25.5% (link)

Popular vote for the Canadian Alliance in the 2000 Canadian general election: 25.5% (link)

Mitchel Raphael on why the PM wanted his guests to leave

By Mitchel Raphael - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments

John Baird wondered about the PM’s outfit
Before Stephen Harper surprised the audience at the National Arts Centre’s gala fundraiser by playing the piano and singing a Beatles song, he was enjoying drinks at 24 Sussex with his wife, Laureen Harper, Transport Minister John Baird, and the PM’s former head of communications Sandra Buckler. Baird and Buckler didn’t know the PM was attending the gala, let alone that he would be performing. Ironically, notes Mrs. Harper, while at the house “my husband was playing the piano—dressed in black like Johnny Cash—and John said to Sandra, ‘He really should play at one of these events.’ Sandra agreed and it was the toughest moment of my life to keep my mouth shut.” Baird did think it was odd that the PM was all in black and that he at one point opened the door himself and told them all to get going, pretending he was staying behind. Baird tried to say something like “We aren’t in a rush at all.” As they left 24 Sussex, Mrs. Harper spotted the van that had the band in it. The musicians and PM had it planned so that they’d all head over together, undercover, for the surprise.

RELATED ARTICLES:
Stephen Harper gets a little help from his friend, Yo-Yo Ma — Video
Canada’s unlikeliest rock star — Stephen Harper may not want to quit his day job. But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t
Playing against type — Was this a fluke, or the dawn of an era of a more human, more likeable Harper?
He gets by with a little help from his friends — Stephen Harper talks with Maclean’s Editor-in-Chief Kenneth Whyte about the Beatles, stage fright and his musical debut
He looks so human. Encore, encore! — One small step for Stephen Harper, one giant leap for the political strategist in us all

U.S. skimps on the water
Toronto Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett testified in front of the U.S. Senate. She was there to talk about why in Canada, in her words, “we pay less [for health care], live longer, and don’t have as many infants die in their first year of life.” The experience wasn’t quite like testifying in front of a Canadian Senate committee, she says. For example, in the U.S., Bennett was given a small bottle of water. In Canada there are glasses and pitchers. “I’m a big water drinker,” noted Bennett, who had to pace her sipping during her testimony because of the small amount made available. She also periodically forgot to turn her microphone on and off. In Canada, it’s someone else’s job to turn mikes on and off during committee hearings. Bennett had to explain to the Americans that Canada has a publicly funded health insurance system “and not socialized medicine—[that] as a family doctor I was not a public servant.” After testifying, she was taken to the U.S. Senate dining room for lunch, where she had some “pretty delicious crab cakes.” Continue…

He looks so human. Encore, encore!

By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 10:00 AM - 5 Comments

Enjoyable though it was, Stephen Harper’s performance of a Beatles song at a ritzy Ottawa gala may wind up being a moment we come to regret. It raised the stakes to the point that all future political photo ops will require, at minimum, a pair of hip-hugging satin trousers and a “surprise” appearance during Tango Night on So You Think You Can Dance. Be warned: even as you read these words, Jack Layton is grooming his chest hair and thinking, “Right foot back, left foot pass—and then I rip open my sequined blouse.”

The “humanization” of Stephen Harper has been almost a decade in the making, and frankly it’s a relief to finally see some progress. There have been so many failures along the way—when he hired that lady to pick out his ties, when he sent his kids off to school with a firm handshake, when he publicly devoured the flesh of the weak (I’m paraphrasing). No matter how many times he pretended to write a book about hockey, he just couldn’t connect with the common man. Continue…

Three Things

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 9:59 AM - 10 Comments

1. I saw Dead Snow last night. Hard to resist a movie about Norwegian med students getting hunted by Nazi zombies. It was ok, but it couldn’t decide what sort of movie it wanted to be. It started out as a Scream-ish ironic horror flick (complete with one character pointing out that lots of horror movies start with young people going to a cabin in the mountains). Then it turned into a Werewolf-in-London-style horror comedy, which is very hard to do well. Then the last twenty minutes was an ultra-slapstick bloodbath, like Shawn of the Dead.

I didn’t love it, but the crowd gave it a big cheer at the end. It’s on again tonight at the Mayfair.

2. Authenticity watch? Gunfire  outside a Jay-Z concert in Edmonton

3. Authenticity watch: The French.

The WSJ checks in with the latest from France’s General Commission of Terminology and Neology, which is always good for insight into just how excellent the French are. This story focuses on the Commission’s efforts to keep up with the internet, and find approved translations of terms such as “cloud computing”.

