I’m still way behind on posting, so here are a few more recent thoughts that I haven’t had time to post. Boston Public
On a recent Monday night I caught Boston Public. It was refreshing to see that it displayed some of the whimsy that made David E. Kelley shows so enjoyable in days gone by. The guest appearance by Verne Troyer (Mini Me) as a disgruntled former teacher was as good as anything that Kelley used to treat us with on Picket Fences. Actually, recent weeks of the show haven’t been all that bad. I guess once Kelley got over his Catholic Church bashing obsession he was able to get back to some real writing again. It’s worth noting that the past few weeks over on Kelley’s other Monday night drama, The Practice, have been about the best of the season. With some of the plot twists and shocks that made the show so original in seasons past. While this a couple of recent episode went back to the melodrama that has followed the show all season, I hope that both The Practice and Boston Public will manage to finish out the season on a strong note, so that their seasons won’t have been a complete waste. News War
I’m going to skip my thoughts on the now ended war on Iraq and go right to my thoughts of the coverage. Should Peter Arnett have been fired for his interview with Iraqi TV? Tough call. Sure he was hard on the US side, and sure it might have been questionable for him to have given the interview in the first place. But from the outside looking in, it seems like a little quid pro quo to me. Arnett seemed to get more access inside Iraq than other western journalist. Perhaps the price he had to pay for that access was the granting of the interview. Hardly an earth shattering trade off, if you ask me. If his responses weren’t coerced and he was answering as he honestly felt, I‘m not sure of the harm that he caused. I understand the argument that journalists are supposed to be impartial and not express their opinions, but if opinions coming through on the air were a cause for dismissal, then there would be a hell of a lot of journalists in the past couple of weeks who would have joined the unemployment lines. Almost the entire staff of CNN would be polishing their resumes at this point. In some cases it has just been subtle cheerleading. But in many cases it is a great deal more unprofessional. Paula Zahn is the queen of the loaded question, everything out of her mouth seemed to be geared towards looking as pro war as possible. Then we have the astoundingly blatant Lou Dobbs. How in hell his show can be referred to as a “news hour” is beyond my comprehension. This guy might as well be on the payroll of the Pentagon he is so one-sided. If anything good comes out of the Arnett story, I sincerely hope that CNN takes a cue from NBC and cuts Dobbs loose as soon as possible. I’m sure if I had written this a couple of weeks ago that this would be the point where I could fill several paragraphs gleefully pointing out the complete incompetence of Connie Chung and the fact that she really has no business being a news anchor. Fortunately someone at CNN finally decided to jettison her. It was one of the first good moves that they have made in a long time, but long overdue. And speaking of anchors who need to be jettisoned someplace, let’s turn our attention to Geraldo Rivera and his latest stunt. The guy has been a joke for the better part of his career. And while he did do some brilliant journalism years ago, it is too long ago for any network to justify having him on their staff. His stunt involving being a bit too generous with his viewers in terms of troop position and movement just confirms that stroking his own ego is his one and only priority. Why the Pentagon didn’t boot his ass back to the US within hours is a mystery to me. Instead we had a couple of days of conflicting stories out of Iraq over whether or not he had been asked to leave. Quite frankly, if I was one of the soldiers whose location and safety had possibly been compromised by Rivera’s grandstanding, I doubt I would be too confident in the leadership abilities of my bosses in Washington after the way they waffled on what should have been such an easy call. For his part, Rivera first denied reports that he was being booted by the military instead blaming reports on “rats” from his old network (presumably referring to NBC). Way to go Geraldo, you were a class act right to the end. As for Fox News, who clearly should sever ties with Rivera, it was interesting to check out their website as this story was developing. The story about Peter Arnett being fired by one of their competitors was one of the headlines on their main page, yet strangely enough their own dipstick’s jump into the hot water was nowhere to be found. Got to love that fair and balanced reporting Fox. Barbara Walters
A couple of weeks ago I happened to catch the opening few minutes of The View when Barbara Walters and her cohorts discuss the top stories of the day. Not surprisingly, Peter Arnett and Geraldo Rivera ‘s names came up since it was just days after Arnett was fired NBC, and Geraldo was still waiting to see if he would be bounced from Iraq. Even less surprising was the fact that Arnett’s termination and the suggestion that the same thing should happen to Rivera got generous amounts of applause from the audience. But one thing did surprise me. In discussing Arnett’s interview, Barbara Walters questioned why he would grant an interview to “the enemy”. Maybe I missed a little something along the way, but I’ve always thought that journalists at least try to be balanced and impartial. By throwing terms around like “enemy”, it seems that at least part of Ms. Walters’ impartiality has been compromised. While I understand that she is American and therefore very likely privately supports the American troops, that one slip of the tongue on her part could make someone question her impartiality down the road if she finds herself reporting on a particular sensitive issue involving Iraq.

