CTV airs wrong episode of 'Anatomy'
TORONTO (CP) -- When did Dr. McDreamy finally profess his love for Meredith Grey? What happened to Izzie in the hours after her fiance Denny died? And is it finally curtains for The Chief and his wife?
Many Canadian fans of "Grey's Anatomy" were left puzzled by plot gaps and apparent inconsistencies Thursday night when CTV inadvertently aired the second episode of the season rather than the hotly anticipated premiere.
While the network blamed the mistake on a "satellite feed error," it was little consolation for viewers who had waited an entire summer to learn the fate of the libidinous interns at Seattle Grace Hospital.
"Can I just say that CTV is a crappy irresponsible network?" wrote one blogger, carmen16.
"I know errors happen, but this is one of the biggest shows on TV these days. (I'm) just not impressed."
"Stupid people who don't know how to push buttons right. I am most seriously displeased," posted another who identified herself as Lynda.
On CTV, the show airs at 8 p.m. ET, while the U.S. version airs at 9 p.m. ET on ABC.
Many fans who tuned in to CTV said they couldn't quite put their finger on what was wrong with the show.
"We were trying to figure out if they were just artfully leaving some gaps for the viewers to figure out what happened, or if indeed they were airing the wrong episode," said one blogger.
After the mistake became clear (ABC aired the correct version), fans took to the Internet, begging viewers who watched the CTV episode not to ruin it for them.
"Now that I know that Canada got next week's episode, I'm going to be frightened of spoilers constantly until next week!" wrote jasminelily.
"If you live in Canada, please don't include any spoilers about the second episode!" implored a blog on the USA Today website.
CTV spokesman Mike Cosentino said the network took in its regular satellite feed of the show thinking it was the season premiere.
"We were fed an incorrect show," he said Friday. "We recognize the scope of this situation."
The network has announced it will air the season premiere next Thursday, when it would have aired Episode 2.
The error came as "Grey's Anatomy" made its much-anticipated debut in a new Thursday night timeslot, a fact not lost on fans.
"After a whole summer of pimping the new timeslot, CTV showed the wrong episode of 'Grey's Anatomy' last night," said alias-elaina.
"How did they screw THAT up? Someone is so fired."
Cosentino called the CTV glitch a "good news/bad news scenario."
"The bad news is viewers missed Episode 1 and we're working on the right solution to remedy that, and the good news is -- Episode 2 is fantastic."
"South Park" creators look back 10 years
LOS ANGELES - Talk about a star-studded arrivals line. There they were: Tom Cruise, Jennifer Lopez, Steven Spielberg and Paris Hilton. Mel Gibson even showed up.
But this was the launch party for the 10th season of "South Park" and the celebrities were A-List — A for artificial. As in cardboard.
No matter, the smiling caricatures still loomed large along the red carpet at the Thursday-night affair to celebrate the controversial Emmy- and Peabody-winning animated Comedy Central series. The program first aired Aug. 13, 1997, and begins its new season Oct. 4.
Series creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone topped the Hollywood back-lot party's real A-List, as in authentic.
"I remember when we started the show, we had an order for six episodes, and we're like, `This is great, because, when we're older, we'll always have these six shows,'" Parker told AP Television.
"And, it was actually Brian Graden (the executive who commissioned the original short film that became "South Park") who told us, `I think some day these will be six of 100.' And we're like, `You're crazy. There's no way.' And we're up to 150-something."
"South Park" spins around four elementary-school boys who slog out their days and nights in the quiet Colorado mountain town of South Park. Over the last decade, the boys have had to grapple with everything from problematic parents to the apocalypse.
Virtually everything and everyone in politics, pop culture and religion have been fair game for Parker and Stone's sharp satire. Tom Cruise and John Travolta got it on the chin in last season's Emmy-nominated "Trapped in the Closet" episode, which took on the Church of Scientology.
"We have not personally heard from any of them," Stone said.
"No, Tom hasn't called," Parker added.
"No, hasn't called us. We used to go over to his house for Friday-night dinners, but not any more," Stone joked.
Yet for all its craziness and cussin', the "South Park" franchise is nothing to laugh at, with top-selling DVDs, CDs, dolls, albums, a movie, reruns in worldwide syndication and soon-to-be 10 years and counting on Comedy Central's prime-time schedule.
Coinciding with next month's 10th-season launch is a DVD of Stone and Parker's 10 favorite "South Park" episodes, "South Park the Hits: Volume 1," which arrives in stores Oct. 3.
"We've said in a lot of interviews, `There's no way we're going to be 35 or 40 doing this show,' and here we are at 35, and we're doing the show," Stone said. "Now we'll say, `There's no way we're going to be 45 to 50 doing this show.'"
"I think when I have kids, it'll be over," Parker added. "Because that'll be the day, we'll have kids, and then one of us will come in the office and be like, `I think we should take the show in a different direction. I think we offended some people last night, and I don't know that that's good.'"
Stone: "Once we have kids, we'll do the George Lucas thing, and we'll go back and change all the old episodes."
Parker: "All the guns out of people's hands and stuff."
Stone: "Get all weird and wimpy."
