Oct 2006
Making an impression: SNL's Darrell Hammond
stays on and on
10/31/06 12:00 PM Ed Bark |Permalink
By ED BARK
Saturday Night Live stalwart Darrell Hammond is best known for his impersonations of Bill Clinton. Or maybe you prefer his Sean Connery, Dick Cheney, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chris Matthews, Donald Trump or Al Gore. The one that got away still vexes him, though.
After Will "Strategery" Ferrell left SNL in 2002, Hammond got his shot at doing George W. Bush. But he failed to nail him in two on-air tries. Eventually Will Forte managed to make Bush his own while Hammond reverted back to Cheney.
"I would call that the great disappointment of my career," Hammond says in a telephone interview tied to his one-man SNL show this Saturday (Nov. 4). "I think part of it was I was so heavily influenced by Will Ferrell, and there wasn't a lot of time to put it out there. I just never got a handle on it, and it went poorly a couple of times. So I thought it was time for me to step down ... I had no real basic understanding of how to do this guy."
That's a rare admission of defeat for Hammond, who's in his record-setting 12th consecutive season on SNL. At age 51, perhaps it's time for him to go. It's certainly crossed his mind but Hammond finds it tough to kick the habit of "just sort of hanging around drinking coffee and waiting for somebody to ask me to start practicing somebody."
"It's hard not to love playing really powerful, famous people in front of millions of people," he says. "It's hard not to get hooked on that, and I am hooked on that."
None of the powerbrokers he's lampooned has ever told him to knock it off, Hammond says. And unlikely though it may seem, one of his best audiences has been the outwardly taciturn Cheney.
The vice president is "the guy that ended up being the most charming and forthcoming about it, and the most fun to talk to about it," says Hammond, who's attended one of Cheney's Christmas parties. "I always felt when I met him there was a sense of good feeling there. He's just been very complimentary in a general sense."
The Nov. 4 SNL, airing just three days before Tuesday's mid-term elections, will give Hammond an unprecedented forum. No ongoing cast member has ever got a "Best of" special.
"Yes, it is an honor. It really is," Hammond says. "I graduated from college with a 2.1 (grade point average) and really had no hopes, no prospects."
He co-hosted a big John McCain party at the 2002 Republican National Convention in New York. But Hammond's bread-and-butter guy is still the only Democratic president of the past quarter-century. So yes, he'd like to see Hillary Rodham Clinton run strong as a presidential candidate because that would put her husband firmly back in the picture.
"I would love to play Bill Clinton as many more times as I could play him in my career," Hammond says.
He's also done lesser known mockups of Bob Costas, Bill O'Reilly, Dan Rather, Geraldo Rivera, Rudolph Giuliani, Jesse Jackson and Donald Rumsfeld, who wasn't particularly easy to grasp.
"I had to learn to do Rumsfeld a couple of days before the show," he says. "I had to break that down quickly. I finally settled on early Henry Fonda from The Grapes of Wrath."
His sendups of Connery as an Alex Trebek-baiting Jeopardy! contestant are the most popular with fans, he says. The fake Connery's distaste for Trebek makes no logical sense, Hammond agrees. Coming up with the idea "really was just a combination of strong coffee and late hours."
Impressions won't last forever, though. Post-SNL, Hammond sees himself as a standup comic writing his own material. Mimicking famous people would be part of the show, but not to the point where "it ends up being a magic act."
Still, "if I get typecast, then I get typecast," he says. "That's not the worst thing that could ever happen to me in my life."
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Review: Angel Rodriguez (HBO)
10/30/06 12:38 PM Ed Bark |Permalink
By ED BARK
Deliver him from evil and save him from himself. The devil is in those details for an inner city teen whose computer skills and high school guidance counselor give him at least a scant chance to succeed.
