Fox adds a couple for fall, puts 24 in play with two-hour prequel
05/15/08 11:25 AM
By ED BARK
No. 1-rated Fox, with just two new series for this fall, made bigger news Thursday with announcements of a cancelation and a prequel.
The casualty is Back to You, last fall's highest-profile freshman comedy series due to the teaming of Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton as battling Pittsburgh news anchors.
The big twist is 24, which makes an early return on Nov. 23 with a self-standing, two-hour Sunday night movie that Fox says "will set the stage and raise the stakes" for January's launch of the show's "Day 7" on Monday nights.
24 didn't air at all this season because of the writers' strike. "We think we can jump-start it," Fox entertainment president Kevin Reilly said during a teleconference with TV critics. The 24 movie, being shot on location in South Africa, is "a really cool piece of business," he said.
An accompanying Fox news release says that Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) will battle yet another international crisis while incoming new president Allison Taylor (Cherry Jones) prepares for her inauguration. As announced earlier, Carlos Bernard is returning to the cast as the previously presumed dead Tony Almeida. CTU otherwise in fact is dead, and Day 7 will begin with Bauer on trial.
Back to You, which still has three unaired episodes, failed to fulfill the network's high expectations after a "major marketing launch," Reilly said.
"The show did not seem to be striking a chord" and its creative direction looked wobbly, he said. The overall expense of a high-profile cast and older-skewing audience demographics also worked against Back to You.
"It was a factor, not the ultimate factor," Reilly said.
Fox executives also confirmed that they'll be tinkering with American Idol during the off-season after a ratings downturn for its seventh edition, which climaxes Wednesday with a showdown between the show's King Davids -- Archuleta and Cook.
"I would say I'm satisfied creatively, but not necessarily satisfied with the audience," said Fox entertainment chairman Peter Liguori. "I do think the show has somewhat suffered with the post-strike malaise."
Plans to keep Idol clicking as "the most relevant, 'zeitgeisty' show on TV" do not include the ejection of judge Paula Abdul, whom various reports again have put on the chopping block.
"We love Paula. She's coming back," Liguori said unequivocally.
"It's not like it's in its death throes," Reilly added.
Fox otherwise is accentuating "stability" this fall after the writers' strike impaired programming development at all five major broadcast networks. Fox, NBC, ABC and CBS are launching a combined 13 new series, easily their lowest total ever. The CW, which doesn't play in their league, will have three newcomers.
Fox's biggest fall splash will be Fringe, from Lost creator J. J. Abrams.
A passenger jet again figures prominently in the proceedings. This time it's an international flight that lands at Boston's Logan Airport with all of its inhabitants victims of "grisly deaths."
An investigation ensues, with Fox promising a drama that "will thrill, terrify and explore the blurring line between science fiction and reality." Fringe's ensemble cast includes Joshua Jackson (Pacey from Dawson's Creek) and Blair Brown (The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd).
Fox also will pair the returning 'Til Death -- star Brad Garrett must have compromising pictures of Fox execs -- with the new workplace comedy Do Not Disturb. It's set in a hot, hip New York hotel, with Jerry O'Connell playing the place's "egotistical, hyper-stylish, detail-oriented" general manager. Graybeard Robert Wagner occasionally will drop in as the hotel's owner.
Fox's tentative January plans include removing two fall returnees -- Prison Break, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles -- and replacing them on Monday nights with 24 and the new Dollhouse from Buffy, the Vampire Slayer maestro Joss Whedon.
Buffy alum Eliza Dushku will star as Echo, who's an "Active." She's also a "member of a highly illegal and underground group who have had their personalities wiped clean so they can be imprinted with any number of new personas." Etc.
Besides Back to You, Fox has canceled New Amsterdam, Canterbury's Law, Unhitched, the Return of Jezebel James and K-Ville.
Here's the fall lineup, with new shows in boldface:
MONDAY
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Prison Break
TUESDAY
House
Fringe
WEDNESDAY
Bones
'Til Death
Do Not Disturb
THURSDAY
The Moment of Truth
Kitchen Nightmares
FRIDAY
Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?
