BC Crawler

Wednesday: The End of the Pilot, Ledger TV Coverage, The Grammy's are a Go and more...
January 23, 2008

By Alex Weprin

[Pilots B Gone] Following up on his statements to the Financial Times yesterday, Jeff Zucker told the NY Times that NBC was ending its practice of producing expensive pilots for new shows. Zucker pointed out that networks spend millions on these pilots, only to see most of them fail spectacularly. It is hard to argue, after all, if you are dumping the upfront’s and than traditional pilot season already, dumping most of the pilots themselves seems like a logical next step. Zucker and NBC aren’t the only ones contemplating the demise of the pilot, according to the Times, at least one other network is prepared to do the same thing.

[The Heath Ledger-TV Connection] Rachel Sklar over at the Huffington Post does a very thorough job of covering the media coverage swirling around the death of actor Heath Ledger. Sklar noted all the programming changes, and what did not change (The Situation Room was still all about former L&O star Fred Thompson dropping out), as well as revealing the sad news that Ledgers family in Australia found out about his death through the media. The world is flat indeed.

Believe it or not, Ledger actually starred in a Fox TV show that aired in 1997. The show, Roar, took place in 400 a.d. and featured Ledger as a Celtic prince. TVTattle pointed me to some clips from the show.

[Market Bust May be FBN’s Boom] on Monday, Martin Luther King Day, CNBC had a day full of taped coverage, while Fox Business Network was live. That decision proved to be fruitful for FBN, who had the market cornered so to speak on one of the biggest financial news stories of the year: the foreign markets crashing. Not content to simply gloat, an insider sent TVNewser a photoshopped CNBC ad touting CNBC’s absence. TVNewser also heard that FBN may take out ads gloating some more. Classy.

[The Music Must Go On] The WGA has decided that it will not picket the Grammy Awards telecast on CBS Feb. 10. While WGA writers are still forbidden from writing the show, actors and musicians can appear without fear of crossing a picket line. Rock on.

[Real Life Drama] ABC has a new legal drama, Eli Stone, set to debut on Jan. 31. The drama is typical as far as legal dramas go, but the pilot episode covers a topic that is very much in the news, and in many ways more uncomfortable than the standard boilerplate legal fare. The subject is an hypothesized connection between vaccines, specifically a preservative called Thimerasol, and autism. The problem is that so far, all the data suggests that there is no connection, and that it may be a case of confusing correlation with causation (such as the internet meme showing that as the number of pirates declined, the rate of global warming increased, thus poking fun at global warming skeptics by pointing out the ease of finding correlations). The concern over Eli Stone is that parents who see the program may find the drama compelling enough to not vaccinate their children, which could have disastrous results on our health. All of this shows that despite the growth of the Web, TV still holds tremendous influence in many peoples lives, and while I would hope that people are not deciding medical treatments based on procedural law dramas or for that matter Dr. Phil, some people may be inclined to make that leap.

[Web Find: Meg’s Most Embarrassing Moments] Family Guy is one of the cruelest shows on TV, and also one of the funniest. A running joke through the series is how the family mistreats daughter Meg, who is often ignored or otherwise mistreated. Adult Swim, Cartoon Network’s late night programming block, recently went through the old Family Guy episodes and collected their top 10 list of Meg’s most humiliating moments. I have included my favorite below. Prepare to cringe.

Posted by BC Crawler on January 23, 2008 | Comments (0)