Category Archives: Television

May 3, 2011 · 10:07 pm

Television Ownership Drops in U.S.

I’m not surprised…

We barely watch TV and if we do, it’s usually to watch a DVD or stream a movie in from on-line….

Broadcast TV has become a wasteland of mindless trash and insipid commercials….

I don’t miss it….

I choose to watch a few quality shows on DVD, get my news on the internet and ignore the trash culture TV perpetuates….

From the New York Times:

For the first time in 20 years, the number of homes in the United States with television sets has dropped.

The Nielsen Company, which takes TV set ownership into account when it produces ratings, will tell television networks and advertisers on Tuesday that 96.7 percent of American households now own sets, down from 98.9 percent previously.

There are two reasons for the decline, according to Nielsen. One is poverty: some low-income households no longer own TV sets, most likely because they cannot afford new digital sets and antennas.

The other is technological wizardry: young people who have grown up with laptops in their hands instead of remote controls are opting not to buy TV sets when they graduate from college or enter the work force, at least not at first. Instead, they are subsisting on a diet of television shows and movies from the Internet.

That second reason is prompting Nielsen to think about a redefinition of the term “television household” to include Internet video viewers.

“We’ve been having conversations with clients,” said Pat McDonough, the senior vice president for insights and analysis at Nielsen. “That would be a big change for this industry, and we’d be doing it in consultation with clients if we do it.”

Nielsen’s household figures suggest that while the TV set is still firmly at the center of the average American’s media life, a small minority of Americans are finding ways to live without it. The “persistently rocky economy” is a factor, the company says in the report to be released Tuesday.

via Television Ownership Drops in U.S., Nielsen Reports – NYTimes.com.

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May 1, 2011 · 10:26 am

Happy Birthday, Patsy Stone!

I mean Joanna Lumley, the incredibly talented actress who played Patsy in “Absolutely Fabulous”, one of my favorite TV shows…

Even though, in those years Pats and Eddie hit a little close to home on occasion….

Joanna Lumley really is more than Patsy Stone.  She’s an incredibly talented British stage and film actress.

But she will forever be known to many as “Pats”.

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April 15, 2011 · 11:24 pm

If You’re Looking For A Little Diversity On Television, Try HGTV: NPR

Very interesting story that I heard on NPR on Wednesday.

You can click through the link below to another link to hear the whole story…

Neda Ulaby reports on Wednesday’s Morning Edition that there’s a surprising channel where you can see Latino, Asian, or African-American people, as well as gays and lesbians, in significantly larger numbers than in much of the rest of broadcast and cable television.

That channel is HGTV — from Home And Garden Television — which features people of color as hosts and homeowners, as well as designers and retailers. Neda considers an episode of House Hunters, for instance, that featured a black couple where one was a tech consultant and one was a government nuclear inspector. The president of HGTV makes clear that the diversity of participants — not only the homeowners, but the design professionals and other consultants — is entirely intentional, and has resulted in an overall increase in its audience and an even bigger increase in its minority audiences.

via If You’re Looking For A Little Diversity On Television, Try HGTV : Monkey See : NPR.

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April 14, 2011 · 9:17 pm

Zsa Zsa Gabor to Become New Mother at 94, Husband Says

Poor Zsa, Zsa….

She’s 94, bedridden and just had her leg amputated.

But worse, she’s married to a crazy man….

She must be near death and this guy is trying to milk all the publicity he can get before she goes…

He knows no one will pay attention to him once she’s gone…

Sad….

From CNN.com:

Zsa Zsa Gabor’s husband wants his 94-year-old wife to become a mother again using an egg donor, artificial insemination and a surrogate mother, Prince Frederic von Anhalt told CNN Thursday.

“I’ve gone through the initial steps of donor matching and blood work and next week the donation process will begin,” von Anhalt said.

Gabor’s only child, Francesca Hilton, described herself as shocked when told of the plan Thursday.

“That’s just weird,” Hilton said.

Von Anhalt, 67, said he is working with Dr. Mark Surry of the Southern California Reproductive Center in Beverly Hills. CNN calls to the center have not been returned.

Gabor has suffered major health problems in the last year, including hip replacement surgery and a leg amputation. She has been unable to walk since a 2002 car accident.

