Fade Out - Fade In

It's official: No matter how often British journalists on American television profess an admiration for these United States, eventually they show enough haughtiness on the air to get themselves off the air.  First, Martin Bashir, for all his admiration of American community values and how people in this country join to help others in times of crisis (as he discussed in an MSNBC promo), had to leave MSNBC when his vulgar insult of Sarah Palin's intelligence on the issue of slavery - something folks in the United Kingdom, who are used to the shock value of Monty Python or the Sex Pistols, might have tolerated - proved to be unpalatable to American ears.  Now Piers Morgan, who replaced Larry King on CNN, is also out.  Morgan, best known for calling gun rights advocates to task, apparently came off as just another foreign TV personality in American broadcasting tsk-tsking us stupid Yanks.  At least Morgan was smart enough not to cross the line like Martin Bashir did.  What got Morgan fired was his shallowness, which has proven to be fatal for many a broadcast journalist, and his mushy lines of questioning.  Only 364,000 viewers were tuning in weeknights at 9 PM Eastern to watch him.  Presumably, those viewers subscribe to cable companies that don't offer MSNBC or Fox News - increasingly, the only reason anyone would watch CNN.  Morgan had a superiority complex without the superiority, something his British accent helped him get away with for only so long.  So long.

While CNN looks for something to replace Morgan's talk show, which ends later this month, NBC has debuted mid-season replacement sitcoms that represent yet another attempt by the Peacock Network to get out of its ratings slump.  Both shows are on Tuesday nights.  The first, "About a Boy" (at 9 PM Eastern), is based on the 2002 Hugh Grant movie (and 1998 novel) of the same name, exploring the unlikely friendship between financially independent bachelor Will Freeman and Marcus, his female next-door neighbor's son.  Set in San Francisco instead of London but starring British actress Minnie Driver as the woman next door (David Walton plays Will), the pilot episode sets up the relationship between Will and Marcus and shows how they're going to be buddies.  I've never seen the movie, but I found the TV show's pilot episode intriguing, if only because a TV series can take a movie's premise farther than the original movie could.  ("M*A*S*H" is the gold standard for cinematically based sitcoms in that respect.)

The second series, "Growing Up Fisher" (at 9:30 PM Eastern), stars noted character actor and Farmers Insurance spokesman J.K. Simmons as Mel Fisher, a blind lawyer who gets divorced from his wife Joyce (played by Jenna Elfman) when she wants to make up for having married early in life to go through what amounts to a second childhood.   Mel remains devoted to his son and daughter and has no tolerance for anyone who feels sorry for his blindness; he goes on living his life as though he could see.  His son Henry looks back on all of this with an adult voice-over narration (supplied by Jason Bateman),  a common trick in sitcoms these days.  "Growing Up Fisher" is a warm, human sitcom without a lot of sentimentality, and Simmons has the acting chops to pull it off.  Even Elfman isn't bad.  As veterans of two mid-season replacement sitbombs from 2012-13 ("Family Tools" for Simmons, "1600 Penn" for Elfman), though, they could now be part of a hit.

Or not.  Both of these NBC sitcoms are engaging and warm, with some genuine laughs, but because they have two strikes against them - they're on NBC, and they're sitcoms - they may not be around for full seasons come September.  What is a sure bet is that NBC will begin its second decade of being in the ratings basement this fall.

Oh, by the way, because of the Winter Olympics and the hype over the fiftieth anniversary of Beatlemania in America, no one noticed that Michael J. Fox's NBC sitcom was canceled.  But then, not too many people noticed it was ever on in the first place. :-(