P.T. Barnum perhaps said it best when he offered up the memorable observation of his circus-hungry audiences: There’s a sucker born every minute. The days of that circus are long gone; sadly, the only circus of consequence that seems to exist these days is the one surrounding politics in America. It has become nearly impossible … Read more
Maybe I’m late to this particular party, but in the last couple of days it’s become far more apparent to me that there are two newspapers in Los Angeles that are unapolgetically biased in their coverage of UCLA sports. One is the school’s longtime house organ, THE DAILY BRUIN. The other, apparently more so than … Read more
It was an emotional Good Friday for the cast and crew, let alone the small but passionate fan base, of GOOD MORNING, FOOTBALL. It’s actually been airing for seven and a half years, live from New York, weekday mornings on NFL Network. Even among sports networks, it was an afterthought in a daypart where yelling … Read more
A well-meaning friend tagged me on social media to call my attention to a Tik Tok video which has become a viral sensation of late, and not a moment too soon considering the possible fate of the platform in the U.S. Entitled HOLLYWOOD IS BROKEN, authored by user ProducerPatrick, it’s garnered more than 10,000 comments … Read more
Amidst a somewhat tumultuous week for certain divisions of NBCUniversal (make sure you return that IPad, Ronna, not that you were around long enough to have it set up for you), some news came out of the Peacock camp that seemed to trumpet that they found the secret sauce to streaming success. Put a … Read more
Dan Schneider has basically spent almost his entire life within the vicinity of a soundstage. As a teen actor, he was part of the ensemble cast of the modestly successful ABC sitcom HEAD OF THE CLASS, where he portrayed, as Wikipedia described him, the overweight, wisecracking cynic Dennis Blunden , a computer whiz whose fields … Read more
I grew up as a heavy viewer, literally and figuratively, of NBC News. We lived in an area where the CBS over-the-air signal on Channel 2 was often snowy and grainy, so we only watched in prime time when there was a sitcom or drama we HAD to watch (God, my mom LOVED Steve McGarrett … Read more
The first scenes of the newly released documentary film STORMY features shots of a rather mundane home life of Stephanie Clifford and her young daughter in a tony home in the Dallas-area suburb of Forney, Texas. The daughter is helping her mom apply lip gloss, a dog is lying adoringly on a sofa, and we … Read more
So my former Sony colleague Mike Richards is back in the news cycle, courtesy of a PEOPLE Magazine “exclusive” released earlier this week and penned by the apropriately monickered Gillian Telling, who at last is telling Richards’ side of stories that have dominated the media news and yes, click-bait worlds pretty much since Richards took … Read more
Daytime broadcast network television, which at one time actually drove the profit margins of their companies in an era when they actually did make money, has deteriorated into little more than a vast wasteland of legacy formats and lots of news and news-adjacent content. In a world where timeshift viewing and catch-up streaming options proliferate, … Read more