Category: Television

Eternal Youth Keeps ‘The Simpsons’ Fresh
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – For more than a decade they have reigned as television’s favorite dysfunctional family, and now “The Simpsons” will soon enter the record books as the longest-running sitcom in prime-time history.
Now in their 14th season of animated social satire on Fox television, that beer-guzzling, doughnut-scarfing family man Homer Simpson and all the good citizens of Springfield have shown no signs of aging as they near their 300th episode.
With its ratings on the rise, “The Simpsons” remains one of the most watched TV shows on Sunday night and was one of the rare bright spots on the Fox lineup during an overall slump in the News Corp.-owned network’s viewership earlier this season.
It also remains a perennial favorite among critics and in December earned its first Golden Globe nomination in the race for best comedy series, a rare feat for a cartoon show, even though it didn’t win.
Earlier this month, the network announced that it had renewed the series for two more years, through May 2005, meaning “The Simpsons” will stay on the air for at least 16 seasons. By then, they will have easily eclipsed the real-life Nelson family on “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” as the longest-running weekly comedy series on TV. The Nelsons left ABC in 1966 after 14 seasons on the air.
But long before a very different Ozzy came to MTV as head of “The Osbournes” unruly household on MTV, “The Simpsons” had established itself as a worldwide pop culture phenomenon seen in more than 70 countries.
AGELESS CARTOON
And according to creator and executive producer Matt Groening, eternal youth is a key ingredient of the show’s enduring success.
“I didn’t expect to be on the air this long,” Groening said at Fox’s winter showcase for critics in California recently. “One of the great things about doing an animated show is your characters don’t age. So your show stays fresh, and you keep the audience fresh. I love ’60 Minutes,’ but the people who make it are starting to look like the people who watch it.”
For Harry Shearer, the voice of Homer’s tyrannical boss, Mr. Burns, and the saccharin, Bible-thumping neighbor, Ned Flanders, the challenge of performing several characters is what keeps the show interesting.
“I would get enormously bored, even after seven years, just coming in and doing this one character every week,” Shearer said. “For the actors, one of the great things about making this show fun after all these years is all the different characters we do.”
One thing is certain. It isn’t big bucks that keeps the ensemble coming back year after year.
“Altogether, we still don’t make as much as one ‘Friend,”‘ joked Dan Castellaneta, the voice of Homer, alluding to the reported $1 million per episode earned by each of the six principal members of NBC’s hit comedy “Friends.”
The actors clearly enjoy their work, even if they have to suffer silly questions from fans at public appearances.
“The strangest question I ever got is: Do I sound like Lisa Simpson when I’m having sex? And the answer is no,” said voice actress Yeardley Smith.
D’OH!
Beginning as a string of cartoon shorts on the “Tracey Ullman Show” in 1987, “The Simpsons” debuted as a half-hour series on the then-fledgling Fox network in January 1990.
At the outset, the series centered on the hijinks of the wisecracking, underachieving 10-year-old Bart Simpson, a spike-haired misfit who darts around town on his skateboard and drives his fourth-grade teacher nuts.
But as the show evolved, its focus shifted to Bart’s bone-headed father, Homer, who works at a nuclear power plant and punctuates his frequent mistakes with the anguished, half-syllable utterance “D’Oh!” Castellaneta said he adopted Homer’s signature expletive from a character in an old Laurel and Hardy film. “I think it’s a euphemism for ‘damn.”‘
Rounding out the Simpsons clan are beehive-haired mother Marge, the sensible, good-natured anchor of the family, and Bart’s two sisters — pacifier-sucking baby Maggie, a silent observer of all, and second-grade prodigy Lisa, a baritone saxophone virtuoso and intellectual of the family.
Behind them is a huge cast of regulars who populate the fictional town of Springfield — extended family members, neighbors, teachers, classmates, Homer’s co-workers, his pals at Moe’s Tavern, Apu the convenience store clerk, police chief Wiggum and even the Comic Book Guy.
The show derives much of its humor from sharp-edged social commentary, skewering authority figures and such hallowed institutions as public education, politics, the medical profession, law enforcement and the entertainment industry. The series also is known for the steady parade of guest celebrities who lend their voices, and in many cases their animated caricatures, to cameo appearances.