Don't Forget the Lyrics!
SATURDAY
Cops
Cops
America's Most Wanted: America Fights Back
SUNDAY
The OT (NFL post-game show)
The Simpsons
King of the Hill
Family Guy
American Dad
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Laughter still an option on CBS
05/14/08 09:08 AM
By ED BARK
CBS is going cuckoo for comedy, at least compared to its two longest standing rivals.
The network's new fall schedule, announced Wednesday, will include two new sitcoms for a grand total of six.
ABC's announced autumn look is without any new comedies, and just one overall -- the returning Samantha Who? NBC, which unfurled a 52-week schedule in early April, has four comedies set for fall, including lone newcomer Kath & Kim.
CBS also is adding three new drama series and giving The Unit a reprieve after furloughing it for much of this season. The military drama will move to Sunday nights at 9 (central), following Cold Case.
Benched until midseason is Rules of Engagement, which had been performing well as part of CBS' longrunning Monday night comedy bloc. The network also will re-open Wednesday for laughs, but just during the night's first hour.
Canceled are Shark, Moonlight, Welcome to the Captain, Kid Nation, Cane and Viva Laughlin.
Here are CBS' five new fall series:
Worst Week (comedy) -- An entertainment magazine editor named Sam Briggs (Kyle Bornheimer) aims to please his girlfriend's parents, but "instead becomes a one-man wrecking crew whenever he's around them." Veteran Kurtwood Smith segues from sourball dad "Red" Foreman on That '70s Show to sourball dad Dick Clayton.
Project Gary (comedy) -- Jay Mohr forsakes a throwaway recurring role on CBS' Ghost Whisperer to star as a recently divorced painting contractor with a controlling ex-wife. Their 15-year-marriage has yielded two kids, one politically correct and the other socially awkward. More trouble ensues -- and perhaps laughter, too -- when Gary Barnes (Mohr) begins dating a single mom while former spouse Allison (Paula Marshall) hooks up with their mutual shrink.
The Mentalist (drama) -- Simon Baker, featured in two previous CBS dramas (The Guardian, Smith), returns to the fold as detective Patrick Jane, who solves crimes by using his "razor sharp skills of observation." But a prototypical "no-nonsense" senior female agent (Robin Tunney from Prison Break) bristles at his "theatrics, narcissism and dangerous lack of boundaries."
Eleventh Hour (drama) -- Producer Jerry Bruckheimer, whose string of CBS hits includes Without A Trace and all three CSI series, strikes again with the saga of a "brilliant biophysicist and special science advisor" who investigates various crises and oddities. His name is Dr. Jacob Hood, he's played by Rufus Sewell (The Illusionist) and the show is adapted from a British miniseries.
The Ex List ("comedic drama") -- A single, 30-something business owner named Bella Bloom (Elizabeth Reaser from Grey's Anatomy) learns from a psychic that she's already dated her eventual hubby. Shades of Fox's New Amsterdam, she'll have to find him in a year or be doomed -- yawn -- to live alone forever.
CBS also has ordered a midseason drama, Harper's Island. Premise: a murder mystery is hatched during week-long wedding festivities on a remote, picturesque island made infamous by a homicidal rampage seven years earlier. In other words, the perfect getaway spot.
NBC's new fall lineup looks like this, with new series in boldface in case you've already forgotten them:
MONDAY
The Big Bang Theory
How I Met Your Mother
Two and a Half Men
Worst Week
CSI: Miami
TUESDAY
NCIS
The Mentalist
Without A Trace
WEDNESDAY
The New Adventures of Old Christine
Project Gary
Criminal Minds
CSI: NY
THURSDAY
Survivor
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
Eleventh Hour
FRIDAY
Ghost Whisperer
The Ex List
Numb3rs
Saturday
Crimetime Saturday
Crimetime Saturday
48 Hours Mystery
SUNDAY
60 Minutes
The Amazing Race
Cold Case
The Unit
CW adds three new fall series while outsourcing Sunday
05/13/08 06:11 PM
By ED BARK
The CW, ink-a-dink-a-doo of the five English language broadcast networks, nonetheless will have one more new fall series than ABC.
