By Scott Buckner

The most well-known recent season of MTV’s seminal reality show, The Real World, was the season in Las Vegas that made the off-Strip Palms Casino & Resort famous. It was the season the series officially and unapologetically became sponsor to in-your-face spoiled whiny youth indulgence of booze and sex by a cast of boneheads with the exact lack of maturity to gracefully handle the magic but perilous gifts of vice that we have been endowed with by our Creator. Pity.
That was the season, too, that some might say The Real World jumped the shark, though rode the shark might be a more apt phrase. How unlikely, though, that the cast member to emerge with a semblance of celebrity career ahead of her was Trishelle Cannatella, the loose (and that’s not a pejorative) airhead on-call to all horny boys camera range.
Er, how very likely in retrospect, I should say (though she wasn’t the only cast member who went on to pose for Playboy), now that we know just how ready the church-schooled girl from Cut-Off, La., really was to break out.

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Posted on June 28, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Comedian Kathy Griffin has pretty much made a career saying the only people who find her standup material incredibly funny are gay people. I’ve liked Griffin’s humor for a long time (she was the best reason to watch Suddenly Susan) so I spent last night’s mini-marathon of My Life On The D-List on Bravo laughing my ass off. Since she refers to herself “the gaymaker,” I started wondering whether Griffin possesses a mysteriously incredible power to use the power of television to temporarily turn perfectly hetero guys like me to suit her own evil purposes.
No, wait. I the only reason I tuned into D-List was because I ran across Griffin with her pants around her ankles in her Strong Black Woman standup special while channel surfing a few minutes before and thought, “Damn, I’d do her.”

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Posted on June 20, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Welcome every single one of you 150 or so trendy Los Angeles people to the TV-set restaurant featured on Hell’s Kitchen. This evening, I will be your fake-accent maitre d’ and the bloke who rings that funny round vibrating plastic blinky-light thingamajig they give you on weekends at Outback Steakhouse and Applebee’s that tells you your table’s ready. They’re very expensive thingamajigs, so please don’t go kill time next door at Bed, Bath & Beyond and leave them stashed in the towels.
In the meantime, feel welcome to have a seat at our bar for unlimited complimentary drinks. Hopefully soon, food will be the furthest thing from your mind.

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Posted on June 20, 2007

By Scott Buckner

The biggest collection of head cases any American network has ever had the balls to produce in television history returned to FX with a rerun of the fourth season opener of Rescue Me. While the networks serve us reality-show slop and bad sitcoms and then wonders where all the viewers have gone, recovering boozer Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary) and the men of NYFD Station 62 are back elevating into an art from the state of being incredibly fucked in the head by bad childhoods and worse adulthoods. It’s no wonder guys like this don’t mind going into blazing warehouses. For some of them, death would be easier and cheaper than the years of therapy it would take to undo the messes they’ve become.

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Posted on June 19, 2007

By The Beachwood TV Values Affairs Desk

The Sun-Times published a column on Saturday asking “Does Too Much TV Lead To Decaying Moral Values?” Gosh, we certainly hope so. Especially if that means leading us to a society more tolerant, less hateful, more compassionate, and less repressed than what the author favors. Let’s take a look.
Does too much TV lead to decaying moral values? Heavy TV viewers more permissive about sex, abortion and homosexuality: survey
BY BRIAN FITZPATRICK
Couch potatoes, beware: Someday, you might be saying “the TV made me do it.”
A new special report by the Culture and Media Institute indicates that watching too much television could be hazardous to your moral health.

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Posted on June 18, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Welcome back to hell, everyone. Chronically pissed-off Scottish chef Gordon Ramsay was back last night to guide us through a third expletive-laden season of failure and humiliation in Fox-TV’s Hell’s Kitchen – a show that might as well be called Get The Fuck Out Of My Fucking Kitchen, You Fucking Worthless Lazy-Arse Pieces Of Fucking Shit.
In last night’s two-hour extravaganza, which repeated last Monday’s premiere episode, we met 12 chef wannabes looking to win a $250,000-a-year salary (plus profit-sharing) as head chef at the Green Valley Ranch Resort in Las Vegas, which we last saw on TV as the home base of the American Casino reality show that got a little too real.
To win the Hell’s Kitchen chef-off, our contestants have to prove to Ramsay that they possess both the backbone to withstand his verbal abuse and the basic cooking skills to actually run a kitchen that serves high-falutin’ cuisine – all while cooking for crowds of real, high-falutin’ people in the Hell’s Kitchen restaurant. To prevent the guests from being food poisoned or notes hurriedly scrawled in pencil saying “Help Me” being stashed under customers’ cuts of Beef Wellington, Ramsay has to approve every appetizer and entree dish that goes out.

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Posted on June 12, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Back in 1995, Court TV brought everything that was sordid and wrong with the O.J. Simpson and the Menendez brothers trials into the living room of anyone who had cable TV. Since there hasn’t yet been a trial of the century this century to justify the network sucking up space on the dial, owner Time Warner decided it will dump the Court TV name in January 2008 in favor of something that reflects a move to programming about “real people and real situations.”
You know, because real women on trial for poisoning their real husbands aren’t real situations. On top of that, in a drastic move to get trashy America and old people to finally break down and buy computers and high-speed Internet connections, the company announced that actual trial coverage will be aired only on the Web.
If last night’s Speeders and Getting A Ticket In America is any indication of what the new Court TV is to become, I have a suggestion for its new name: Succhiamo!

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Posted on June 8, 2007

By Scott Buckner

I’m glad the data-entry stoner in charge of my satellite TV program guide at 2 a.m. this morning was promising “super heavyweights arm wrestling” on ESPN2. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have found the taped replay of the previous evening’s NCAA Division I Women’s College World Series softball finals in Oklahoma City between Arizona and Tennessee. It was a do-or-die game for Arizona, which trailed 1-0 in the best-of-three series. I was looking forward to some good heavyweight arm rasslin’, but I stayed with the softball because I’m a guy, and I naturally welcome three-hour events involving a whole bunch of attractive college women. Especially when a TV camera spends practically the entire time trained on their backsides.

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Posted on June 7, 2007

By The Beachwood Cutting Edge TV Affairs Desk

Comcast Ch. 125 (Northwest 2 & 3 – Standard)
June 5-6, 2007
Al Gore’s Current TV says they slice their programming into pods of just a few minutes each, but here’s how their schedule looks on the Comcast viewing guide.
5 p.m.: Exciting New Excitement
5:30 p.m.: Trust Me On This One
6 p.m.: Man, What a Surprise

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Posted on June 6, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Bravo began its Sunday programming day at midnight with a showing of The Terminator a film which has now taken on same slightly washed-out look as movies shown on WLS-TV at 3 a.m.
It’s 1984 in Los Angeles and cyborg Arnold Schwarzenegger has traveled 40 years back in time from a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles to scare the shit out of a garbage truck driver by appearing naked in an alley and stealing clothes from community college-level gangbangers too skinny to have clothes that would actually fit him. Now dressed like Michael Jackson, Arnold begins to lay the foundation for his gubernatorial campaign with a thorough cleansing of the voter rolls, starting by shooting every constituent named Sarah Connor.

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Posted on June 4, 2007