Actress Jane Kaczmarek of “Malcolm in the Middle” will reprise her role as Judge Harm for the upcoming 300th episode of “The Simpsons,” in which Bart goes to court to win emancipation from his parents after learning that he starred in a commercial as a baby and that Homer squandered all of his earnings. George Plimpton will appear as himself in a 301st original episode airing the same night.
Those two segments, and a rerun of an episode featuring guest stars Tom Petty, Lenny Kravitz, Elvis Costello and Brian Setzer, will air in a 90-minute block on Feb. 16.
Long live The Simpsons!

LEGAL EAGLE
Rob Lowe close to signing a deal to produce and star in Lyon’s Den, a new NBC ensemble legal drama being readied for next fall. The former West Wing star would play an idealistic attorney trying to make a difference in the world while struggling to escape the shadow of his famous father, a state Senator.

TOUCHDOWN!
ABC’s coverage of Super Bowl XXXVII drew some 138 million viewers–the second biggest audience ever for the NFL championship. About 17 million viewers stuck around for the post-game airing of Alias, the best numbers ever for the spy series.

Jay Mohr, Amy Smart Check In with ‘Scrubs’
NBC’s hospital comedy “Scrubs” is admitting more guest stars for February sweeps and extending the run of a previously announced guest.
Jay Mohr (“Action,” “Jerry Maguire” ) will play a doctor who studied under Dr. Cox (John C. McGinley) in the Thursday, Feb. 13 episode. Mohr’s character will help J.D. (Zach Braff) gain some insight into Cox’s badly damaged psyche.
The following week, Amy Smart (“Felicity,” “Road Trip” ) will begin a three-episode arc as the wife of a coma patient at the hospital. J.D. faces a moral dilemma when he finds himself falling for her.
The show will also keep Rick Schroder around for at least four episodes, up from the two shows on which he was originally slated to appear. His character, a male nurse, will be introduced in Thursday’s (Jan. 30) 40-minute “super-sized” episode.
The character, Paul, becomes an object of infatuation for Elliot (Sarah Chalke) — who at first thinks he’s a doctor. Once she gets over the fact that he’s not, they decide to go out.
Schroder says the decision to do more episodes came from a conversation he had with series creator Bill Lawrence.
“The decision was just a very hang-loose personal relationship where he just asked me if I was having fun,” Schroder says. “And obviously they like what I’m doing to Sarah’s character. She’s so funny with the way she relates to me. It’s just hysterical what it’s done for her character.”

Super Bowl Advertisers Stick With Humor
NEW YORK – Advertising’s auteurs kept it quirky on Super Bowl Sunday, with humor a prime ingredient in most commercials as Americans weary of war talk and a gloomy economy were given a chance to chuckle.
AT&T Wireless offered a parody of the PBS series, “Antiques Roadshow,” with the traditional telephone ridiculed as a useless relic. “Do you know how much this is worth?” the host asks his guest. “Diddly-squat.”
The game’s biggest ad buyer, Anheuser-Busch Inc., tweaked pro football’s review rule and the league’s troubled officiating this season with a zebra pulling referee duty during a game between horses. (The ad aired, coincidentally, right before the Tampa Bay Buccaneers sought a successful review of a turnover call.)
Super Bowl commercials are traditionally among the most coveted and prestigious in the advertising world, with a television audience topping 100 million people and few channel surfers. The night offers advertisers a forum for exhibiting their skills to a huge, diverse group of people ó some of whom watch solely for the ads.
This year’s 30-second slots sold for between $2.1 million and $2.2 million, about 10 percent more than last year. For the second consecutive year, Anheuser-Busch was the game’s largest advertiser, with 11 spots.
Around the ads, Tampa Bay won its first Super Bowl, 48-21. The splashiest commercials typically air earlier in the game, which fit well with listless offense through much of the first half.
About 40 percent of the game’s commercial spots were bought by four advertising behemoths: Anheuser-Busch, General Motors Corp., Sony Corp. and PepsiCo.
MasterCard used a trio of “dead presidents” to extol the convenience of its debit cards. Presidents Washington, Lincoln and Jackson wait impatiently at home as a man has a dinner-and-movie date, paid for with his debit card.