But it's also subtracting a night -- Sunday -- and turning it over to Media Rights Capital, which will announce a separate schedule later.
One of CW's new dramas, 90210, is billed as a "contemporary spin-off" of the old Fox series. It's also touted as "the most eagerly anticipated series of the fall," which it really isn't, but who cares?
TV vets Lori Loughlin and Jessica Walter will join a new cast of teens, with "guest star" Jennie Garth reprising her old character, Kelly Taylor, who's now a high school guidance counselor.
Also added is Surviving the Filthy Rich, starring JoAnna Garcia (Reba) as a Yale-educated journalism grad who finds herself "slaving away at a tabloid rag" until getting fired. So she junks the profession to become a live-in tutor to the twin teen granddaughters of a wealthy Palm Beach cosmetics mogul.
The third entry is Stylista, a new reality competition series being paired with the returning America's Next Top Supermodel. Eleven "fashion enthusiasts" fight for an editorial job at Elle, with the magazine's "fashion news director," Anne Slowey, cracking the satin whip.
Last year's critically praised Reaper will return, but not until midseason. Not in CW's current plans are Beauty and the Geek, Girlfriends, Aliens in America and Friday Night Smackdown!, whose producers couldn't reach a new deal with the network. Incredibly, One Tree Hill is still part of the schedule while the network's remaining comedies, headed by Everybody Hates Chris, get shuffled from Mondays to Fridays.
Here's the new fall lineup, with new series in boldface:
MONDAY
Gossip Girl
One Tree Hill
TUESDAY
90210
Surviving the Filthy Rich
WEDNESDAY
America's Next Top Model
Stylista
THURSDAY
Smallville
Supernatural
FRIDAY
Everybody Hates Chris
The Game
America's Next Top Model (repeats)
ABC's "new" fall season -- more or less
05/13/08 09:04 AM
By ED BARK
No big-time broadcast network has ever stood this pat.
ABC's new fall lineup, announced Tuesday morning, makes room for just two new prime-time series, with only one featuring actors and their roles.
That would be Life on Mars, whose executive producers include Boston Legal creator David E. Kelley. Shades of NBC's canceled Journeyman, it's about a police detective who's mysteriously transported back to 1973 after a car wreck.
Slotted on Thursdays at 9 p.m. (central) following Grey's Anatomy, the hour-long drama is adapted from a same-named BBC series. Featured detective Sam Tyler is played by Jason O'Mara, who played recurring character Stuart Maxson on ABC's canceled Men In Trees.
ABC also has dipped into the mostly mindless Ashton Kutcher well for the reality series Opportunity Knocks, which leads off Tuesday's schedule.
"Hollywood will invade a suburban neighborhood and each week one lucky family will play the game of a lifetime in front of all their friends and neighbors," the network says. They'll have a chance to win an array of prizes packed into a semi-truck, but first must answer trivia questions "based directly on their lives, each other and articles found in and around their home." Kutcher's previous producing efforts include Punk'd, Beauty and the Geek and NBC's short-lived The Real Wedding Crashers.
ABC's cancelation corral houses the aforementioned Men In Trees, plus Women's Murder Club (somewhat surprisingly), Miss Guided, Big Shots, Cavemen, Carpoolers, Notes from the Underbelly, October Road, Cashmere Mafia and the big-money game show Duel.
Just one half-hour comedy, Samantha Who?, has made ABC's fall cut. That's a telling turn of events for a network with a long legacy of comedy hits. In the 1993-94 season, ABC still had four sitcoms -- Home Improvement, Roseanne, Grace Under Fire and Coach -- among Nielsen's Top 10 most popular programs.
