No Country For Old "Men?"

CBS is boasting about how its aging sitcom "Two And a Half Men," inexplicably in its ninth season, is the most watched show on American broadcast television. I've always disliked this show, but I could never find the right words to explain my dislike for it . . . until television critic Alan Sepinwall of the Newark Star-Ledger offered up the following adjectives to describe it - "skeevy," "misogynistic," and "lazily crude."  Perfect - that sums it up! And that's the reason Sepinwall makes the big money. 

CBS's boasting is likely based on the nearly 29 million viewers "Two And a Half Men" pulled in for the 2011-12 season premiere - i.e., the debut of Ashton Kutcher, who's an actor like Ashlee Simpson is a live performer.  Kutcher's character, Walden Schmidt, is a wealthy but dimwitted man-child who buys Charlie Harper's house after Charlie (played by guess-who) is killed in a freak accident. Charlie's brother Alan (Jon Cryer) asks to stay on for awhile, with the audience understanding that he isn't going to leave any time soon.  And, if you believe CBS's hype, none of these characters are going anywhere.

But maybe they are.  My mother is a fan of the show - don't ask me why, please don't - and she saw Kutcher's debut on the show. (I didn't.)  She doesn't think it's going to work out in the long run, and she thinks the  show will go down the tubes.  She can't understand the appeal of Walden, who lazily and stupidly falls into one lucky break after another - especially when it comes to attracting women.  And, if I understand my mother correctly, Walden makes Alan's idiot son Jake look like Aristotle. 

Sometimes a cast member change on a television show can re-invigorate the show.  "M*A*S*H," which once occupied the time slot on CBS that "Two And a Half Men" now occupies, was already a good show when Wayne Rogers and McLean Stevenson both left in 1975, but their respective replacements, Mike Farrell and Harry Morgan, turned a good sitcom into a great one.  But while "M*A*S*H" was a deep human comedy with a stellar ensemble cast, "Two And a Half Men" is a shallow, cheap-laugh show that revolves around two and a half actors (Ashton Kutcher is the half actor here).  Charlie Sheen's departure couldn't ruin the show, because it started out ruined.  The initial curiosity the show is benefiting from right now with regards to how Kutcher fits in will likely fade as the season progresses.  Bear this in mind too - this is the third of the three seasons "Two and A Half Men" was renewed for in advance back in 2009.  The network and the producers had to go ahead with it one way or another - even without Sheen (who already has CBS executive Leslie Moonves' money, dude), there was a lot of dough involved here.  If the ratings trail off by May, there really won't be any need to renew it for a tenth season.

But that might happen.  Yes, the show may be skeevy, misogynistic, and lazily crude, but if there's one thing I've noticed about Americans' TV viewing habits, there's a big market for skeeviness, woman-hating, and lazy crudity.  Just don't tell my mother I said that. ;-)      

Don't Lean On Me

Remember that episode of "Mad Men" where Don Draper pitches what he thinks is a surefire ad campaign to Conrad Hilton for his hotel chain, only for Mr. Hilton to reject it because he didn't get the moon? And Mr. Hilton then walks out, never to return? Someone at MSNBC should have done the same after its ad agency pitched the new MSNBC campaign that has just started.

MSNBC is running a series of incoherent television ads showing pictures of famous Americans, famous American moments, and pastimes as different as Latin dancing and demolition derbies to celebrate the "diversity" of our country while a voice-over reads an atrocious paraphrasing of the Declaration of Independence. When I first saw one of these ads, I asked myself, "What the hell is this?"

Oh yeah, the ads - which you can't tell what they're for even twenty seconds into them - end with MSNBC's logo and its new slogan . . . "Lean Forward."

And I thought Volkswagen's "Fahrvergnügen" ad campaign sucked.

"Lean forward?" Isn't that what you do when a nurse needs to give you a shot in your rump? Or when you stand above a toilet when you have to puke?

This ad campaign isn't making anyone puke, because people are too busy laughing their rumps off to be indisposed. Fox News, despite its utter lack of integrity, is very good at selling itself. Although "We report, you decide" and "Fair and Balanced" are the two biggest lies in advertising history, they're effective because each slogan communicates a simple direct idea. "Lean Forward" communicates nothing. And compared to the TV spots for MSNBC, the new campaign's print ads are not much better, showing MSNBC on-air personalities in casual poses that suggest they're not going anywhere, never mind leaning in any direction. "The Place For Politics," MSNBC's old slogan, wasn't so wonderful either; MSNBC is supposed to report news as much as it offers punditry (and it does), and there are many places for politics, like in Congress or an insurance office. But from a point of message and branding, "Lean Forward" is irredeemably asinine.