Michael Jordan showed up in two campaigns.
In Gatorade’s Super Bowl debut, Jordan of today plays against his younger self, the No. 23 icon of the Chicago Bulls. In a spot for Hanes, Jordan smirks as actor Jackie Chan scratches at the shirt tag rubbing his neck. The ad shows off Hanes’ new tagless T-shirts.
Pepsi hired Ozzy Osbourne’s prominent clan to push Pepsi Twist, although none of the oft-deleted-expletive bunch was bleeped, even once, in the 45-second spot.
Big-budget movies played their usual role, with Arnold Schwarzenegger on hand to tout his summer action flick, “Terminator 3,” and Warner Bros. offering many viewers their first peeks of the two new “Matrix” movies scheduled to be released this year.
McDonald’s offered a humorous twist on the bad day of a bedraggled middle-aged Dad: his equally frazzled young son forced to contend with a flat tire on his bike and a surprise math quiz at school. Then Mom offers McDonald’s, to which the precocious adolescent replies, “That’s what I love about that woman.”
In a spoof of his past tax problems, country crooner Willie Nelson decides to shoot a shaving cream commercial to help pay a $30 million tax bill. The ad was for H&R Block, the tax preparation company.
HotJobs.com, the job-search company that’s part of Yahoo! Inc., bucked the trend with a somber commercial showing people at work singing about rainbows.
“We just feel that this year, given what’s going on in the economy and in the environment in general, that a more respectful point of view and approach of job search is what’s needed,” said Marc Karasu, HotJobs’ vice president of advertising.
Dodge offered perhaps the grossest commercial moment, using the power of its new truck engine and quick braking to help a choking man expel a hunk of beef jerky ó directly onto the windshield, slime and all.

Super ‘Alias’ will bowl you over
Here’s an image that should grab a Super Bowl fan’s attention: Jennifer Garner in black scanties.
Oh, there’s much more to Sunday’s fabulous post-Bowl episode of Alias than those opening shots of Garner, undercover and underdressed as CIA agent Sydney Bristow. But the scene, and the humorous twist it takes, is a prime example of how knowing and witty this show can be, and how eager it is to get the kind of ratings it has long deserved.
Besides, if there’s a TV star who can carry off that opening (and that outfit) with more style than Garner, I don’t know who she is. Garner is not just the sexiest spy since Emma Peel, she’s one of the few actresses who can stand up to comparison with Diana Rigg.
Sunday, she has the kind of showcase that actors dream about: a heart-stopping, plot-packed adventure that lets her hit just about every emotional note. And the good news extends beyond Garner. Seldom has Alias produced a more exciting hour or one more user-friendly for newcomers to the show.
Conveniently enough, Sydney is introduced to a new class of CIA recruits, which allows Alias to reintroduce its premise: Sydney and her father, Jack (the invaluable Victor Garber), are double agents assigned to destroy SD-6, one of 12 cells that make up the criminal syndicate The Alliance. And they have just been handed a new tool: a secret computer that can reveal the location of all Alliance agents.
Naturally, there are complications. The Bristows have a new boss at SD-6 (played with cool authority by Rutger Hauer- who IS still alive), and he has questions about their job performance.
Revealing much more would spoil the fun.
What sets Alias apart? For one thing, there’s writer J.J. Abrams (Felicity), who knows how to surprise you without making you feel as if you’ve been duped. He also has been smart enough to hire actors who are as talented as they are attractive and who are able to keep the often outrageous plots grounded. This week, watch Carl Lumbly as Sydney’s partner and see if you don’t believe every move he makes.
Action, suspense and a last-minute twist: Sunday’s Alias provides everything you’d want from a show following the Super Bowl and, for that matter, from the Super Bowl itself. Whether the game will deliver, I can’t say, but the postgame show is a champ.

Jimmy Kimmel Premieres Sunday on ABC
NEW YORK (AP) ó Jimmy Kimmel is live, devouring a burger at a Manhattan steakhouse and talking about his ABC late-night show.
“Jimmy Kimmel Live” premieres with a special post-Super Bowl telecast Sunday night, then continues Mondays through Fridays in the time slot right after “Nightline,” which in no way it resembles. (For starters, “Nightline” isn’t always live and anchorman Ted Koppel doesn’t fancy flannel shirts.)