The network plans to again add According to Jim at some point in mid-season. And it's picked up Scrubs for later in the year after NBC dropped the long-running comedy. That's largely because ABC Studios produces it and wants to get an extra season in the books for syndication purposes.
ABC also announced two new midseason series. One of them is an untitled Kutcher project built around "a beauty pageant unlike any you've ever seen." The other is The Goode Family, an animated half-hour from Austin-based King of the Hill creator Mike Judge, who will voice a Dad named Gerald. ABC says the Goodes are "obsessed with doing the 'right' thing, whether it's environmentally, politically or socially. Unfortunately, their efforts often have unintended comic consequences." Wah, wah, wah.
As with this season, Lost again is scheduled to return in January with an uninterrupted string of episodes. The Bachelor and Primetime: What Would You Do?, from ABC's news division, also are slated for later.
Here's ABC's fall lineup, with new series in boldface:
MONDAY
Dancing with the Stars
Samantha Who?
Boston Legal (new night)
TUESDAY
Opportunity Knocks
Dancing with the Stars results show
Eli Stone (new night)
WEDNESDAY
Pushing Daisies
Private Practice
Dirty Sexy Money
THURSDAY
Ugly Betty
Grey's Anatomy
Life on Mars
FRIDAY
Wife Swap (new night)
Supernanny (new night)
20/20
SATURDAY
Saturday Night College Football
SUNDAY
America's Funniest Home Videos
Extreme Makeover: Home Edition
Desperate Housewives
Brothers & Sisters
Jimmy gets the job
05/12/08 11:48 AM
By ED BARK
Long-rumored to be Conan O'Brien's replacement on NBC's Late Night talk show, Saturday Night Live alum Jimmy Fallon officially got the gig Monday.
He's the hand-picked choice of SNL creator Lorne Michaels, who also tabbed a then virtually unknown O'Brien to replace David Letterman when he jumped to CBS in 1993.
"When you're good at it, it's the last job you'll ever have," Fallon said at a Manhattan press conference also made available to TV critics across the country. "You started my career. You might as well end it," he then told Michaels.
"NBC has identified the last piece in its late night succession plan," the network said in its official news release. But plenty of uncertainty remains.
It's been nearly five years since NBC announced that O'Brien would replace Jay Leno as Tonight Show host in 2009. But the exact takeover date is still up in the air, as is Fallon's debut on Late Night. Meanwhile, NBC still wants to somehow keep Leno on its team, although what the Peacock could offer him remains a puzzlement.
It's far more likely that Leno will join a rival network in hopes of re-dominating the late night ratings. He continues to beat Letterman by a substantial margin in most weeks, and the winning streak continued during the recent writers' strike. That was an impressive feat, considering that Letterman's show made a separate agreement that allowed him to book big name guests while Leno persevered without his writers and with little star power.
Fallon, 33, joined SNL in 1998 and became best-known for co-anchoring the show's Weekend Update segment with Tina Fey before leaving in 2006. He's since had a less than successful feature film career.
"It's going to be a grind," Fallon said of his return to a familiar building -- NBC's famed "30 Rock" studios -- but in an unfamiliar setting. His only previous talk show hosting experience came when he guest-hosted CBS' Late Show with David Letterman in 2003 while the incumbent recuperated from heart bypass surgery.
"It's one of the best opportunities you could ever get . . . I want it to happen tomorrow," Fallon said. "I can't wait. I've been doing monologues in my living room for the past three years."
For now, though, "it's just kind of surreal," he said.
Michaels said the challenge for any television show, particularly in late night, is to lure younger viewers away from their computers.
"The enemy," he said, isn't rival networks, but Guitar Hero and other diversions.
Fallon likely will take over Late Night sometime within the first six months of 2009, NBC executives said. The duration of his deal wasn't disclosed, but Fallon joked, "I have the same contract as Willard Scott -- 150 years."
***NBC also announced Monday that it's getting into business with Ryan Seacrest.
The ubiquitous American Idol host and E! network personality will be co-executive producing the reality series Are You a Momma's Boy?, set to premiere "on the heels" of NBC's August presentation of the summer Olympics in Beijing.
