Welcome to the newest feature of TV Barn -- sneak previews! This week I look at HBO's "Taking Chance," starring Kevin Bacon as a Marine officer who escorts the remains of a private killed in Iraq to his final resting place; and "The Order of Myths," a PBS documentary about segregated Mardi Gras celebrations in Mobile.
(P.S. I'm going to try to produce these on Wednesdays from now on. "Taking Chance" repeats Feb. 22 and 24 and Feb. 26 on HBO2. Click here to grab the video RSS.)
On Thanksgiving Day, the fine TV critic of the Baltimore Sun, David Zurawik, and I quarreled politely over whether MSNBC was adequately covering the Mumbai terror situation on Wednesday.
Well, that was before a violent attack turned into a three-day ordeal. Unfortunately, by the time the killing in Mumbai was over, one network had decided to save some money and send everybody home for the Thanksgiving weekend, and I was feeling like an idiot for defending MSNBC. Take a look:
Sure enough, as I suggested a couple of weeks ago, it appears MSNBC and its number one talent, Keith Olbermann, have decided he has a woman problem. Appearing on "The View" was just the start -- this week, he made a triple-chocolate pumpkin pie with Martha Stewart. Next week, I understand Carson Kressley is going to show him just how beautiful he looks in the buff!
Tellingly, KO has used segments of "Countdown" to play back highlights of both appearances, and while KO contributes the requisite amount of eye-rolling at what a dork he is on these programs, even this gesture serves to underscore the larger point: KO is strong enough to be a man even on a show that's made for a woman.
Before Barack Obama addressed 250,000 people in Chicago's Grant Park on Election Night, some other things happened. But you didn't see them because other than C-SPAN, no cable or broadcast network carried them. These other networks chose to put their talking heads on screen to talk over them.
These are the same networks that subject us to countless renditions of the national anthem and "God Bless America" at sporting events -- so why couldn't they have exposed America to the anthem and a rousing invocation by another longtime pastor friend of Obama's?
Here they are.
First, the anthem as sung by Kim Stratton (who has a brief Patti LaBelle moment there but recovers).
NBC announced it has signed Keith Olbermann to a new four-year deal today, tearing up the existing one that he was only about halfway through. (Press release is below.) By his own measure, Olbermann has now been doing "Countdown" longer than he did "SportsCenter" on ESPN, although I don't think he was counting the leather jacket phase.
And apparently there is an Epatha Merkerson clause in there that calls for KO to improve his relationship with female viewers, now that Rachel Maddow is proving to be as big a draw some nights as "Countdown" is. Or at least, that's my pop explanation for KO's appearance today on "The View." For seven minutes he folded his gigantic frame into a chair meant for a size 0 woman, and endured the torture of five caffeinated frissonettes, who battered him relentlessly with questions of the beat-your-wife variety. Even Joy Behar, who probably agrees with KO on 90 percent of the issues, acted as though he was the moose galloping haplessly on the tundra and she was the one firing away from the helicopter.,
Most of Olbermann's answers I'd heard before, but he said two interesting things right at the end:
Good to see Joe Scarborough is feeling really relaxed in his role as the morning man on MSNBC. So relaxed that, out of nowhere, he dropped this one on live television about an hour ago:
Mike Barnicle's reaction is instantaneous and priceless. Joe's delayed, stunned reaction as he receives word of his transgression in his earpiece is just about as good.
And yes, we have a television reference for this television reference. Seems that what Joe (who was beamed in from D.C.) was trying to say was that the new Democrat press secretary will be nothing like that guy Rahm Emanuel who used to work for Bill Clinton. The more we're learning about Rahm, the more we're put in mind of Ari Gold, the character on "Entourage" widely thought to be modeled on Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel, whose brother is Rahm. Told you we had a TV reference.
If you watch "Late Show with David Letterman" most nights, you probably think you could write some of the material ... but actually, in the opening desk bits of the show, the material more or less writes itself. Letterman's writers, like their NYC colleagues over at Comedy Central, specialize in found humor from the wide world of videotape (or whatever it is these days).
But whereas their boss, in his salad days, always added his personal snarky commentary to whatever bits of epehemera his staff picked up from the small-town news and whatnot, today Letterman often gets his biggest laughs from the "no comment" videos, carefully edited to make the subject look as idiotic as possible.
As soon as I saw this segment from John McCain's interview with Tom Brokaw on "Meet the Press," I knew it would show up on Letterman's show. It is 5:24 p.m. ET as I write this, so the show has not begun taping yet. (Special guest, Bill O'Reilly!) So this really is a guess, but an educated one. Watch.
Story updated with another sordid tale of Olympic fakery ...
