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by: NAPALM JONES
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I’ve been avoiding this moment like an NBA player avoids paying child support, but whether I like it or not, it's here. Back like a pesky case of genital herpes is the time of year when all the big TV networks come together for one giant gang dump on your idiot boxes. To help you wade through this pile of runny festering shit, I dug through all the pilot episodes, synopsis, and upfronts hype I could possibly bare, in hopes of perhaps finding that rare pearl in a sea of repeatedly harvested prairie oysters. Will there be another "Lost" or "Desperate Housewives" this year? Will NBC stay in fourth place, now that Must See TV has been slaughtered like that small village we marched through in the Quong Mai Valley in the summer of ‘70? And the most important question of all- do I have enough Tums left to stomach the hours of shows I have to watch to figure this all out for your lazy boot-licking asses? It’s time to find out. On to my fall TV pre-reviews.




Five Ears – Five Ears for awesome shit that makes me want to fight, fuck or kill!
Four Ears – Four Ears for well above average stuff that gives me a chubby
Three Ears – Three Ears for well-rounded but average...like a white girl's ass
Two Ears – Two Ears for subpar material that makes my crotch itch
One Ear – One Ear for shit that makes me want to fight, fuck, or kill for the wrong reasons.
testicle – An added testicle for shit that is in between.



Television



“And my name is Dignan, man. So what?” Jason Lee struts his Springer Show best in this comedy about trying to right your bad karma. First of all, NBC has put the full force of the 60,000 candle watt GE hype machine behind trying to push this laugh track-free situation comedy, but in the process of punching the 400-pound gorilla uphill they lost sight of one tiny little thing- the fucking jokes! Jason Lee puts in some of his best work since Chasing Amy as the haggard everyman, but if no one is actually writing him some punchlines, how in the retard’s shitstain is he supposed to be funny? The idea of a degenerate redneck trying to right his karma is pretty funny by itself, and I even liked the idea of Earl trying to get his gay buddy laid in the pilot to make up for fucking with him when they were kids, but scene after scene, the jokes had no discernible punchlines whatsoever. So does that make this a half-hour dramedy, or just a poorly written show? I guess it boils down to this question. If was being tied down and tortured in a Vietcong POW camp, and being forced to watch this show, would I keep my eyes open? Probably. I mean, this is easily the best sitcom on NBC now, but sadly, in a sea of the most contrived bullshit awful programming on network television, that still doesn’t mean it's any good.






You may not believe it when I say this, but I actually like this show. Does that mean it's any good? I believe it does. When I was in boot camp back in ’61, my drill sergeant always said that all you had to do was believe, and it made things true. Just like we were supposed to believe him when he said to move our lazy no stripe having asses or we would find out what the mother of all ass kickings was like, you should believe that this show is at least worth watching for the first two episodes. At first I thought this suspense show was gonna be some kind of James Cameron Imax-type deal where he makes one hack movie about a subject and then ends up doing 17 documentaries about the same sunken wreck, but this show is far creepier than James Cameron’s obsession with the Titanic. Basically, the first episode is full of weird events happening around various bodies of water that have the scientific community and the population baffled. Is it Nessie? Are aliens attacking? Or is that just the old Baby Ruth trick from Caddyshack? The more the show goes on, the more questions arise. Almost like the pilot for "Lost", minus that guy getting sucked into the airplane engine and spit out the other end in a million flaming pieces, this show gets you hooked by making you shout questions at your TV. Like, “Man, what the fuck is wrong with you people! Don’t go back, you dumb biatch! If you put your hand in that water I will turn the fucking channel on your stupid ass. Damn, I bet Vinny Chase could run up in this shit like Aquaman and chill all these weird mutha fuckaz out!” Anyway, eventually one kid brings a gestating sea egg home and plops it in mom's fish tank. After a day' the tank looks like that time I tried to feed three-week-old hotdogs to my Jack Dempsey- oily, murky, and full of very dead fish. All types of suspense ensue. Some divers get eaten, some scientist relives a scene from The Abyss, a creature busts out of the fish tank. It doesn’t really matter; all you need to know is that I actually wanted to see the second episode when it was finished. It is rare that the first episode of anything makes me care enough to watch more, so I have to give it a solid Four Severed Ears, fresh out of the pickling jar.






