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« January 2007 | Main | March 2007 »
It was the
matchup no one saw coming, except perhaps for a proud papa in Muscle
Shoals, Ala.
Entering the "Nashville Star" country music competition in separate tryouts in different cities, brother and sister Zac and Angela Hacker both made the cut for season five, then sang their way forward.
And now it's come to this: Thursday night, there is a two out of three chance that someone named Hacker is going to be named the winner of "Nashville Star" and take home not only a recording contract with a major label and a Chevy truck, but family bragging rights as well.
What's more television than the Oscars? We'll be flooding the zone on Sunday, and you're welcome to join in.
First, we've got a new TV Barn Oscars Challenge that's unlike any you'll see anywhere on the Web. It's kinda thrown together but you'll want to play if only to win valuable swag!
Second, thanks to new technology we've been perfecting in the TV Barn Labs (tm), we'll be doing a big ole group Oscars live blog Sunday night. You'll get carpal tunnel just hitting the reload button.
And of course, we'll be posting Oscar stories -- check out the incredible list of Oscarcast spoilers up there (if you're like me, there's no such thing as a spoiler). All that's now up at TVBarn.com/oscars.
TV critics have a lot of people whispering in their ears -- readers,
publicists, “Grey's Anatomy” devotees -- but I should've been listening
more carefully when one of my editors, Ward Triplett, starting
pestering me for my “Slings & Arrows” screeners.
Sneaking onto the Sundance Channel schedule a couple of years ago, this Canadian-produced dramedy flew under a lot of critics' radar and TV screens. From its unpromising nutshell description -- backstage high-jinks at a struggling Shakespeare company up north -- it sounded like “Waiting for Guffman” with frostbite.
How wrong I was didn't become known until the screeners for season three arrived recently, and instead of handing them over to Triplett, I watched “Slings & Arrows” and was blown away. So will you. Season three began airing this weekend on Sundance Channel, available on digital cable. Episode 1 reairs at 6 p.m. ET on Wednesday. Other airdates
It's not that the show is over-the-top hysterically funny, or an eye-popping blockbuster. But rarely has television woven high culture, graceful comedy, gut-busting gags, nimble dialogue and grown-up situations together so successfully. It's a delightful show. (If you're playing catch-up like I am, seasons one and two are out on DVD.)
Easily the most fascinating viral video of the month among showbiz folks was the on-stage confrontation at L.A.'s famed Comedy Store between Carlos Mencia, star of Comedy Central's “Mind of Mencia,” and Joe Rogan, star of “Fear Factor.” Mencia was recently outed by Radar magazine as the comic “reviled” by his fellow comics for stealing their jokes (Radar reported that Mencia's presence is loudly announced whenever he enters the club as a warning to performers). Rogan -- who is not the most diplomatic guy, as any TV critic who's ever interviewed him can attest -- decided he'd had enough of Mencia's larceny. Plus, he needed material for his online “Joeshow.” So in this 10-minute video (viewable at joerogan.net), he charges Mencia with stealing from him and Ari Shaffir, a shock comic known as “The Amazing Racist.” When Mencia denies even having heard Shaffir's act, Shaffir joins them on stage and reminds him he used to open for Mencia.
It's profane, probably alcohol-fueled, and riveting. "To be honest," Rogan wrote later on his blog, "I have been baiting him into a conversation to expose him and end this all for a while now, I just never thought he would actually be dumb enough to want to do it in front of an audience, especially when he knew that we were filming it."
Immediately after posting the video, Rogan was barred from the Comedy Store and his agent, who also represents Mencia, dropped him. Other successful comedians are notorious lifters of jokes (Dane Cook, Robin Williams), but rarely has the complaint been made this vocal. But as you troll the interwebs, it becomes clear that a cult of hate-Mencia is alive and well, ready to trumpet his joke-stealing and other unflattering biographical data (his real name is Ned Holness and he's not Mexican, he's German-Honduran).
Rogan's gutsy decision to vent his rage at Mencia impressed me — I think you can guess how big a "Fear Factor" fan I wasn't. And Mencia's evasions certainly could be career-damaging, except they're likely never to gain much TV coverage. Why? Because VH1 and Comedy Central, cable's two biggest pop-culture-spoofers, are both owned by Viacom. And Viacom already got Rogan's video kicked off YouTube.