“I’m a retired guy,” von Anhalt said. “I can take care of it.”

via Zsa Zsa Gabor to become new mother at 94, husband says – CNN.com.

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April 13, 2011 · 12:05 am

David Cassidy is 61

I almost missed it, but I’m on the West Coast this week where it is still April 12th…

That should make some of us feel rather old…

Keith Partridge is almost old enough for Social Security!

For the record, I never got him or The Partridge Family, but my sister lived for it…

What the hell, it was a cultural milestone of the ’70’s.

Happy Birthday, David!

 

 

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April 11, 2011 · 10:01 pm

To sir, with love: How ‘Glee’ turned Matthew Morrison from Broadway stalwart to international star -The Independent

One of the many things I love about “Glee” is that it’s given so many Broadway people a wider audience and bigger paychecks.

We saw several younger members of the cast on and off Broadway in “Spring Awakening”.

We also knew Matthew Morrison from Broadway.  We had seen him in “Light in the Piazza” and maybe a couple of other things.  I hated that he had left “South Pacific” by the time we got to see it as we had been looking forward to seeing his Lt. Cable.

So I’m quite pleased to see him making it big now.  We already have our tickets to see him live, again, when he comes to Greensboro this summer.

Here is an interesting article about him I thought I would share…

 

Morrison is Glee’s break-out male star, and not just because he gets to share screen time and vicious dialogue with the best female character, comedy nasty cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester (played by Jane Lynch). On the set he’s known as “Triple Threat”: he can sing, he can dance, he can act. So, after rigorous training, can most of the other cast members. But not with the natural-born – and professionally honed – savvy of Morrison.

Prior to Glee, he was a Broadway stalwart with a decade of well-regarded, award-winning performances behind him, in shows including Hairspray, The Light in the Piazza and South Pacific – he was the male lead in the latter when Glee creator Ryan Murphy cast him in the show. He went from earning “something like 10 grand a week” to a figure he can describe only with a cat-that-got-the-cream smile.

With seven to 10 years’ age on most of his castmates, he is also a little more sanguine about the hoopla surrounding what has become one of the biggest TV shows in the world. “I’m so happy I got to live out my twenties in New York and be free to do whatever I wanted to do, not under that public eye and that scrutiny,” he says. “I feel bad for the rest of the guys that they’ll never experience that.”

via To sir, with love: How ‘Glee’ turned Matthew Morrison from Broadway stalwart to international star – Profiles, People – The Independent.

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April 9, 2011 · 11:22 am

Betty White on Lindsay Lohan and Charlie Sheen

She doesn’t pull any punches!

Betty White made her name back in the innocent days when TV stars knew their place.

‘We considered ourselves lucky to be on the box, never complained if a critic didn’t like us, dressed modestly and were always on our best behaviour in public,’ she recalls primly.

Now she’s 89, a big name for more than 40 years with The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Golden Girls and Malcolm In The Middle, and she doesn’t have much time for today’s celebrities.

The drinking, the misbehaving and the endless self-analysis . . . she can’t bear any of it. ‘They party too much, don’t learn their lines, are unprofessional and they grumble about everything. I think they are terribly ungrateful,’ says Betty, her eyes flashing.

‘I cannot stand the people who get wonderful starts in showbusiness, and who abuse it. Lindsay Lohan and Charlie Sheen, for example, although there are plenty of others, too. They are the most blessed people in the world and they don’t appreciate it.’

via Golden Girl Betty White, 89, has a new show and an eye for the boys | Mail Online.

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April 6, 2011 · 7:40 pm

The Glenn Beck Show is Going, Going, Gone…

Finally, some good news from Faux News….

Glenn Beck really has become toxic if Fox is getting rid of him…

CNN already fired him before he went to Fox….

He’s running out of networks, so he has to go out on his own…

From the Los Angeles Times:

Completing a swift rise and fall from TV stardom, controversial host Glenn Beck will lose his once-popular Fox News show later this year, the network announced Wednesday.

Beck’s 5 p.m. program, which earned scorn from liberals for its attacks on President Obama as well as its devotion to sometimes-obscure right-wing thinkers, was a top cable draw in 2009 and a signpost for the populist “tea party” movement in last year’s midterm elections, which dealt a ballot-box rebuke to the White House.