Rupert Everett spills beans on Hollywood
LONDON - Rupert Everett hates Hollywood. The British actor, whose screen hits include "Another Country," "Shrek" and "My Best Friend's Wedding," says he's sick of the movie industry's hypocrisy and homophobia. He's even tired of celebrity — the whole glittering illusion deliciously evoked and eviscerated in his candid new autobiography "Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins."
"Hollywood is a mirage," said Everett, 47, reclining in jeans and plaid shirt on the sofa of a London hotel suite.
Movie stars are "blobs who don't say anything, aren't allowed to say anything. They are paid to shut up."
Fortunately, Everett can't help talking.
The book, for which he reportedly received a seven-figure advance, is a string of glittering anecdotes with edge, bonbons with a bitter center.
Everett is a waspish observer of the celebrity A-list, from Madonna ("she oozed sex appeal") to Julia Roberts ("beautiful and tinged with madness") to Sharon Stone ("utterly unhinged").
The book is a sort of Rough Guide to late 20th-century highlife — and lowlife — that moves from London to Paris, New York, St. Tropez, L.A.'s Laurel Canyon and Miami's South Beach. There are walk-on parts for Andy Warhol, Elizabeth Taylor, Orson Welles, Bob Dylan, Donatella Versace and a host of other luminaries. Everett seems to know everyone, remember all and recount everything.
Almost everything. Everett skates quickly over his brief stint as a London rent boy, although he cheerfully admits that he stalked the actor Ian McKellen.
The openly gay actor also discloses his handful of heterosexual affairs — with Paula Yates, wife of Bob Geldof, French actress Beatrice Dalle and Hollywood star Susan Sarandon.
The book is a feast for gossip fans, and Everett is an articulate and charming raconteur with a knack for a memorable image. At one point, a swimming pool is described as "shaped like a Xanax."
"I think what people will be really surprised about is the writing," said Antonia Hodgson, Everett's editor at British publisher Little, Brown. "It's not just another celebrity book.
"He's not so much interested in spilling the beans about a particular celebrity, but about showing what celebrity does to those people."
Everett says he was inspired by "The Moon's A Balloon," David Niven's literate, witty memoir of Hollywood's golden age.
"I also loved the prewar frenzy of Evelyn Waugh, that feeling of the end of the world coming," said Everett. "It seems to me that, especially through show business, everything is getting more and more feverish and faster and nastier and scarier.
"Entertainment is becoming the great decoy — we are so entertained, it's almost impossible for us to think about anything else. The only thing that has continuity in the news is Jennifer Lopez's bottom."
The book is also the story of Everett's lifelong flight from the conformity of an upper-class English upbringing that saw him sent away to a Catholic boarding school at the age of 7.
He recounts his early career as a youthful rebel and party animal, friend of prostitutes, addicts, divas and thieves. He says he has always been drawn to "the freaks, the overdoses and the suicides."
He says being gay "certainly wasn't acceptable in any of the arenas that were on offer to me. So I think I had an instinct to escape into a world that I thought would be more friendly."
Everett was disappointed to find showbiz "as middle-class and provincial" as the private school world he'd left behind.
"My imagination of show business was this red plush netherworld of drunks and sex maniacs and killers and freaks," he said. "It's not. My world is, because I've doggedly tried to create that world. But it's not in general."
Everett has often complained of Hollywood's homophobia, arguing his sexuality has stopped him getting the leading-man roles offered to his countryman Hugh Grant.
But he's also highly self-critical. Everett emerges from the book as ruthless and driven, a bit of a monster who confesses he "lied about everything. My age. My name. My background."
"I think the actor's geography, there's a hole in it somewhere," he said. "There's a hole in your identity, a black hole that you try and fill up with posturing."
For all his drive to be a star, Everett is ambivalent about success. The book recounts his highs — his breakthrough as an English schoolboy turned Soviet spy in "Another Country," his Hollywood triumph as Julia Roberts' gay pal "My Best Friend's Wedding" — and the many lows. These include the disastrous rock'n'roll saga "Hearts of Fire" and "The Next Best Thing," a limp comedy-drama co-starring Madonna.
At the height of his fame, after "My Best Friend's Wedding," he is recognized on the street as "the gay guy from that movie."
He yearns to be taken seriously as an actor, laments the superficiality of Hollywood, yet has reportedly resorted to Botox injections to maintain his lean, unlined good looks. It's working. The sculpted cheekbones are intact, the big, dark eyes as luminous as ever.
These days, he travels the world on behalf of the Global Fund against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria and declares showbiz "not very relevant."
"To be honest, for me it's not the time for show business," he said — although he's got a play, a movie and "a couple of TV things" in the works.
"Life behind a velvet rope — I never enjoyed it. I like going out, going to bars, going to clubs, hanging out on the street.
"I always thought an actor should be like a bodybuilder. His life should be like a muscle — it should be exercised and flexed and worked. Doing everything, experiencing as much as you can.
"It was a conscious decision for me to exist like the people I really admired on-screen — the Marlon Brandos, the Montgomery Clifts, the James Deans.
"You felt they had experienced everything. Their eyes were shocked and dead and alive and glowing like coals at the same time. And I think that was through experience, using your life as a tool. That's the way I wanted to conduct myself."