I don't know how this slogan was dreamed up, but I'm guessing that some hotshot ad man proposed a slogan that suggested forward movement to complement MSNBC's liberal bias, but that "Go Forward" sounded like a car company slogan and "Moving Forward" already was one (it was taken by Toyota, itself going through image problems these days for different reasons), so "Lean Forward" - like leaning Democratic or leaning Republican - was a perfect fit. Right. It fits MSNBC as perfectly as a 28-inch-waist pair of pants would fit William Bennett.

Sean Hannity has already ridiculed this MSNBC slogan on his own blog, but more noteworthy is that Jon Stewart has skewered it even more wittily on his TV show. Stewart summed up the ad campaign's incoherence by playing a tape of MSNBC president Phil Griffin explaining the positive message of the slogan, and then showing clips of Chris Matthews, Ed Schultz, Dylan Ratigan, and even the clownish Keith Olbermann delivering pessimistic, decline-and-fall rhetoric about the direction the U.S. is moving in. (And Stewart didn't even mention the channel's sensationalist weekend crime documentaries.)

MSNBC insists it's not a propaganda arm for the Democratic party, which is why MSNBC personalities sometimes criticize the Democrats despite their support for the party's basic agenda. So, even though I'm an avid viewer of MSNBC, I'm reacting just as critically to this new ad campaign. MSNBC deserves better than what their ad men are pushing. It is a reliable news source, with on-air personalities that have strong identities, and they finally have a lineup that has a sense of permanence (though the jury's still out on Lawrence O'Donnell's show). Plus, the channel already has a solidly loyal audience. The channel's liberal on-air personalities may be preaching to the choir, but there's a lot to work with in order to make the choir bigger. The bosses at MSNBC have the opportunity to promote their strengths effectively, and this new ad campaign is not the way to do it.

And no, again, it is not true that MSNBC has more initials in its name than it has viewers. That would be true of CNN.

MSNBC's Weekend Problem

Recently it was reported that the most watched cable news channel in 2009 was Fox News, a finding that must be scaring liberals. It bested MSNBC by a wide margin. The big loser, though, was CNN, which remained in third place. Ratings for MSNBC produced mixed results; though more people watched Fox, MSNBC gained among viewers in the 25-54 age demographic. Rachel Maddow's show has become appointment television, and Ed Schultz has cultivated a core audience of his own. But facts are stubborn things. For all of Keith Olbermann's lampooning of Bill O'Reilly as "Billo the Clown," O'Reilly's show has been highly rated, usually attracting more viewers than Olbermann in the same time slot, and even Rachel Maddow has faced tough competition against that other Long Island Irish fascist on Fox, Sean Hannity.

Fox's higher ratings don't necessarily meant that the country is tilting more rightward; it could easily mean that conservatives, feeling that their ideology is under siege, are tuning in to Fox more frequently. The political faction out of power normally rallies together and stirs up trouble, and it's been that way since newspapers sympathetic to Thomas Jefferson regularly assailed the administration of John Adams. MSNBC is actually doing pretty well overall, but it has one Achilles heel that makes it seem less like a serious cable news channel than even Fox.

I'm talking about MSNBC's weekend programming.

MSNBC always airs documentaries, usually on prisons, murders, and domestic abusers, on Saturdays and Sundays. The channel, like the fabled middle class Ed Schultz is trying to represent, pretty much takes the weekend off. Occasional updates from Christina Brown are as much news as you get from MSNBC on the weekends, except when they come from Milissa Rehberger. Naturally, the channel also goes in to hibernation on holidays, as it did on Christmas Day a couple of weeks ago. Therefore, MSNBC was the last channel to get in on the attempted airline bombing over Detroit, and the channel seemed just as slow to react as President Obama was while in Hawaii.

And some of MSNBC's commentators actually had the nerve for chastising Obama.

MSNBC has always frustrated me with their weekend programming. I don't like their sensationalist documentaries, and I never find out what's going on in the world when I tune in on Saturday or Sunday. It sounds trivial, but if cable television news had been around in 1941 or 1979, and if MSNBC then had a programming format like the one it has now, they would have been out of the loop during, respectively, the attack on Pearl Harbor and the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Iran, both of which happened on Sundays.

If MSNBC wants to be taken more seriously as a cable news show, they should have weekend news and talk shows and not just show those stupid documentaries, many of which are reruns of "Dateline NBC." They don't even show reruns of "Meet the Press" anymore on Sunday evenings, and they've had little if any weekend news programming since Tim Russert died. Even its loyal weekday viewers now have to go somewhere else for breaking news on Saturdays and Sundays.

It is not true that MSNBC has more initials in its name than it has viewers. It is true, however, that MSNBC has more initials in its name than it has weekend news reports.

On the Tube

So what's on TV these days?

It's been awhile since I commented on television, and I thought I'd take a break from commentary on current events (pretty boring, huh? ;-)), partly because there hasn't been that much to talk about for so long. But a few new shows in the 2009-10 season and of a couple of veteran ones are worth noting. Or not.