Not that we'll ever fully know. HBO's Angel Rodriguez, premiering Oct. 30 (8 p.m. central, 9 eastern), considers his possibilities before leaving Angel's fate to our imaginations. So don't look for a prototypical "payoff," but do expect to be pulled in by this small, affecting 90-minute film from director Jim McKay (Everyday People). It's a case study in direct, unadorned drama unfolding amid oft-unforgiving surroundings. There's no mood music, whoosh editing or camera tricks. The natural, often raucous sounds of Brooklyn and Manhattan clang and bang in the background while Angel (Jonan Everett in his film debut) mostly proceeds aimlessly. His life needs a life raft, his attitude an adjustment. Give him a chance and chances are he'll squander it. But there's also at least a slight possibility that for once he won't.
Rachel Griffiths (Six Feet Under and ABC's ongoing Brothers & Sisters) co-stars as guidance counselor Nicole, who's pregnant with her first child and married to a not entirely likeable guy named Henry (Denis O'Hare). They temporarily take Angel into their home while she tries to convince his fed-up father (David Zayas) to take him back. The father has just one scene in the film, but it's an indelible one.
"Do you think this boy deserves respect?" he asks Nicole while Angel sits nearby. "Fine. You give it to him. He's not gonna get it from me. He still wets his bed like a little faggot. Pitiful."
So there's no going home again for a kid who's broken promise after promise. He's both sweet-natured and at times hot-tempered. Both are defense mechanisms. Angel's life seems mapped into a series of dead ends, but maybe someone can still thread the needle. The film encourages us to figuratively hold a candle in the dark for a kid whose vulnerabilities, talents and faults are all self-evident.
Angel Rodriguez also looks at Nicole's latent downward spiral. She administers to troubled kids in knowing, practiced ways. But the impending arrival of her own child is starting to overwhelm and depress her. Angel's life is fraught with peril while Nicole's already seems bought and paid for. Her endless possibilities are slowing to a crawl.
As noted, there's not a speck of a musical soundtrack in Angel Rodriguez. But the closing credits are accompanied by "Thank You For Hearing Me," an instantly hypnotic song written and performed by Sinead O'Connor. In some ways, that's the film's payoff. But first you should invest in this compelling look at a young life that's both blooming and dying on the vine. HBO will be repeating the film throughout November, affording a chance to pick one's spot.
Grade: B+
DVD Review: That's My Bush!
10/25/06 05:12 PM Ed Bark |Permalink
By ED BARK
Both the timing and the cancellation were just about right for Comedy Central's That's My Bush!
The president and his First Lady had inhabited the White House for barely two-and-a-half months when this sendup of a '70s sitcom portrayed him as a dumb, amiable bumbler and her as his understanding but often unfulfilled wife. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park, had planned to lampoon Al Gore had he won. But they clearly got luckier -- from a comedic standpoint at least -- when George W. Bush prevailed after the prolonged electoral showdown in Florida.
Timothy Bottoms' portrayal of a hapless but well-meaning Bush proved to be comedy gold in a series that ended on May 23, 2001 after Comedy Central said it cost too much to make. The eight exceptionally irreverent and often riotously funny episodes are newly available on a two-disc DVD set retailing for $26.99.
That's My Bush! clearly could not have premiered or continued after Sept. 11th. Scenes such as the president with "Abortion Summit 2001" cake all over his face would have been in awfully bad taste. The president inviting his frat brothers to an execution wouldn't have played too well either. More than five years later some of this stuff is still hard to digest in a wartime climate that's nothing to joke about. Oddly, though, That's My Bush! is testament to how good we had it when its then virginal president was billing himself as a "uniter not a divider." Seems like a long time ago, doesn't it?
The pilot episode finds the president trying to split time between a promised intimate dinner with Laura (Carrie Quinn Dolin) and an abortion summit in which he hopes to make "uniter history."
Bottoms, whose career had pretty much cratered in the years after The Last Picture Show, turned out to be both a dead-on Bush lookalike and a surprisingly deft comedic actor. His flustered looks and ill-fated efforts to please are perfectly in sync with the series' throwback takeoffs on loud, broad sitcoms such as The Jeffersons, Maude, Three's Company and Sanford & Son. In a romantic touch, George has a mariachi band play the latter sitcom's theme song for Laura while he's frantically racing back across the hall to his ill-fated summit dinner.
