Since the ghost of a writer's room presence from Ellen DeGeneres's past has come back to haunt the picket-line-circumnavigating chant-target—and in doing so, reopened the age-old debate about how much writer-abuse is too much writer-abuse when your name's in the title—the first new episode of The Ellen DeGeneres Show has aired.
Hoping to salvage a reputation damaged by the emergence of an audio recording in which he repeatedly detailed his racial preference for potential daughters-in-law, Dog the Bounty Hunter threw himself into the bony embrace of CNN softballer Larry King last night, trusting that the hurt he's feeling would dissipate to near nothingness by the end of the first commercial break.
Just as the love story between illustrator Patrick Moberg and his now-identified mysterious subway love interest winds its way to its cloying and crushing denouement, "The Morning Show" announced that the young subway-taker's house just burned down. Also, Camille Hayton, as Moberg's crush is named, is Australian. As we knew, she's an intern. (This is like three strikes in our book but whatever.) Also, though this isn't addressed, the only extent picture of her is one in which she clutches a white rose in her teeth, which is just odd.
Super-cougar publisher and current Sirius radio chat-show host Judith Regan writes in the December Harper's Bazaar that , after she was fired from her own HarperCollins imprint, she went off to China and found some of herself. Then she came back to New York and enjoyed a cathartic moment when she belted out "My Way" in a downtown karaoke bar." Well! We are extremely please to report that, while she declined to reenact that performance for us, Ms. Regan has sent us the audio of her version of "My Way." (Yes. We are being serious.) Honestly, it is amazing. Not "Chocolate Rain" amazing—more like Jennifer Hudson amazing. We made a video of the first half! [Karaoke video: Blakeley/Stein Film Starship]
Last night on the morally vexed television show "Kid Nation," viewers were introduced to members of the upper class: Natasha from Miami and Mingle from Illinois. According to Alex, a nine-year-old from Reno who is never seen without sunglasses, they're like the "Paris and Nicole." Later in the conversation, Alex confesses he doesn't really know what that means. Of course he wouldn't! His favorite movie stars are Gene Kelly and Ginger Rogers. You stay gold, tiny unicorn angel!
The nonwhite Greek chorus of the candycoated Upper East Side universe of 'Gossip Girl' giggled as they snapped cellphone pix of Serena and Dan's makeout session, but once more, their behind the scenes plot-advancing role was not rewarded with lines of actual dialogue. Will we ever be allowed to know the inner lives of Black Girl and Asian Girl? Or will their exploits continue to be overshadowed by the forbidden love affair between Dan and Serena, who come from such different worlds that they go to the same school and also their parents used to bone? Good thing the new Judith Butler-Gayatri Spivak book comes out the day before next week's episode: Maybe that will help us puzzle things through.
YouTube founder Steve Chen, on the Oprah show, recites the same old tale he and Chad Hurley have been trained to give about how YouTube got his start: Chen threw a dinner party, friends filmed each other with videocameras, and then realized the videos were hard to share. What the two didn't tell Oprah: YouTube's third cofounder, Jawed Karim, claims the dinner party never happened, and he came up with the idea for a video-sharing site.
If only all guests of The View carried on with the candor of a Damon Wayans, whose folksy take on such hot-button topics as Don Imus's return to radio ("When he called them 'nappy-headed hos,' I went, 'Wow. He's right!'"), and the lack of available women possessing the basic, barefoot culinary skills he demands in a partner, energized the typically moribund proceedings.
In an effort to document for posterity how some of the striking writers tasked with pacing the sidewalks outside of Hollywood's temporarily stalled dream-fabricating factories spent this third, historic day of picketing, we dispatched Defamer videographer Molly McAleer to the Paramount lot, hoping that her bribes of tasty donuts (the beer we offered was less well-received; we suppose the drinking has to wait until happy hour at Lucy's across the street) would encourage some of the protesting scribes to open up for the camera.
So maybe America's Most Smartest Model isn't the greatest reality show of all time. But it's on TV, it requires no Guild writers, and at least it has a goal in life—finding the most smartest model or whatever—so we think it deserves the occasional scrutiny of our ever-diminishing attention span, now hovering somewhere between that of a gifted four-year-old and a weimaraner's.
Unseated from the highest position of the Top 200 album charts because of a lousy, 11th hour reversal of Billboard's "no retail-giant exclusives" policy that instead gave the spot to the Eagles' "Long Road Out of Wal-Mart," Britney Spears will have to settle with the knowledge that her new album came out a solid number two.
YouTube cofounders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen went on Oprah today. Most of it was eminently skippable pap, the kind Hurley and Chen have been trained by Google PR to recite. But the money shot? Well, it was when Winfrey, who's worth $1.5 billion, asked Hurley and Chen whether Google's $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube had changed their lives. Oh, no, the pair demurred. They don't think about money. They were much too busy working on new features. And going on Oprah.
In troubling times like these, we realize that we can always depend on frosted-tipped E!biquity Ryan Seacrest to provide us with some much-needed comfort, knowing that within seconds of hearing his reassuring, silky voice, we'll be gently hypnotized into believing everything is going to be OK.
If it's strike carnage you seek, look no further than today's episode of The View: Stripped of its guild-member producers pumping meaningful dialogue into their earpieces, a Hot Topics segment on the writers strike forced the hosts to explain the labor impasse using their own, barely coherent grasp of the issues. (Particularly immaterial was Joy Behar's "Surveillance Cameras: What's With Them?!" contribution to the ongoing debate.) In moments of total daytime TV chaos like these, we typically rely on Barbara Walters to set this runaway locomotive back on its rails. Oddly enough, however, she remained uncharacteristically quiet during the segment—and, we might add, looking in her old age more and more like Tori Spelling every day.
The genius of MTV's reality-TV programming is that it's not that real. The Hills itself is — get this — a faux reality show. But will an audience tuning into the passive escapism of The Hills, Pimp My Ride or Laguna Beach really want to go to the effort of logging onto a virtual world? Based on MTV's new advertising campaign, we're guessing the answer is "No." The music television pioneer has taken to airing 30-second TV commercials promoting Virtual Hills, the Second Life-like counterpart of the serialized docusoap. Notice how this machinima spot captures all the wit and charm of the Virtual Hills. So this is a fake real TV ad about the real fake version, online, of a fake real show on TV. Post-post-postmodern genius.