The Peacock says that "tension mounts" when moms and their eligible bachelor sons are housed together with several potential brides. "The women will first have to get by mom," NBC says.
Seacrest says he's a "true momma's boy" who always wonders whether his own mother will approve of his professional and personal decisions.
"She is the most important woman in my life and she is never short of opinions," he says.
Somewhere Simon Cowell is laughing uproariously.
Idol: Evicted Jason Castro seems glad all over
05/08/08 06:58 AM
By ED BARK
Rockwall's Jason Castro got sent home Wednesday night after becoming the first finalist to openly plead American Idol fatigue.
The dreadlocked 21-year-old essentially wrote his own obit the night before with dreadful performances of "I Shot the Sheriff" and "Mr. Tambourine Man."
"Someone told me that I shot the tambourine man yesterday," he told host Ryan Seacrest Wednesday, referring to the lyrics he forgot before judge Simon Cowell began lowering the guillotine by telling him, "Jason, I'd pack your suitcase."
Castro ultimately found himself paired with veteran Bottom Two-er Syesha Mercado, who's been coming on strong while he kept regressing.
"I almost feel like you're relieved," Seacrest said after sparing Mercado.
"A little," he said. "There's three songs next week. I don't know what I would have done."
Castro had greased his skids with recent comments in Entertainment Weekly, where he admitted to struggling with Neil Diamond's songs the previous week and not really caring all that much how his performance fared.
"What happens happens," he told the magazine. "I'll sing and if people like it, they like it. And if they don't, they don't. I'm kind of ready to go home."
It at least was a refreshing departure from typical down-the-stretch Idol swan songs. Brooke White, the eventual evictee during Diamond week, had sobbed herself into a pool of self-pity when Seacrest put it to her. Castro exited pickin' and grinnin' after playing around with a final performance of "I Shot."
Earlier in Wednesday's show, a phone-in questioner asked the four finalists what their biggest challenges had been.
"Just the brain bein' dead," Castro replied.
He later told Seacrest, "I think it's just gettin' tough for me. My inexperience is showin' up."
Rockwall is still planning some homecoming festivities for Castro while Mercado, David Archuleta and David Cook brace themselves for another pivotal performance show.
Wonder if he'll even watch.
Babs and Oprah: two queen bees spoonin' the honey
05/07/08 09:41 AM
By ED BARK
Television's two most powerful women, Barbara Walters and Oprah Winfrey, did a little business with each other Tuesday.
Walters has a new, revelatory book to sell. Winfrey had a big interview to get. So Babs made her first promotional stop on The Oprah Winfrey Show, where the host primed the pump by telling viewers, "You know you've arrived when Barbara comes a callin' "
Babs came a callin' after being introduced as "The First Lady of Television," a title she holds only because she's been around longer than the still incredibly influential Winfrey.
Copies of Walters' Audition assuredly are already flying off bookstore shelves, in no small part because the most potent bookseller in the land -- Oprah Winfrey -- ordered her viewers at show's end to "Go get it."
She then bestowed a cheek-to-cheek hug after twice telling Walters, "Good job."
Yes, they definitely got the job done during a genuinely intriguing hour in which Walters decorously dished about Star Jones, Rosie O'Donnell, Donald Trump, her mentally challenged sister, Jackie and most important of all, her two-year affair in the mid-1970s with then U.S. Sen. Edward W. Brooke, who was married at the time.
Winfrey was one of the very first to know of this after getting galleys of the book in preparation for her interview with Walters.
"How did you pull that off at the time?" she asked.
"Were you surprised?" Walters rejoined, seemingly impressed with her ability to hide a dalliance that she's certain would have ruined both of their careers if made public.
Walters good-naturedly balked when Winfrey referred to her as Brooke's "mistress." No, a mistress is someone who's "taken care of" financially, she said. And Walters, now 78, already was drawing a nice paycheck as the trailblazing co-host of NBC's Today show.