“Jimmy Kimmel Live” will air from Hollywood’s El Capitan Theater as “the first live nightly talk show in over 40 years,” according to ABC publicity. (Which maybe it is, if you don’t count Joan Rivers on Fox 16 years ago, for all of six months.)
The late-night failure rate is high. Think of Chevy Chase, canned after six miserable weeks in 1993.
“When he came on, a lot of people thought he was going to be really good,” says Kimmel. “That’s what worries me, about ME!”
But he doesn’t look worried. As Kimmel speaks between bites, he seems relaxed, perhaps a little sleepy (jet lag). Even though just days remain before opening night.
And even though his specialty, up to now, has been bad-boy talk radio and, more recently on cable, playing guru to the guy brigade √≥ most notably, as a creator and host of Comedy Central’s “The Man Show,” where he reveled in something he promises he won’t bring to his new show: buxom girls on trampolines.
Despite this note of restraint, he aims to bring an unaccustomed bounce to late-night talk-variety. And he guarantees his studio audience an open bar.
The challenge: broadening his appeal beyond his guy laity and viewers who know him from Comedy Central’s “Win Ben Stein’s Money” and Fox’s NFL pregame show √≥ and maybe even holding on to “Nightline” nerds with his maverick style.
“I don’t believe that lack of intelligence and appreciation for lowbrow comedy go hand-in-hand necessarily,” he says.
Meanwhile, ABC is promoting Kimmel as “Late Night Fresh.”
“Fresh?!” he groans. “There’s nothing less fresh than the word `fresh.'”
Maybe he’s just feeling a little pressure.
“I feel a lot,” he says. “It’s like when I was in college and I was a wedding DJ. Even though it was just a job for me, each time I knew if I screw it up, if my record skips or my equipment blows out, I’ve screwed up someone’s wedding. The pressure was really intense.”
Now 35, Kimmel is still a hard worker, a trait that contradicts the party-hardy image he took to cartoonish extremes on “The Man Show.”
“You want to make it look easy and fun,” he says. “The best time I had this year was my buddy’s bachelor party. We went up to Lake Tahoe √≥ 12 guys in a cabin for three days. I think that’s what people imagine that I am, and it’s what I like to be.
“But when I’m at work, there’s stuff that has to be taken care of, and I’m involved in every little thing.”
So maybe it’s like Fred Astaire gliding across the floor with Ginger Rogers in all those movies √≥ whereas, behind the scenes, he painstakingly choreographed every step.
“Yeah,” says Kimmel gamely. “A hairy, fat Fred Astaire √≥ that’s a good analogy.
“But the only responsibility I feel is to try to be as original as possible, and not to ever steal anything. And that’s been a challenge for me, through my whole career, to not be overly derivative of Letterman. I have to make sure that I don’t. Because everybody that matters will know it.”
Kimmel is an unabashed fan of David Letterman. But there are other broadcasters he admires ó particularly Mike Douglas, a daytime TV talk pioneer whose guests ran the gamut and who, to keep things fresh, teamed up with a different celebrity co-host for a week at a time.
Kimmel, too, will book weeklong celebrity co-hosts. (First week: Snoop Dogg.)
Another policy he’s borrowing: “No cards with questions on them! Mike Douglas just did the interview, just went with things. It’s not like that on talk shows anymore. They’re pretty regimented, very highly produced.
“He was real good,” Kimmel affectionately says. “I remember pretending to be sick because Steve Garvey was gonna be on `Mike Douglas’ and I wanted to see it. Staying home from school is a great association with Mike Douglas.”
A Brooklyn native, Kimmel grew up in Las Vegas, where he and his pals “took advantage of everything the city has to offer. There was no rule that said you had to be a tourist to eat a $2 steak dinner at the Horseshoe √≥ every night for like 35 nights in a row one summer. That’s Vegas!”
Leap forward a few years and Kimmel is a rising TV star about to invade the late-night kingdom. But fame and fortune can’t undo those formative years or compromise the inner guy that got him where he is. Not Kimmel, who savors memories of a $2 steak while feasting on a burger that costs 12 bucks.