The goofball prez even has a tagline, borrowed from Ralph Kramden's blowups on an even more vintage comedy, The Honeymooners. It's triggered by a loving Laura putdown such as "You're the best. even if you are a clueless bastard sometimes." To which hubby good-naturedly retorts, "Ho, ho, one of these days, Laura, I'm gonna punch you right in the face!"
No, Parker and Stone aren't subtle. Nor is the Bushes' saucy maid, Maggie Hawley (Marcia Wallace from The Bob Newhart Show), who means it as a compliment when she says, "Wow, look at you, Mrs. Bush. You look like a hooker!"
A later episode features a visit from battle ax Barbara Bush (Marte Boyle Slout), whose relationship with Laura is testy even though George insists it's lovey-dovey.
"Is that why, in her Christmas card, she still refers to me as 'That whore from Dallas'?" Laura wonders.
This is the same episode in which George inadvertently pops a few Ecstasy pills during a White House media event tied to the arrest of the 100 millionth drug offender. Bottoms again is a riot, especially after he thinks he sees a man in a banana suit.
That's My Bush! called it a wrap with a "Fare Thee Welfare" episode that has George and Laura tossed out of the White House by a demonic Dick Cheney. The series is then renamed That's My Dick! until George returns to power in the guise of a masked wrestler known as "The Mysterious Loser." A two-faced Karl Rove (Kurt Fuller) had come to miss his old boss. After all, he "was a great man, an honest man, a premature ejaculator, I understand, but very well-meaning."
Creators Parker and Stone remain resolutely immature, which is nice work if you can get it. That's My Bush! ages pretty well, however. It also reminds us that those were the good old days.
A Rivers goes with her flow
10/22/06 04:13 PM Ed Bark |Permalink
By ED BARK
Shutting Joan Rivers' mouth may be a nigh impossible engineering feat. It's hard to even imagine it in that state. Rivers without her yapper would be Niagra Falls reduced to a trickle-down drip. She is what she is -- a voice box amid constantly changing surroundings. You can nip and tuck her, but you can't zip those lips.
Best known these days as a red carpet fixture, Rivers, 73, gets back to where she still belongs as the leadoff hitter on Bravo's Funny Girls, a new series of standup specials premiering Tuesday night, Oct. 24 (9 central, 10 eastern). Her contribution, subtitled "Joan Rivers: Before Melissa Pulls the Plug," is a bawdy, frequently bleeped attack on just about every sensibility known to humankind. She hates, in no particular order, old people, ugly people, the Olsen twins, vegans, kids, love, the Clintons (and their "ugly daughter Celery"), the Bushes and, to a certain degree, herself.
"I use my left boob now as a stopper in my tub," she tells a mostly receptive crowd at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles. And her dates are getting so ancient that "one guy gave me a hickey, left his teeth in my neck."
In a teleconference tied to the special, Rivers says she's had to change her act or be irrelevant.
"I ratchet it up because comedy is ratcheted up. The times are so rough."
The special was taped before Mel Gibson's infamous drunken tirade against Jews. She now incorporates him into her act, joking that his other car is a gas chamber and that he has an "I (heart symbol) Hitler" license plate.
"I think he's an anti-Semitic sonofabitch, and he should (expletive) die," Rivers says in the phone interview. "He is what he is. And how refreshing that we all now know. The ones I hate are the ones who say they all love everybody."
She has a substantial following in the gay community, and regularly plays off that fact. "Gays booing!" she retorts in the Bravo special after telling a thoroughly tasteless joke about how Heather Mills seduced Paul McCartney.
Without her gay fans, "I'd probably be a dentist's wife in New Jersey," Rivers says. "They just love strong, ugly women. They love Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, Liza. I think they love us because we try harder and we're not the stereotype of what we're supposed to be."
Rivers also has taped a pilot for Bravo, Straight Talk, which she describes as "The View with four gay men. We talk about current events, or as we now call it, 'pop culture.' Gay men have the best sense of humor, the best sensibility."
Bravo asked Rivers to do the standup special after hearing about her regular Wednesday night performances at New York City's The Cutting Room. She agreed with the understanding that "I'm not going to change anything."