She wouldn't tell Winfrey whether she loved Brooke. But in her recollection, Walters finally told him, "I can't sneak around anymore."
Brooke then told his wife of the affair, and their resultant divorce doomed his bid for re-election.
"Do you regret the affair?" Winfrey asked her.
"I regret that he didn't get re-elected," Walters replied. She's ever the pragmatist.
The guest wore white, the host wore light pink and the studio audience was kept at a distance. There were no questions from the rabble, just Babs and Oprah in their one-on-one element. Winfrey probed, but never harshly. She's good at this. Very good.
Walters says she's made peace with both Jones and O'Donnell, both of whom contributed mightily to The View before turning on her.
"In a lot of ways, Oprah, she (O'Donnell) began to think of me as her mother," Walters said. And you know how it sometimes can go with moms and daughters. Their relationship eventually came to a boil during "that terrible incident in the dressing room," which Walters otherwise won't detail.
To hear Walters tell it, she's incapable of holding a grudge, preferring to hold fast to the better angels in people she's known, loved and sometimes discarded.
Older and wiser now, she's learned that "you must be kind," Walters said at interview's end. "I'm not going to be a very good interviewer anymore. I'm getting too soft. That I know for sure."
As Walters herself would say, it was all very "fasssss-inating." Next stop -- tonight's (May 7th) ABC special, Audition: Barbara Walters' Journey. And on Monday, Larry King Live.
That's my boy: Son's troubled presidency burnishes his father's
05/05/08 04:48 PM
By ED BARK
It can't be of much comfort to him, but it almost goes without saying.
What George H.W. Bush didn't do in Iraq can't help but compare favorably with what his son, George W., is doing now.
The latest in PBS' well-received The Presidents series doesn't have to do much at all to compare and contrast. The senior president Bush's former secretary of state, James A. Baker III, notes in retrospect that he used to always get asked, "Why didn't you guys take care of Saddam Hussein when you had a chance?"
"Well, guess what?" he continues with some relish. "Nobody asks me that question anymore."
Premiering Monday, May 5th at 8 p.m. (central) and concluding at the same time Tuesday, the three-and-a-half-hour George H.W. Bush doesn't exactly gild his one-term presidency. It is in large part rehabilitative, though, with critics far outnumbered by admirers, including Barbara Bush, their son, Jeb, and their only daughter, Doro Bush Koch in new interviews for this film. Occasionally seen, but only fleetingly heard in archival footage, is the sitting president Bush.
The Presidents , presented under the long-running American Experience series umbrella, previously has looked in-depth at the formative years and administrations of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry S Truman, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
Multi-part American Experience films on John F. Kennedy and Theodore Roosevelt also are part of the series' history. But unlike the aforementioned biographies, they're not scheduled to be re-deployed on PBS as part of a "multimedia election-year project."
George H.W. Bush, written and directed by Austin Hoyt, begins on a heroic note with the now oft-told story of the young Navy pilot being shot down and then rescued after a World War II bombing run. His mission indeed was accomplished before his plane became inoperative. The young Bush's two crewmen didn't survive, though, and he understandably has been reluctant over the years to revisit that traumatic day.
George already had met Barbara as a teenager before he shipped overseas.
"Well, he was the handsomest living human I ever saw," she says, "and maybe the nicest . . . I fell in love at first sight -- practically."
Bush is portrayed as both a politician of expediency and of principle. In his early years as one of Texas' bare handful of Republicans, he reached out to bigoted John Birchers in hopes of forming a bigger tent. An old friend eerily calls him "a uniter."
But once elected to Congress from a Houston district, Bush quickly risked his seat by backing President Johnson's open housing bill.
"Dad got a lot of death threats," remembers daughter Doro. But the film says he bravely took on his detractors at a public meeting in which many of them came away admiring his courage.
