More than three decades ago, I at least got the chance to turn my childhood obsession into a business strategy. Game shows were (and still are) the highest-rated and most profitable programs on TV, and while they were dominating late afternoon and early evening lineups, and still fairly prominent in the morning programming of the … Read more
Right up front, let me assure you all: the last word of today’s title is spelled WITH AN L. Just like my last name is spelled with two. Believe me, it’s been mispronounced more than once, and while I embrace the nickname, I still bristle when someone leaves the second “L” out of my last … Read more
On a day that was fraught with emotion for me on many levels, to top it all off, I had to see headline after headline about yet another so-called “nice guy” being publicly exposed for being far less nice in private than he was in public. As DECIDER’s Greta Bjornson reported: Jimmy Fallon has been accused … Read more
I’ve gotten four different alerts for free pumpkin spice lattes this week, Halloween candy displays are already in every drug store and supermarket I’ve been to (it’s the beginning of the month; that’s my window these days) and there’s no Thursday afternoon baseball game for white noise for the first time since February (ok, that … Read more
My dad and I had a Sunday afternoon ritual during football season to watch–well, suffer through–the Giants and the Jets–which, if you look back on how those teams performed during the 1970s, brought particular pain on most Sundays. But the results paled to the frustration and Tourette’s-like rants that would spew from him when he … Read more
How slow a news day was it on the holiday yesterday? This was the leading story across an overwhelming number of sites I regularly visit, including DEADLINE, where Ted Johnson chose to share with the entertainment industry this: First Lady Jill Biden had tested positive for Covid and is experiencing mild symptoms, her communications director said. … Read more
One of the true feel-good stories of these times, fraught with the doom and gloom of political divide, feckless shilling for nominations, endless strikes against tyrannical megalomaniacs, climate change and ever-increasing numbers of those truly spooked by screaming headlines of conflated numbers shrieking that “COVID is not over” (congratulations, Rong-Gong And The Hyphenates, I saw … Read more
My esteemed onetime partner in FOX research crime Melva Goffney Benoit passed along this eye-opener as mine attempted to fight off a full day of migraines as they struggled to open today. Like moi, she’s seen more than her share of both good and bad brand research, and we’re both experienced and nuanced enough to … Read more
We’ve all got a little extra time on our hands this holiday weekend, enough to actually give the question we asked above a bit of thought. Because it’s not all that cut-and-dry to answer and, from my experience, there’s little that qualifies as a wrong answer, so long as YOU have a justification for thinking … Read more
I had almost forgotten how much I missed the wit and banter of late night television hosts, not that the term “late night” is really all that applicable any more. When they were in production, like the majority of those who collectively still watch the Jimmys (Kimmel and Fallon), Stephen Colbert, John Oliver and Seth … Read more