It seems certain that she hasn't. Rivers' humor is filtered through a sewer pipe, emerging raw, rank and ribald. But she knows how to deliver it while also playing the crowd. Those are her saving graces on a special that's both indescribably malicious and far funnier than expected. Whatever it is, she's still got it.
Grade: B-minus
Oh Danny boy: Bonaduce's back
10/20/06 01:28 PM Ed Bark |Permalink
By ED BARK
How screwed up is Danny Bonaduce? The usual shorthand descriptions don't apply anymore.
"Actually it's a train wreck landing on top of a car crash mixed with a baby on fire," an interested observer opines on VH1's second season premiere of Breaking Bonaduce (Sunday night, Oct. 22, 8:30 central, 9:30 eastern).
That's probably putting it mildly. The Partridge Family's onetime cuddly kid is now a 47 year-old man-child battling more demons than The X-Men. Should we feel sorry for him, or his long-suffering wife, Gretchen? Is their act getting old? Not to the point where VH1 is about to give up on them. And it should be noted that the network has become very good at packaging these less than savory celebrity emissions. It's fresh from setting a ratings record with last Sunday's finale of Flavor of Love 2, in which rapper Flavor Fav picked "Deelishis" as his love connection. The thing attracted 7.5 million viewers, a level that several of this season's new broadcast network series have yet to hit.
Breaking Bonaduce has upscale production values if nothing else. This season's first two episodes are impressively presented, lending an almost film noir quality to the cheese at hand. So Danny is shot well, even when he's shot to hell. There's too much redundancy, though. Recaps and coming detractions seem to take up about one-fifth of these half-hour dollops. Gretchen's mantra goes like this: "I really want to file papers. I just don't want to live this way."
The first season of the series tracked Danny's descent into drugs, drinking binges and a 30-day stint in rehab. He's supposedly seven months sober as Season 2 begins. At least that's what he tells reporters and fans while strolling the red carpet toward the "VH1 Big in '05" awards ceremony. He somehow manages to lose the "Favorite Reality Star" category to last year's American Idol runnerup, Bo Bice. A gracious and still buff Danny responds by stripping to the waist and hugging Bice onstage. Talk about your magic moments.
The episode otherwise trains on Danny's trip to Mexico City for a press conference heralding the premiere of Breaking Bonaduce's first season in 22 Latin American countries.
"I look like an idiot on television. I look like an idiot in lots of ways," he says, displaying an acute self-awareness.
Problem is he's hardly watched any of his own show. So it vexes him to witness the Spanish language dubbing of a sequence in which Gretchen gets up-close and pretty personal with a male stripper who's performing at her birthday party. Two weeks later he's regressing again, Gretchen tells the couple's therapist, Dr. Garry Corgiat, who's returning from Season One.
Danny, who played a corpse earlier this season on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, gets the boot from Gretchen in Episode 2. He frets that "gearing up for this show" put him on the wrong track again. This, of course, isn't VH1's worry. A happy, contented Danny doesn't deliver the goods, so to speak.
He later blows up at a VH1 film crew for videotaping and recording what he deems a "super-private conversation with my wife." He demands that it not be aired, but of course it is. Meanwhile, his two young kids are missing their wayward dad, and you really hate to see them dragged into this. But press materials say that Danny eventually decides this season to "relinquish all of his demons and seek help from a most surprising place -- God."
We'll see how that goes. Boy, will we ever. Breaking Bonaduce in reality is the gift that keeps on giving to its star attraction. As he tells the Mexican press, the overall point of the show is "to pay my rent and feed my children."
It's a helluva way to make a living, Danny boy.
Grade: C+
Peacock plucked? NBC will start writing off scripted
shows
10/19/06 06:31 PM Ed Bark |Permalink
By ED BARK
NBC Universal says the Eleventh Hour is nigh for scripted shows occupying prime-time's first hour. The company's sweeping NBCU 2.0 initiative, announced Thursday, is aimed at cutting costs and restoring double-digit growth via the elimination of 700 jobs and the escalation of cheaper-to-produce reality fare.