First, CBS's "How I met Your Mother." I've always liked this show, particularly because its characters are so likable - even Neil Patrick Harris's Barney - and they've had several unorthodox ideas and plot twists. But none of their far-out storylines have reached the improbable idea of Barney and Robin (Cobie Smulders) getting together. Gee whizbangers, this is more fun than the time Hawkeye and Hot Lips shacked up in a two-part "M*A*S*H" episode.

We still don't know who becomes the "mother" - the lady love of Ted (Josh Radnor) yet, but who cares? I'm having too much fun watching how everything else plays out. And Cobie Smulders remains the most beautiful brunette on American television. (Not bad for a Canadian.)

The most beautiful blonde on American television, Julie Bowen, landed a plum role on "Modern Family," an ABC sitcom about an extended family comprised of three separate units. Bowen plays Claire, the mother in a traditional nuclear family with a homosexual brother in his own relationship and their father married to a Hispanic trophy wife with her own son. This is probably the best new sitcom to appear in four years, and the intricate plot lines tying the three situations together offer plenty of enjoyable moments. Ed O'Neill, as the patriarch, is funnier than playing Al Bundy on "Married . . . With Children" ever allowed him to be. The pseudo-documentary format modeled after "The Office" (more of which later) adds to "Modern Family"'s freshness.

"Community," on NBC, is another keeper, starring Joel McHale as a conceited lawyer who's learned that his bachelor's degree is illegitimate and has to go to community college, where he thinks he's superior to his fellow students. He finds himself in a study group full of eccentrics, including one character played by Chevy Chase. Chase, as an entrepreneurial type with crazy ideas, performs with understatement but remains as funny as ever. This is a big comeback for Chase, whose movie career has long since stalled - although I'll go to my grave insisting that Foul Play is one of the greatest screwball comedies of all time, or at least the seventies. He's ready to take a chance again.

Sadly, NBC can't do much better. Still in fourth place, the network once known for groundbreaking dramas has moved their veteran drama series to the 9 PM ET hour, where they have to compete with lighter fare in the same time slot. Jay Leno owns every weekday 10 PM ET slot, hampering NBC's ability to produce new drama shows and shore up old ones. Well, what old ones they still have - they lost "Medium" to CBS. Leno himself has proven himself unable to compete with the traditional ten o'clock programming on ABC or CBS. Fox, as always, continues to eschew the 10 PM ET time slot, preferring to let its affiliates air local newscasts in that slot.

Speaking of local news, NBC's affiliates, whose own local newscasts are between Leno and Conan O'Brien, are losing viewers even as O'Brien struggles in vain to go up against David Letterman, a man O'Brien reveres and chooses not to lampoon for his sex scandal blackmail issues. O'Brien has been unable to adapt his after-midnight style of smart-aleck humor to "The Tonight Show" the way Letterman did when he began doing late-night talk an hour earlier.

Who would have thought that Jimmy Fallon, the insufferable nimrod who took over for O'Brien at "Late Night" and has enjoyed good ratings, would be the one NBC late-night comedian smelling like a rose?

Meanwhile, "The Office" is beginning to stink. Yeah, I saw the one-hour episode of Jim and Pam's wedding, but the humor was so lame and in some cases rather sick - Andy Bernard (Ed Helms) hurting his scrotum on his car keys while dancing - I have a feeling that, if it hasn't jumped the shark, it's swimming close to it. The British sitcom of the same name that it was based on didn't run as long, as Ricky Gervais (who played the boss) and his castmates knew when to quit.

This is NBC at the end of the two thousand zeroes, folks. Devoid of any coherent programming plan, unable to pull out of fourth place after half a decade, it's in such dire straits it may qualify for a taxpayer-supported federal bailout. Well, that's one way to get a BBC-style national television network; heck, it already has the proper name (NBC stands for National Broadcasting Company). It's easily the weakest link in the NBC/Universal media empire, its sister cable networks MSNBC and CNBC probably drawing more viewers. But gee whiz, look at its great successes of the past - "Ed," Friends," Frasier." As of today, Julie Bowen, Courteney Cox (star of the new series "Cougar Town," a sitcom I don't get) and Kelsey Grammer, who respectively starred in those shows, have all gone to ABC and Patricia Arquette took her entire show to CBS with her.

One thing about Kelsey Grammer's new ABC series, "Hank." Grammer has said that he would reprise his most famous character, Dr. Frasier Crane, in a new sitcom if he thought it was good enough. He apparently thought a show like "Hank," about a humbled man returning to his hometown to take a dead-end job, wasn't good enough to bring Frasier back in - his character is, after all, named Hank - and neither do critics and viewers. It's only one midseason replacement away from cancellation, and Grammer's chances of pulling off the impossible - enjoying three hit sitcoms in a single career - seem to have evaporated. NBC is probably glad it did not at least get stuck with this one.