From scary monsters to scary myths, this show is basically an extension of the X-Files idea minus the conspiracy theories, the aliens, or the paranoid government agents. So really it’s just like all those pointless episodes where Moldy and Skuller chased around some monster and nothing happened in the general plot. Not surprising, since "The X-Files" was actually based on the original ‘70s TV show "Kolchak The Night Stalker", which can be seen in reruns on the Sci-Fi channel daily marathons from time to time. Yeah, I know I should get a day job, but freelance mercenary work pays good enough for me to sit at home and watch this shit as much as I want, fat boy. The original Night Stalker had something going for it. It was funny as hell, although that may not have been intentional. But dammit to hell, I laughed at every episode with a headless motorcycle ghost or a telekinetic zombie just as hard as I laughed at Lori Singer in Footloose. Anyway, that Stuart Towsend guy who’s movie career never went anywhere after filling Tom Cruise’s shoes as the vampire Lestat makes his attempt at updating the campy role portrayed with brilliant bumbling campiness by Darren McGavin in the original, except that Townsend plays every scene baby in a coma, straight. Way to take everything good out of an idea and pump tons of money into it. I will give Townsend some credit for starring across from the hottest black chicks around, like the late Aliyah in the aforementioned shitty Anne Rice movie. Shit, I’m half tempted to dig Aliyah’s hot ass up right now and knock the dirt off, if you know what I’m saying. But seriously, if this show didn’t also star the deliciously chocolate curves of Gabrielle “Bring It On Me” Union, it would have gotten no rating at all. It has to make me wonder if another black romantic comedy will ever get made, now that Gabrielle has a TV show.






McGollyG Whiz, what the fuck are you doing? The first Charlie’s Angels movie was fun, and at least shit got blown up on Fast Lane. "The OC" gets a pass, because it least it makes the few women I know stop complaining about missing "90210". But seriously; do I really need a WB show that is a cheesy cross between "Buffy" and Poltergeist? The show started off sweet when this kid's mom gets eaten by the ceiling when some freaky ghost shit goes down like in that movie The Grudge, but then the rest of the show turns into a "Dawson’s Creek"- type romp of fighting evil spirits as the kids turn into grown-up ghost-chasing vapid male models with cool weapons. This show is about as good an idea as delicately slicing cold cuts with a STIHL chainsaw (something I can tell from experience is very fun, but not very effective; unless, of course, you are making cold cuts out of some asshole who has been withholding information from you for three days straight). The effects are solid, but this stinker falls short every time it tries to create some real chills.






Me too! I hate all funny rich guys. Regardless, this is about as close as Chris Rock will ever get to being a black comedian that is accepted by mainstream white America. Though he doesn’t appear in the show other than narration, this tale of his childhood is basically his version of "The Cosby Show" without the cheesy rich family, the lame guest stars, the contrived jokes, or the watered-down social references. So basically, not at all like the Cosby shit, but very similar. This show for the most part actually tells it like it is, or as least as much as one can do that on network TV. The show stops short of the dad full-on punching the little kid version of Chris in the mouth with a closed fist and a four-finger ring, but at least it attempts to take network TV to a place that is not only real, but also funny. Then again, is UPN even a network? Shit without a Star Trek show on for the first time since the netlet launched, I’ll be surprised if this show can draw flies in the seven markets that still even have a UPN affiliate. The last two fart-in-the-wind towns I drove through had You Peein on at like three in the morning when the Home Shopping Channel ran out of knife sets and those talking plastic bass fish that you can mount on the wall. This show was originally created for Fox, but then some brilliant idea made Fox decide to dump it like a black man trying to put a show on network television. Then something even stranger must have happened that made Chris Rock decide that he absolutely hated the idea of money or success, so he sold it to UPN. Sadly, because of that it’s probably the best new sitcom that no one will ever see.