NBC Universal chief executive Jeff Zucker told The Wall Street Journal that the Peacock's history-rich broadcast network intends to begin at the beginning. The 7 to 8 p.m. (central time) hour gradually will be stripped of expensive comedies and dramas, he said. Advertiser interest in them is waning, Zucker contended, citing the $2.6 million cost for one episode of Friday Night Lights versus the $1.1 million NBC spends on Deal or No Deal.
He said this on the same day NBC ordered an additional 10 episodes of 1 vs 100, a less than cerebral, big-money game show that opened big last Friday. Sample question: "The 2003 movie Seabiscuit featured what kind of animal?" The three choices were "one with fins, one with paws or one with hooves."
It's been a tough fall for NBC in the 7 to 8 p.m. leadoff slot. Friday Night Lights, which opens Tuesday nights and will get a test run at 9 p.m. Monday on Oct. 30, has been held to little ratings gain despite a wealth of critical praise. The network's new comedy combo of 30 Rock and 20 Good Years is faring even worse on Wednesday nights at 7. And Thursday night's Emmy-worthy opening duo, My Name is Earl and The Office, is lagging behind both CBS' Survivor: Cook Islands and ABC's new Ugly Betty.
NBC's only new hit among its six new scripted shows is Heroes, which follows Deal or No Deal at 8 p.m. Mondays. It costs $2.7 million per episode, and that's without any big name stars. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, another acclaimed NBC series that hasn't caught fire, reportedly carries a tab of $3.5 million a show. Much of it goes to pay the salaries of TV thoroughbreds such as star Matt Perry and creator Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing).
NBC isn't the only network looking at the hard realities of higher costs and generally lower payoffs for scripted programming. But it's the first network to specify a time period as a test lab for the phasing out of same. NBC has a long list of written word successes in prime-time's opening hour, particularly in the sitcom genre. The roll call from the last 30 years includes The Cosby Show, Friends, The Golden Girls, Family Ties, The A-Team, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, A Different World, Mad About You, Wings and Little House on the Prairie.
But a little show called Fear Factor also crept into the 7 p.m. slot in recent seasons. That highly cost-efficient hour bore Zucker's enthusiastic stamp of approval in the face of near-universal critical disdain. It was no Friday Night Lights, but it did help to keep the lights on. NBC is, after all, owned by General Electric. So brace yourselves for a possible onslaught of dim bulbs.
Review: The Lost Year in Iraq
10/18/06 01:16 AM Ed Bark |Permalink
By ED BARK
Just how did things come to this? It's the overriding question of our times as mid-term elections near while America remains stuck in the land without weapons of mass destruction.
PBS' The Lost Year in Iraq, presented under the prestigious Frontline banner, spells out some cold, hard truths Tuesday night (9 p.m. locally on KERA/Channel 13). Beginning with the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue and ending with U.S. Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III's evacuation, the one-hour program puts a pivotal freshman year in perspective. It's a story of missed opportunities, poor preparations and infighting that only led to more fighting. In hindsight . . . well, it always seems to go that way, doesn't it?
Baghdad fell in just three weeks, on April 9, 2003. At first it looked like a cakewalk, with U.S. troops as liberators who'd mostly be home by Christmas of that year.
"People were just in pure exhilaration," remembers Lt. Col. R. Alan King. "At that point you think, 'This might just work, and we have an opportunity.' A guy was carrying a huge couch on his back, and he turns and says, 'Yay, America'."
Looters initially were allowed to run wild. But matters quickly escalated into car jackings and kidnappings, "a DNA chain to the insurgency," says former ambassador Barbara Bodine. "That was the spark."
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who declined to be interviewed along with all other current members of the Bush administration, characterized the early violence as exuberant behavior by the previously oppressed. It's still hard to believe that he actually said, "Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and to commit crimes and do bad things; they're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things."
Bremer, then managing director of Henry Kissinger and Associates, soon rode in as an anointed Lancelot charged with making things right. Others contend that he did two things very wrong -- alienating the Ba'athists by purging them from all government offices and infuriating the Iraqi military by dissolving it.
Several U.S. military officers, in new interviews, say they were counting heavily on the Iraqi army to help them in the reconstruction effort.
"It shocked many of us," recalls Col. Paul Hughes. "Up to that time I had these guys pretty much doing anything I wanted them to do."