But ratings plummeted and advertisers bailed as Beck — a cherubic, salt-and-pepper-haired longtime radio host who has compared himself to a rodeo clown — increasingly pursued a hard-to-follow agenda that many found too conspiracy-minded. He also chafed his bosses at Fox News, who faulted him for spending too much time on his far-flung business operations and not enough on honing his TV presentation.

Both sides cobbled together a diplomatically worded statement Wednesday that noted Beck would “transition off” his daily program but stressed that the host and Fox News had reached a new deal for future, as-yet-unspecified projects. Joel Cheatwood, a senior Fox News executive, was hired away to help run Beck’s company, Mercury Radio Arts.

Fox News and Beck both declined to comment beyond the statement.

Roger Ailes, the Fox News chairman and chief executive who until recently had overridden doubts about Beck among his subordinates, said in the statement: “Glenn Beck is a powerful communicator, a creative entrepreneur and a true success by anybody’s standards.”

But there was little mistaking the upshot of the move: Less than three years after joining Fox News from CNN’s Headline News amid a burst of publicity, Beck is being booted off the air. His sinking ratings certainly didn’t help — they fell 32% for the first three months of this year, to 1.9 million total viewers, according to the Nielsen Co.

And after months of reported friction between the host and Fox News as well as an aggressive advertiser boycott after Beck dubbed President Obama a racist, analysts professed little surprise.

via Fox News to end Glenn Beck’s show – latimes.com.

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March 24, 2011 · 9:30 pm

CNN Tops Cable Ratings Amid World News Bounty – NYTimes.com

Great news about both the rise in ratings at CNN and their returned focus to hard news.  As a former news junkie, there just isn’t anything for me on TV anymore…

I like MSNBC, but they have to be the worst managed Network out there.  As their ratings started to improve, they let Keith get away.  And they basically ceded the weekends by putting that prison crap on all Saturday and Sunday.

They don’t seem to realize the Fox viewers just keep Fox on all the time.  I used to do that with CNN before it became so insipid.  MSNBC will never build that kind of loyalty when they aren’t even willing to program news all week….

Maybe CNN will come back to what it once was.  It would be nice to have at least one TV channel I could watch without wanting to throw things at the TV…

But that still won’t cure the issue with both the number of commercials and their vulgarity that appear on TV…but that’s another post….

CNN has been the big ratings gainer among the cable news networks during the extensive coverage of events in Japan and Libya in the last two weeks, and that success has come mostly at the expense of MSNBC, which has fallen into third place almost across the board because of CNN’s surge.

The disparity has been most noticeable during the last two weekends, when CNN has attracted huge audiences with continuing coverage of the international crises, beating even Fox News, the perennial leader among the news channels. Meanwhile MSNBC, sticking to a weekend lineup of recorded programs largely about problems in prisons, attracted only about a third as many viewers as CNN.

In prime time Saturday, CNN averaged 678,000 viewers among the audience most desired by news advertisers, ages 25 to 54. MSNBC averaged 254,000, while Fox News drew 353,000. On Sunday, CNN averaged 442,000 viewers; MSNBC, 298,000; and Fox News, 344,000.

Now CNN’s advantage has begun to carry over into weeknights. For more than two years, MSNBC has consistently beaten CNN in prime time on weeknights. But for March, CNN has moved ahead from 8 to 11 p.m., beating MSNBC in every hour among the 25-to-54 audience.

If the message seems to be that CNN cannot be matched in covering breaking international news, even MSNBC’s top executive is not disputing it.

“This is where CNN excels,” said Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC. “This is in their bull’s-eye, and they’ve done a great job. Even Fox News, which dominates them, gets beat by CNN at times like this.”

He called MSNBC’s weekend reliance on “Lockup,” its recorded documentary-style program about prisons, a “tricky situation.” He said, “This is our strategy for weekends, and it has worked well for us.” Its audience now “has an expectation” of seeing such programs on Saturday and Sunday nights, he said.

via CNN Tops Cable Ratings Amid World News Bounty – NYTimes.com.

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March 24, 2011 · 7:59 am

Fran Lebowitz: Public Speaking

Fran Lebowitz is one of my literary and cultural idols.  I’ve loved her since I discovered Metropolitan Life in College.

If you missed this great documentary about her by Martin Scorsese when it ran on HBO, it’s coming out on DVD in May.

I’ve already pre-ordered my copy for my archives…

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