¶ 4/27/2003 06:14:00 PM //

I was under the weather one day last week, but it ended up turning out to be a good thing for me. By sheer coincidence, I was flipping by TBS and discovered on that very morning that they were going to begin re-running Dawson’s Creek. While the later seasons of the show have been nothing but another nighttime soap opera, the first couple of seasons were a whole other matter. Watching the first four episodes of the series again made me remember just how brilliant the writing was during that first season. Sure the cast used a few too many big words, but a show where characters have an actual vocabulary has always been a plus in my books. And sure, Dawson was too uptight for his own good, although I would have to admit to seeing a little bit of myself in him. But the perfect casting and the smart dialogue always transcended any problems the show had. And, I’ll admit it, Katie Holmes as the girl every guy only wishes that he had living next door to him helped make the show for me. It’s no surprise to me that as the show is airing the end of its run on The WB that she is the one with the most solid film career out of her talented co-workers. Sadly, the show lost most of its luster for me in the seasons that followed, a fact that I attribute mostly to the fact that the show’s creator, Kevin Williamson, moved on to other projects. He was the creative genius that made those early episodes so special. I stopped watching somewhere around the third season I think. The fact that the show became more and more like every other teen drama on TV diminished my interest in it. I’ll no doubt try to watch the later episodes of the show that I skipped now that it is readily available in rerun form. But even if they are no better this time around than they were originally, I will still have that opening season to look forward too again and again. For me, it stands as possibly one of the best single seasons of any show on television. No doubt I’ll tune in to the final few episodes that air on The WB in the coming weeks to watch the show’s finale. And no doubt I’ll be a little sad to see it go, even if I haven’t been a regular or even semi-regular viewer in the last couple of years. Although I suspect I would be a little sadder had the quality of the show from season one been maintained throughout the entire run. At the very least, I’m confident that the final episode will be a memorable one since Kevin Williamson will return to pen one last script for the show that he created.

¶ 4/15/2003 06:09:00 PM //

I’m running a way behind in posting blog comments, but I have been jotting down notes, so here are some random thoughts about things that have occurred over the past weeks. Today Exclusive
So on in the days following the rescue of Elizabeth Smart, NBC’s Today show aired an “exclusive” interview with former hostage Patricia Hearst. They made a point to have a big “Today Exclusive” banner prominently displayed during the interview. My beef is that either the definition of the word exclusive has somehow changed or NBC takes its viewers for idiots. Because I could have sworn that just the night before Ms. Hearst had done an interview with CNN’s Larry King on the same topic. In fact, the questions on Today were so damn similar to the ones King had asked the previous night that they sounded as if some Today producer had just copied down the questions while watching King’s show and decided to recycle them. Latoya Jackson
You know a show is desperate for a co-host when they bring in LaToya Jackson. That’s just what The View did a couple of weeks ago. I’m not sure what the hell they were expecting when they decided to put this air-headed bimbo on live TV for an hour. Actually I doubt they were thinking. This girl makes Anna Nicole Smith look bright. But then again, how could The View have known that? It’s not like there have been countless reports about her wacky behavior over the last decade. Oh wait, yes there have. In the grand scale of things, she is just slightly below her brother Michael on the freak meter. Martin Sheen
It appears that the Visa ad featuring Martin Sheen and his son Charlie in a video store is no longer airing. Visa says that the ad had run its course. Some question the timing since the ad was pulled as war in Iraq was becoming immanent. Is it just coincidental that the ad featuring the very anti-war Sheen ran its course at the same time war was about to break out? Who knows, but Visa would be making a huge mistake not to bring the ad backing the future, it was about the best ad that they’ve had since Jerry Seinfeld stopped doing commercials for them.

¶ 4/15/2003 05:59:00 PM //