Canadians won’t see hyped Super Bowl ads
TORONTO — Canadians tuning into Sunday’s Super Bowl telecast will see the football game. They’ll also see the pre-game and halftime shows, with Shania Twain and Celine Dion among the big stars.
But they won’t get to see Ozzy Osbourne waking up in bed with Florence Henderson to pitch Pepsi Twist. Nor the orangutan doing the backstroke on behalf of Sierra Mist, a new soft drink. Nor the $85,000 diamond-laden pair of Levi Strauss jeans.
They’ll also miss Michael Jordan who, thanks to digital special effects, will play some basketball with his younger self in a Gatorade ad.
That’s because in Canada, Global TV has the broadcast rights to the ABC-TV program, including the right to insert its own commercials which, more often than not, are the same old ads one sees during the rest of the TV week, not the so-called “new creative” content airing south of the border.
Dave Hamilton, vice-president of promotions and publicity for Global, concedes the network always takes viewer heat for the arrangement.
“People complain all the time about not seeing these ads,” he says. “We don’t apologize because we do have the Canadian rights for the game, and it would be great if the Canadian chapters of these companies who are producing them could buy the time and air the creative here, but in most cases that’s not the case.”
Hamilton laughs at the odd prospect of viewer complaints over the issue.
“It’s the only time of year where we actually get people calling to say I WANT to see commercials!”
Truly determined viewers who live near a U.S. border signal could foil the override, though, by disconnecting their cable or satellite service. In Toronto, for example, the ABC affiliate in Buffalo, N.Y. can be received with an old-fashioned antenna.
South of the border, of course, Super Bowl Sunday is more than a sporting event. It has become a national holiday viewed through the electronic stadium of television. And sponsors traditionally pull out all stops to debut imaginative, prestigious and very expensive ads for which they’re paying more than $2 million US for a mere 30 seconds of airtime.
That sounds expensive until you consider that an estimated 130 million people in the U.S. will be tuned in to the game and may catch most of the 61 half-minute ad slots. There’s also an acknowledged prestige factor. In today’s fragmented TV universe, the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards are among the few scheduled programs left that can promise and deliver a truly mass audience.
Global TV expects to lure some three million pairs of eyeballs to the game coverage. Hamilton says Global has sold all its ad time, but won’t say how much it’s charging. He stresses that the old 10-to-one economic ratio doesn’t apply, though. In other words, a spot going for $2 million on ABC would not go for $200,000 in this country.
“Something less than $100,000,” is all he would say.
Hamilton says at least one of the U.S. sponsors, Pepsi, may also run its new ad on Global’s game telecast, but that would be an exception. Generally, Canadian ads will be seen only in Canada and U.S. ads in the U.S.
One Toronto agency, Downtown Partners DDB, has produced a couple of the American spots, including one for Bud Light beer. The Anheuser-Busch brewery has the most Super Bowl ads — 10 of the 30-second slots — including the most coveted and costliest — the first ad after the kickoff. Anheuser-Busch is also the game’s exclusive beer advertiser for the 15th year in a row.

‘American Idol’ Gets Storming Start
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – A new edition of “American Idol,” the hit reality TV show that teams dreams with screams, got off to a storming start, giving Fox television one of its highest audience ratings ever.
The 2003 season premiere of the amateur talent search for the next instant pop star averaged 26.5 million viewers — the biggest audience for any network show Tuesday night — according to preliminary figures on Wednesday from Nielsen Media Research.
The winning formula of barbed comments from British record executive and judge Simon Cowell (“Go back to your vocal coach and demand a refund”) and the hopes of thousands of young wannabe stars grabbed a 30 percent share of viewers younger than 50, the key demographic most prized by advertisers.
Delighted Fox executives said Tuesday evening’s 90-minute show gave the News Corp. Ltd. -owned network its highest-rated night ever, excluding sports telecasts.
The first edition of “American Idol” proved an unexpected hit last summer and made household names of its eventual winner, former cocktail waitress Kelly Clarkson, and runner-up Justin Guarini. Clarkson won an instant contract with RCA Records and scored a No. 1 hit single with “A Moment Like This,” the song she performed on the show.