Adds Col. Thomas X. Hammes: "Now you have a couple hundred thousand people who are armed, because they took their weapons home with them. They know how to use the weapons, have no future and have a reason to be angry at you."
Bremer, who also spoke to Frontline, says he doesn't remember if any of his sweeping early edicts faced strong opposition from within his own ranks. Jay Garner, a retired general who preceded Bremer in Iraq as Rumsfeld's handpicked leader of the reconstruction effort, says the "de-Ba'athification" policy in fact was viewed as potentially very dangerous. In his and others' view, it would drive 30,000 to 50,000 perceived Saddam loyalists "underground by nightfall."
How many of them, along with disgruntled Iraqi soldiers, now are involved in the ongoing insurrection? Nobody really knows. Nobody really wants to know.
The Lost Year obviously isn't the last word on Iraq. It is, however, a dispiriting dissection of little gained and much lost in a period capped by the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Those weren't pretty pictures, and neither is this. Bremer, now long gone, says he tried his level best.
"I think on the whole, the American people can say we did a noble thing," he tells Frontline. "We put the Iraqis on the right path ... to a better political future. And they now have got, certainly, the right plans to rebuild their economy. All that remains now is to effect a security strategy that defeats the Sunni insurgency."
Oh yes, there's still that.
Vince Young: BET says it's all good
10/04/06 06:09 AM Ed Bark |Permalink
By ED BARK
Humbled perhaps by Sunday's spotty showing against the Dallas Cowboys, Vince Young can snap right back by watching BET's on- and off-field highlight reel.
The network's six-episode Next Level: Vince Young, premiering Wednesday night (Oct. 4) at 7:30 central, 8:30 eastern, stops just a bit short of being an out-and-out infomercial. ESPN analysts who question whether he'll excel as a pro quarterback are seen, heard and dismissed in these half-hour testaments to Young's overall greatness as both an athlete and human being.
That said, you can learn a little something about where he came from, who he is and what he means to those who knew him when.
"I love my 'hood, love my fans," Young says while walking the streets of his Houston neighborhood with boyhood pals Austin Pitre and Brian Dudley. "I want to continue to get my blessings."
Young already has immortalized himself in many eyes by taking the University of Texas Longhorns to the national championship game and then almost singlehandedly winning it. Wednesday's first episode begins at the Heisman Trophy ceremony in New York, where he watched Reggie Bush win college football's most coveted award.
"I was a little upset," says Young, who then fueled himself to beat Bush's Southern California Trojans in the Rose Bowl. Footage of his exploits sets the stage for a trip back home, where viewers are introduced to Young's mother, sister, cousins, high school football coach and Uncle Keith Young, who became Vince's surrogate father in place of an absentee blood dad.
There's fleeting mention of a somewhat rebellious youth, in which Young and his running mates would break windows, get in fights and occasionally run afoul of the cops.
"We had times we did negative stuff," Pitre recalls.
"Some of that stuff, you just can't talk about," Dudley doesn't recall.
But Young kept doing great things on his Madison High School's football field while also getting "spiritual guidance" from Pastor Smith of the Mt. Horeb Baptist Church. Episode 1 ends with Young at Easter Sunday services and then at a big family dinner.
The star of the show also talks directly to BET's cameras. He's not the most articulate guy in the world, and sometimes seems a bit robotic -- or under-rehearsed. Next Level's better moments depict Young trying to blend in with his surroundings after becoming a superstar commodity. A visit to "Big Dude's" barber shop in next week's episode seems to put him at ease in comfortable surroundings. Then he motors in grand style to a March of Dimes benefit after telling viewers that "I blessed myself with a nice Cadillac." We don't see his speech, but we do see the chairwoman of the event gush all over him.
That's pretty much in keeping with the overall intent of Next Level. It's Vince Young up close and personal, but not really.
Grade: C+
Second verse, same as the first
10/03/06 03:11 PM Ed Bark |Permalink
By ED BARK
CBS again took the prime-time crown in total viewers, ABC prevailed with 18-to-49-year-olds and NBC showed the most year-to-year improvement in Week 2 (Sept. 25-Oct. 1) of the new fall season.