The amazing sequence you see below appears to have been perfectly tracked by a helicopter-cam. If you didn't know these were fireworks "footprints" being shot off through Beijing, you might think you were seeing an opening shot from the hit TV show "CSI."
But it turns out, that comparison is unfair ... to "CSI."
After I wrote about KMBC-TV's "breaking news" coverage Tuesday night, John Landsberg of Bottom Line Communications sent along the rest of the story: An embarrassing moment when KMBC news anchor Larry Moore was pranked by a caller claiming to be a janitor at the gasoline plant that caught fire during Channel 9's "breaking news" coverage Tuesday night:
Ah, Baba Booey. Time for another flashback.
In 1996, just before I joined this newspaper, I wrote this piece for my Late Show News e-letter about the weird practice of putting unverified callers on live television. It stemmed from an incident that occurred on "The Rosie O'Donnell Show" when producers there put a live call on the air claiming to be from the mayor of Philadelphia, who had been in the audience the day before. In fact, the caller was Captain Janks, the notorious prank caller and member of radio jock Howard Stern's "Wack Pack," who seems to have never met a call screener he couldn't talk his way past. Janks called O'Donnell a "fat pig," and hung up.
Janks, who has gotten on CNN and MSNBC multiple times, as well as the Jerry Lewis telethon and countless local broadcasts, is in fact captain of a small army of mischief makers devoted to two things: the Stern show and disrupting breaking-news telecasts across the country. These listeners call into the newsroom — not hard, since most after-hours switchboards at TV stations will transfer you to the assignment desk with the press of a button — and from there it is, I guess, shockingly easy to get on the air. Their rebel cry is "Baba Booey!", the nickname of Stern's longtime producer Gary Dell'Abate.
Unfortunately for our Kansas City prank caller, he was upstaged that very same night by troublemakers in San Diego who managed to drive by and disrupt two live shots on local TV stations with their "Baba Booey!" cheers. Stern played the clips on his Sirius Satellite Radio show the next day and gave the pranksters his highest praise. As faithful show recapper Marksfriggin.com described it, Stern "said he loves when people do the Baba Booey thing. He said that if he was lucky enough to be walking by he'd do it and he'd say 'Baba Booey, Fafa Foohey...' "
Twice in recent weeks David Letterman's writers have worked "Baba Booey" references into Top Ten lists, so it's clear they love it, too. And you know, as a subversive activity, I do too. I mean, is there any godly reason why, in this day and age, news stations need to drag non-credentialed strangers onto the air? If a non-journalist sees or hears something interesting, LET THEM BLOG, and then the TV stations can link to that.
When I wrote about this phenomenon 12 years ago, a more serious matter was on my mind than just the "Rosie O'Donnell Show":
On the night that TWA Flight 800 went down, all of the New York stations broke in with special reports, and coverage continued for several minutes before returning to prime-time programs. Later, NBC 4 broke in again, with what it thought was an exclusive: a telephone interview with a Coast Guard official claiming to have information on the downed airliner. Of course, it was a Stern listener, and while one could definitely feel Chuck Scarborough's pain as he realized, on camera, he'd been hoodwinked, it is still a valid question whether we would be better informed by an actual Coast Guard official on that phone line. You didn't have to be a news director to know that little solid information would be available from the wreck until much later -- even a passenger list takes time to compile. But all reason seems to go out the window at NBC 4 and other stations when an "exclusive" is on the line.
And let's take this discussion beyond pranksters for a moment. Remember the Sago Mine news disaster? CNN's Anderson Cooper let anyone standing within 10 feet of him broadcast unconfirmed rumors of the miners' rescue — rumors that turned out to be horribly wrong. If anything, the Baba Booeys out there should serve as miners' canaries, early warning systems that little can be gained from putting strangers on the air, and much can be lost, credibility-wise.
For whatever reason, the following pithy observations were cut from the story:
In hindsight, the moguls should have put their negotiating prowess to work a few months ago and struck a deal with their show writers before there could be a strike. Still, most of us had expected that things would be pretty much back to normal by now. Clearly that’s not going to be the case.
ABC chief Steve McPherson never let on to advertisers, but “Wipeout” is a blatant knockoff of the Japanese stunt game show “Takeshi’s Castle,” which you may have seen on the Spike cable channel, where it was dubbed into English and retitled “MXC.” Four producers talking into a camera and two carbon copies of shows that have aired elsewhere — this is ABC.
And my favorite, regarding the NBC Universal Experience:
Lights blared. Music pulsed. Reporters who emerged from their “Experience” spoke as if they had survived a passage through one of Dante’s circles of hell.
And now for something a little lighter for your weekend enjoyment ... some harmless video chicanery, courtesy of the YouTubers.
Freddy Rhoads, a KU student who goes to my church and has helped me with some of my fumbling documentary video efforts in the past, sent me this mashup he made about the gas tax holiday. Maybe "mashup" isn't the right word for it, but I enjoyed it.