The second series enters a prime-time landscape bustling with new “reality” favorites, including ABC’s “The Bachelorette,” which features a bevy of young males vying for the attention of a leggy, blond cheerleader, and Fox’s own reality dating show “Joe Millionaire.”
Cowell, dubbed “Mr. Nasty” by the American media last year, returned to the judging panel for the second edition along with music industry executive Randy Jackson and singer-choreographer Paula Abdul.
Tens of thousands of singers in six U.S. cities auditioned for the second series, with many of them getting the sharp end of Cowell’s tongue for their efforts.
“This says you went to the Fame high school,” Cowell told one nervous contestant. “Did you get thrown out?”
“If you lived 2,000 years ago and sang like that, I think they would have stoned you,” he told another.
The season finale, in which the winner will be announced, will be broadcast in May.

Super Bowl Ads Aim for Sensation, but Not Too Much
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Osbournes, Osmonds, Clydesdales, and rabid squirrels are on tap for this year’s Super Bowl commercials, as marketers desperately vie to make an impression in front of the biggest television audience of the year.
In a high-stakes game where each 30-second spot goes for more than $2 million, smaller advertisers like HotJobs, a unit of Yahoo Inc. are putting all of their marketing eggs in one commercial, while giants like brewer Anheuser-Busch Cos. Inc. and PepsiCo Inc. are fielding as many as 11 ads.
With under five days remaining, Walt Disney Co.’s ABC Network still has “less than five” commercial spots yet to be sold, according to a spokeswoman. That suggests that some former Super Bowl advertisers like Electronic Data Systems Corp. and Masterlock decided the game’s exposure just wasn’t worth the money this year.
The HotJobs ad, featuring a variety of workers singing Kermit the Frog’s signature song “The Rainbow Connection,” is a straightforward ad without high-tech gimmickry or gross-out hijinks.
At the other extreme are a series of slapstick ads for Pfizer Inc.’s Trident, which explain why only four of five dentists recommend the gum. (One Trident ad, guaranteed to cause wincing among male viewers, blames it on a bloodthirsty squirrel). And Pepsi’s special effects-laden ad for its Pepsi Twist drink features the borderline-overexposed Osbourne clan, in which Ozzie has a trippy dream featuring the mirror-image Osmond family.
CROSSING THE LINE
Advertising in the Super Bowl must strike a delicate balance: an overly extreme commercial will alienate the public, but an overly cautious ad will sink without a trace.
“We try to find humor that’s broadly appealing,” said Bob Lachky, Anheuser-Busch’s vice president for brand management. “It can be out there and edgy, but as soon as it crosses the line, you’re running a gauntlet.”
Anheuser-Busch will run one timely spot featuring its trademark Clydesdales playing football in a game marred by an instant-replay debacle. The NFL has had several hotly contested playoff games this year that hinged on questionable calls, including one where the league admitted officials made an error that cost the New York Giants a chance to win their game against the San Francisco 49ers.
The ad was shot before that game, Lachky said. He has been working since September to winnow down 25 to 30 contenders to the 11 spots that will run on Sunday.
Other Anheuser-Busch commercials, which are perennial viewer favorites, include a parody of “Tough Man” competitions and a spot where a man tries to woo women with a seashell with “hilarious consequences,” Lachky said. He refused to speculate whether any of this year’s ads would become franchises like the some of the company’s past Super Bowl spots.
“You would always hope you’d have lightning in a bottle like you did with “Frogs,” “Lizards,” “Wassup” or “I love you, man,” he said, “but that’s dangerous to start predicting.”
“If it’s great work it tends to resonate, and the consumer will lead you to what’s a franchise.”
Other advertisers in the big game include the sandwich chain Quizno’s Corp., Levi’s, General Motors Corp.’s Cadillac unit, TMP Worldwide Inc.’s Monster.com. and Reebok International Ltd., which is returning to the game after several years’ absence.
Sitting out the game this year, as with most years, will be Reebok’s arch competitor Nike Inc., whose commercials are almost always a hit with viewers. Nike did, however, score a major hit with an ad during the NFL’s conference championship game last week that depicted a streaker at an English soccer match who eluded a squad of police — all thanks, naturally, to his Nike sneakers.