That made for the same picture as opening week, although two new big splashes changed the terrain on Monday and Thursday nights.
Last Thursday's premiere of ABC's Ugly Betty ranked ninth in total viewers and tied for 15th among advertiser-coveted 18-to-49-year-olds. And NBC's Sept. 25 launch of Heroes placed eighth with younger viewers.
The season-to-date ratings show NBC making significant strides from a year ago. The Peacock network is up 13 percent in total viewers and 18 percent with 18-to-49-year-olds. So far It's the only network to show gains in both categories.
Source: Nielsen Media Research
CBS again took the prime-time crown in total viewers, ABC prevailed with 18-to-49-year-olds and NBC showed the most year-to-year improvement in Week 2 (Sept. 25-Oct. 1) of the new fall season.
That made for the same picture as opening week, although two new big splashes changed the terrain on Monday and Thursday nights.
Last Thursday's premiere of ABC's Ugly Betty ranked ninth in total viewers and tied for 15th among advertiser-coveted 18-to-49-year-olds. And NBC's Sept. 25 launch of Heroes placed eighth with younger viewers.
The season-to-date ratings show NBC making significant strides from a year ago. The Peacock network is up 13 percent in total viewers and 18 percent with 18-to-49-year-olds. So far It's the only network to show gains in both categories.
Source: Nielsen Media Research
Big Al gets into the act
10/01/06 08:43 PM Ed Bark |Permalink
Photo: NBC Universal
By ED BARK
James Lipton tees up another one Monday night, this time spending two slow-brewed hours with a guy who's well worth the time.
It's Al Pacino's turn, at long last, to submit to Bravo's longrunning Inside the Actors Studio (6 central, 7 eastern). It's the one show that NBC Universal hasn't messed with or canceled since acquiring the network several years ago and quickly cheesing it up. Which means that Billy Bush isn't hosting yet, although NBC's own Jay Leno somehow was deemed worthy of a guest spot after amassing a film career that pretty much began and ended with his role as "Poopy Butt" in 1979's Americathon.
Lipton, memorably parodied by Will Ferrell on Saturday Night Live, at least is obsessed with the artists' craft. He doesn't diddle around with matters of the flesh or any other easily served up scandals. Pacino in turn is as forthcoming as he's probably ever been, particularly after Lipton solemnly intones, "It was called, of course, The Godfather."
The movie that made Pacino a megastar is also the one that Paramount wanted him fired from, even during filming. But director Francis Ford Coppola kept fighting on his behalf, finally sealing the deal by shooting Michael Corleone's famed restaurant gundown scene well ahead of schedule so that studio bosses could see the kid had what it takes.
Pacino, in a dark pinstriped suit and black, open-collared shirt, recalls being intense even as a five-year-old. The preschooler used to do scenes from The Lost Weekend, for which Ray Milland won an Oscar as an alcoholic. But his friends and relatives would laugh at him, Pacino remembers. He now knows it was simply at the sight of someone so young doing something so adult.
The legendary actor doesn't exactly melt like butter in Lipton's presence. You can still feel him holding back, declining to really answer what it was like to share scenes with Marlon Brando in The Godfather. But it's clear he's really trying. So you can hear a pin drop when Pacino distills acting to its essence in these two sentences: "What you're trying to do is get yourself out of the way all the time. And when you're very successful at something, it's when you do that the most."
Lipton, who quotes "the unerring" Roger Ebert five times Monday night, just happens to know how many times characters used the f-word in Pacino's 1992 film version of Glengarry Glen Ross. Pacino doesn't have that stat, but says it couldn't have been more times than in Scarface. Luckily, the latter film's producer, Martin Bergman, has got his back. Lipton says the official f-bomb count is 137 for Glengarry. Bergman raises him, saying from the audience that Scarface had 170 of 'em.
That's a prime slice of trivia on a program that otherwise prides itself on not being trivial. Lipton will always be an acquired taste at best, but his intentions are honorable. Inside the Actors Studio is still a place where guests can talk both seriously and conversationally about what's made them tick. In that realm, Pacino is certainly worth a good listen.
Grade: B+