After 18 months, the 20-person team came up with “informatique en nuage,” but it was rejected by the Commission. So they’ll go back to the drawing board. Read the whole piece.

EKOS Weekly: Tories just an armful of oversized novelty cheques away from the big M?(!)

By kadyomalley - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 9:44 AM - 86 Comments

Happy EKOSDay, everyone!

Conservatives: 40.7 (+1.0)
Liberals: 25.5 (-0.2)
NDP: 14.3 (-0.9)
Green: 10.5 (+0.8)
Bloc Quebecois: 36.1 (-2.6)
Undecided: 17.9 (+3.4)

Conservatives up! Liberals down (see, Colleague Wells told you they could find a different direction to take, all you the-only-way-left-is-uppers)! NDP, Bloc Quebecois even down-ier, although it’s worth noting that all changes are within the magical 2.1 margin of error, which is, incidentally, a tiny bit higher than usual for EKOS. That could be partly due to the growing population of Undecideds that was uncovered by this week’s surveyors; at this rate, if that number keeps rising, they may soon be able to describe themselves as ‘legion’. Or ‘destroyer of worlds’. Really, whatever works for them.

Anyway, as usual, the national numbers don’t tell us much about what’s really going on, since it’s all about the regions. So, what do the data tables reveal?

First,  the regionals:
Continue…

Bestsellers

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles (week of October 13th, 2009)

Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

‘Chinatown’ comes back to haunt him

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

If you’ve never seen Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, and still intend to, be warned that this piece begins with a spoiler. It’s the famous scene in which Jake Gittes, the private eye played by Jack Nicholson, bullies the mysterious Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) into revealing that she conceived her daughter with her father. Dunaway’s lines, punctuated by Nicholson’s slaps—“She’s my daughter . . . she’s my sister”—are so familiar they’ve become the stuff of parody. But the most intriguing moment occurs just after, when Gittes turns to her and says, “He raped you?” Sobbing, she looks up at him, stricken by shame, then shakes her head, unable to answer.

This haunting exchange, which was not part of Robert Towne’s original screenplay, deepens the horror of a sexual crime with a creepy undercurrent of complicity. And that takes on a bizarre resonance in light of the current debate about rape, retribution and Roman Polanski. Three decades after Polanski fled America, convicted of having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl, his past has caught up with him. After a marathon game of cat and mouse, the Los Angeles district attorney’s office finally has him cornered and awaiting extradition—thanks to Swiss police, who nabbed him at Zurich Airport as he arrived to accept a lifetime achievement award from a film festival. Continue…

'A civilian, development, humanitarian mission'

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 8:55 AM - 1 Comment

Saturday. The Conservative government intends to keep some Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan in a non-combat role beyond Parliament’s 2011 end-date for the military mission, CBC News has learned. Dimitri Soudas, a spokesman for the Prime Minister’s Office, told CBC News there will be Canadian troops in Afghanistan after 2011, though “exponentially fewer.” ”I would caution you against saying dozens or hundreds or a thousand, there will be exponentially fewer,” Soudas said. “Whether there’s 20 or 60 or 80 or 100, they will not be conducting combat operations.”

Wednesday. Prime Minister Stephen Harper sought Wednesday to clear up any confusion about Canada’s role in Afghanistan after 2011, saying the military mission to the strife-torn country would end as planned by that date and be replaced by a civilian operation. ”We are very much planning to have the military mission end in 2011,” Harper said in an interview with Global News in Edmonton. Asked directly if there would be a role for soldiers after 2011 or whether they would be pulled out, Harper said: “The plan is to move to a civilian, development, humanitarian mission.”

Target: Chicago

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 8:40 AM - 5 Comments

Move over, San Francisco, there’s a new town for conservatives to hate: Chicago. President Obama’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to get the 2016 Olympics for his hometown has caused an explosion of anti-Chicago commentary from U.S. conservatives, while John Boehner, the leader of the Republicans in Congress, played to his base by saying that Obama seemed to be forgetting that “he’s the President of the United States, not the mayor of Chicago.” Conservatives still find time to attack Hollywood for defending Roman Polanski, or New York for just being New York, but their heart isn’t in it these days. The new enemy is Chicago, which, as Fox News’s Sean Hannity put it, may not be “a city where we want the Olympics taking place.”