Bush eventually lost a run for the U.S. Senate to Democrat Lloyd Bentsen, prompting him to successively accept appointments as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, chairman of the Republican National Committee, U.S. ambassador to China and head of the Central Intelligence Agency.
He collected various political IOUs along the way, repeatedly expressing his willingness to serve at the call of the President because to do otherwise would be unpatriotic. It culminated in his successful vice presidential runs with Reagan on the 1980 and '84 Republican ticket.
"In many ways George Bush was what Ronald Reagan pretended to be," says narrator David Ogden Stiers, the former M*A*S*H co-star. That's because Bush in fact was both a war hero and star athlete while the bossman only played them on film. Bush also had a happy, fulfilling family life; Reagan preached family values but had recurring problems with his children, as did wife, Nancy.
Monday's Part One skimps on Bush's controversial 1988 campaign for the presidency, in which he defeated Michael Dukakis after portraying him as soft on crime. His televised, "Iran/Contra affair" dust-up with CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather is omitted completely. As are his debates with Dukakis or his earlier 1984 struggles in dealing with Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman ever to run on a major party presidential ticket.
Through it all, historians and biographers say Bush went for the jugular only as a last resort. Still, he also seemed all too malleable, leading to George Will's famous "The Sound of a Lapdog" column and Newsweek magazine's characterization of him as a "wimp."
Tuesday's Part 2 details President Bush's key role in ending the Cold War after Reagan "did all the exciting, glitzy stuff," in the view of Colin Powell. The senior Bush also rode his decisive handling of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait to a then record approval rating of 89 percent.
But a souring economy and Bush's "Read My Lips, No New Taxes" pledge at the 1992 Republican National Convention would quickly undermine his bid for a second term. Says biographer Timothy Naftali, "He never connected with the American people . . . George Bush was not his own best friend when he tried to explain George Bush."
His defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton, with help from cantankerous third-party candidate Ross Perot, left Bush dazed and depressed for a while. But the pain eased, and "I now think we were saved the four most miserable years of our life," Barbara Bush says.
The film ends sentimentally after several Bush admirers stand tall for him and extoll his administration as far more successful than sometimes meets the eye.
George and Barbara Bush continue to divide their time between Houston and their beloved Kennebunkport, Maine retreat. In an excerpt from a recent letter to his children, he tells them, "Your mother and I sit out here like a couple of really old poops, but we're at total peace."
Others no doubt will judge him more harshly. But The Presidents, as have previous films in the series, remains unashamed to hold both the office and its occupants in generally higher stead.
Grade: B
Idol: Burbling Brooke's out, Rockwall's Castro in Final Four
05/01/08 03:38 AM
By ED BARK
Relentlessly needy Brooke White sobbed her way through Neil Diamond's "I Am . . . I Said" Wednesday night after American Idol viewers put her in the show's past tense.
That whittles it down to a Final Four that includes 21-year-old Jason Castro of Rockwall, who survived another whipping from the judges. That included a now exhaustively reported out-of-body Paula Abdul critique of a second Neil Diamond song, "September Morn," that he hadn't yet performed.
"Just for the record, the rumors are not true (about Abdul)," said host Ryan Seacrest, apparently referring to a report that she may have been a bit tipsier than usual. "She's part of our family, and we love her."
Castro was declared "safe" in the show's opening minutes, although many expected him to at least share a Bottom Two rung. Judge Simon Cowell had lashed both of his less than riveting Tuesday performances, telling him, "This is not the Jason we put into this competition."
Instead, White joined the relentlessly imperiled Syesha Mercado on the griddle. She sobbed copiously into Mercado's arms after Seacrest counted her out.
"I just want to say thank you," White finally told a weary nation. "It's going to be terrible for me right now. But thank you."
Castro and Mercado join David Archuleta and David Cook in the show's home stretch competition to be Idol's seventh big winner. The two Davids are widely seen as the show's Goliaths, but Castro also appears to have a very formidable fan base. If he survives another week, it would be Idol's first all-male Final Three. No married contestant has ever won, and White was the last of those.