This three-minute video from Thursday's Fox 4 morning news -- the top rated morning newscast in Kansas City -- shows what happens when you leave a live TV camera on a little too long. Weatherman Don Harman's reaction to two humping puppies walks right up to the edge of "SCTV"-style self-parody ... but doesn't quite go over. And the closer comes in to save it, in the form of a perfectly understated comment from the chopper pilot:
Anyway. The least surprising week in "American Idol" history left the field right where much of the viewership thought it would be several weeks ago, with only the two Davids and Syesha still standing. (How not-close was the vote to get Jason Castro off the show before he started holding pleas for help written on his palms up to the camera? DialIdol.com, which measures callers' busy signals, made a rare slam-dunk prediction that Castro would leave.)
What many of us hadn't counted on would be how quickly David Archuleta's audition for the Kathie Lee Gifford Up With Jesus and the U-S-A Tour went from refreshing to annoying to pure agony. I mean, I know they cut the musical numbers down to 120 seconds to keep ADD Nation from tuning away, but even two minutes of looking at Archuleta looking back at us with those dead eyes, that expression that should be accompanied by a spooky reverbed voiceover a la "The Shining" that says, "MY FATHER IS MAKING ME DO THIS. PLEASE. STOP HIM," is almost too much to take.
Syesha Mercado, on the other hand, offers a nice contrast to Prohibitive Favorite and Local Boy Made Good David Cook, who should have no trouble beating back a challenge from either of these future one-and-done recording artists. Syesha is not quite up there with "Idol" gospel talents of years past, but she's got loads of personality and seems to actually want to be there, on live TV, receiving the adulation of the overeager studio audience and the rest of America. Cook, I must say, has overcome a lot of his early stage fright, but what is with Archuleta and Castro? Can't they at least FAKE some enthusiasm? This is television, people, not a recording studio!
Anyway. I have been slow on the draw this week, owing to special circumstances (Mrs. TV Barn is getting her master's degree this week and Tuesday was my birthday, which I prefer to spend not typing or watching). Check the "Barnhart in print" zipper for my preview of next week's upfronts, or what's left of them; that story should post over the weekend. Finally, here's video of the third of my three appearances on the local talk show "Newsmakers," and this installment is personal, as my griller, Cynthia Smith, asks me how the heck I became a TV critic anyway (it wasn't a hostile question, um, I think):
Lots of sports bloggers are weighing in this morning about the scene that unfolded Tuesday night on HBO between respected journalist (and author of Friday Night Lights) Buzz Bissinger and respected Deadspin editor Will Leitch. Here's the video.
Most of the commentaries point out what will be obvious to anyone who clicks that link: that in his purple-faced, profanity-laced rant, Bissinger is embodying the kind of hateful blogger-type he claims is ruining sports writing. Not to mention calling Leitch "Jimmy Olsen on Percocet" is the kind of ad hominem attack Bissinger was ripping just moments before. (Others point out that Bissinger, of all people, shouldn't be saying that "facts get in the way" of most bloggers' work when, it seems, facts have gotten in the way of some of Bissinger's recent work. I would simply note that Bissinger was a lot easier on Don Imus than he was on Will Leitch.)
As it happens, Will Leitch and I recently had an email exchange around and about the subject that got Bissinger so unhinged. Namely: When talking about blogs, what part of the blog are we talking about: the author or the commentary? Do both have equal weight in the reader's mind? Should the author of a blog post be held accountable if he is very polite toward the subject and 10 commenters offer that the subject is, in fact, a dick?
Bad lighting, a crowd of zombies behind her, the always unfortunate satellite bounce and a voice that sounds like it's gone into overtime ...
I understand what Sen. Clinton was trying to do here. If she's to keep this campaign going beyond Tuesday -- and by the way, why is everybody so opposed to that notion? Do people want to shift the conversation back to the Middle East? The price of oil? What? -- anyway, if she's going to endure, she'll need more than white mature female voters in her corner. Hence her visit to Letterman, "SNL," and now Talk Stew.
See that milk carton over my shoulder? It's a tchotchke from Morgan Spurlock's new movie, "Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?" Photos.
What's working for me this week
1. ABC's Bob Woodruff going back to Iraq. He gave several reasons for returning to the place where he was gravely injured in 2005, but he only needed one: to "get back on my horse."
Sure enough, as 
As it happens, Will Leitch and I recently had an email exchange around and about the subject that got Bissinger so unhinged. Namely: When talking about blogs, what part of the blog are we talking about: the author or the commentary? Do both have equal weight in the reader's mind? Should the author of a blog post be held accountable if he is very polite toward the subject and 10 commenters offer that the subject is, in fact, a dick?