These pundits weren’t just arguing that, as Michelle Malkin said on Fox News, Obama’s quest for the Olympics was “all about paying back” his Chicago “cronies.” They argued that the city itself is the violent epitome of liberalism gone wrong. A typical headline on Matt Drudge’s popular conservative website read “CHICAGOLAND: Another boy critically beaten: ‘Blood all over street.’ ” Malkin posted a video of a gang war among mostly African-American teenagers in Chicago, and warned that “Community organizing has not stopped Chicago’s teen violence epidemic. The Olympics will not solve this long-festering problem, either.” The message is that Democratic liberal politics have turned Chicago into hell on earth. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Fred Siegel summed up the current view of Chicago when he described it as a “mix of black-nationalist, gentry-liberal, machine- and mob-connected politics.” Continue…

The story behind the new Erica

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 8:20 AM - 2 Comments

It used to be hard to find a TV show that didn’t follow a strict formula, but now it’s getting harder to find one that does. Being Erica (airing on the CBC Tuesdays at 9 p.m.) began last year as a fantasy-comedy-drama in which the depressed, lonely title character (Erin Karpluk) goes to a mysterious therapist, Dr. Tom (Michael Riley), who sends her back in time to learn from her past mistakes. But when it returned for a second season last month, Erica was no longer lonely or depressed, and she spent the season premiere helping Dr. Tom instead of the other way round. Jana Sinyor, who created Being Erica, says that her heroine has changed so much that “the way she acted in the first episode of season two was quite an evolution. She would have acted quite differently in the pilot.” Today’s shows don’t wait until late in the run to make changes; writers want to create a world and then, as Sinyor puts it, “blow the world up a little bit.”

The original concept of the show was that Erica was unemployed and had a screwed-up romantic life, but now she has a good job and a steady boyfriend. The early episodes had her finding out why her life turned out so badly. Now she’s learning how to improve her seemingly perfect life, or helping others solve their problems. Aaron Martin, who executive-produces the show with Sinyor, explains that this season will be “focusing more on secondary characters and their role in Erica’s life.” Continue…

NFL Picks Week 6: Not above putting Jessica Simpson in title to increase traffic

By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 6:11 AM - 6 Comments

Scott Feschuk Last week: 8-6 Season: 39-37

Scott Reid Last week: 8-6 Season: 44-32

Ah, week six of the NFL season – the pivotal 35.294% mark of the long gridiron campaign. The cream is rising to the top. The wheat is being separated from the chaff. And the “inspirational” bulletin board material in the Rams locker room consists of brochures for January cruises.

K.C. (plus 6.5) at Washington

Feschuk: Over the last four weeks, the Redskins have played the Rams, Lions, Bucs and Panthers (aka the Four Horsemen of the Spazocalypse). Combined, those teams have a record of 2-17. Against which team did both those wins come? Ladies and gentlemen, your 2009 Washington Redskins! Running back Rock Cartwright (I believe he graduated from Bedrock U) put it this way after losing to Carolina: “You can’t cry over spoiled milk.” Yes, Redskins fans, it’s gotten this bad: your team can’t even succeed in executing the fundamentals of sports clichés. Pick: K.C.

Reid: This was all so predictable. Not only could Zorn not defeat Kirk, he just stood by and watched Continue…

For Those Who Cannot Obtain Sufficient Python…

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 at 9:13 PM - 1 Comment

Tonight is Monty Python night on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon; Mark Evanier has been told that four of the five surviving Pythons will be on the show, and that they will make appearances before the interview proper begins. They’re plugging IFC’s big new “definitive” Python documentary, Monty Python: Almost the Truth, and Fallon, who appears as a talking head in the documentary, will presumably be worshipful.

Two Python-related things I didn’t bring up before:

1. The success of Monty Python over the years makes a great case for independent production of TV shows, as opposed to being network owned. One of the reasons why Python has become such a huge worldwide franchise is that the BBC doesn’t own it. According to the terms of the Pythons’ contract with the BBC, the rights to the episodes, including foreign rights, reverted to Python (Monty) Pictures. The BBC is notoriously bad at even preserving the episodes it owns, let alone marketing them worldwide. The Pythons’ company kept the episodes in decent condition, sold them everywhere, made sure (even to the point of going to court) that they were shown in their original form, and generally has acted like a company with an interest in making it a profitable franchise.

2. I doubt any of the interviewers they encounter will ask the Pythons about their most embarrassing non-Python projects. All of them have done their share of hack work except Gilliam (he’s done some bad work, but personal, quirky bad work). But I don’t think anything can compare in badness to this Idle show; Cleese may have picked up some extra money in monstrosities like Pink Panther 2, but Idle was the top-billed star of this show.