Did she dyke out in prison? Did she learn how to make an effective shank from a paper plate and a toothbrush? Did they force her to eat recipes from her own lousy cookbooks? These are none of the questions that will be answered on "The Apprentice" this year. It used to be that only "Law and Order" and "CSI" were allowed to take up multiple time slots with spin-off dreck. But now, in the worst precedent in television history, we are going to be subjected to back-to-back nights of different versions of the fucking Apprentice, of all things. Do you fucking people really want to see more rich white assholes hold a contest for other rich white assholes to see who can be the richest, whitest asshole of them all? If you said yes, you should know that the knock on your door is me and, that I am armed and that I will not hesitate to put a bullet in your candy ass for having such piss poor taste in your reality programming. With hours of "Hogan Knows Best", "Being Bobby Brown", "Kill Reality", and "Laguna Beach", who the fuck needs the queen of homemade potpourri to have her own fucking unreality show? I’d rather watch a show about her being sent to China as a stipulation from her early release from incarceration and being forced to work in one of those factories that creates her exclusive line of clothing and home goods for K-mart. But that’s not the case. Now my living room is the “bored room”, and anyone who is watching this crap and keeping it on the air is fired.






You probably think that this is the first time a show has been dedicated to the premise of a woman being President, but you’d be wrong. Back in the early days of Fox there was a little show called "Hail to the Chief" that starred Patty Duke as the President. Throwing Gena “Cuthroat Island was still better than The Island” Davis in this Breast Wing drama proves that even that far-fetched stupid idea of hiring some washed up-actress to play the leader of the Free World isn’t new. Yeah, I’d like a serving of that rehash scatter smothered and covered, please. I truly hope this isn’t some ploy to prepare the masses for Hillary “I’m not just Bubba’s wife, I’m a Senator” Clinton’s run at the Oval Office. But I believe it probably is, which means one very important thing… some pompous network assholes think what they can actually have an effect on your feeble little TV-viewing brains. They also have created two other very unlikely scenarios for themselves, the first of which being that this female Commander in Chief is not only a woman but also an independent who was actually elected to high office (she starts as VP in the show and then moves up); the second is that anyone will watch this garbage! A political drama with a woman at its core is fine by me, but please keep the science fiction out of the political drama. A third-party female president is more unrealistic than the premise for "Alf". This show gets a two testicle rating, because it could really use some balls.






Hmm, another spooky sci-fi-ish hour long drama that may or may not be about weird creatures lurking just around the corner. Are you getting the feeling like I am, that "Lost" and "The 4400" are just easier ideas to copy than "Desperate Housewives"? I’m guessing so, since there seems to be no lack of spooky weird shows with otherworldly characteristics debuting this year. In fact, I believe there are just shy of an assload counting the ones reviewed here, plus the Jennifer Love's Hugetits stinker "Ghost Whisperer" and the Carla Gugino-fights-aliens show "Threshold" that don't even deserved to be reviewed. How unimaginative can one industry be? Apparently the possibilities are infinite. The show pretends to be a family drama that just happens to get caught up in some freakish abductions and weird glowing orbs right after a hurricane blows through their new Florida town. I can only hope that because of the recent tragedy in the South that the hurricane references will keep this show from ever seeing the light of day. If it does, however, make it on the air as was originally planned, it will get a lead in from the oft-copied wunderkind itself, "Lost". So that’ll probably make it some big hit that everyone wastes their fucking time on just like that other crappy show that once had a "Lost" lead in. God what was that show called? Oh yeah, "Alias", also known as, why are those zombies chasing that hot man with the boobs?




Question of the Week
That’s all the new shows I could stomach for one column, but there are lots of returning shows that I’ll be commenting on in the weeks to come. In light of that, I’m curious to know what shows you guys are excited to see back this fall, and why. If any of you says you can’t wait to see the season premiere of "Yes Dear", I will hunt you down and rip your tongue out with my jagged crusty toe nail.
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COMMENTS  1-10 out of 47 Post Comment Message Board View
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Dave Can't Wait () Post #: 1
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Posted: 9/9/2005 3:47:37 AM
To see the season premiere of Yes, Dear?....Who does???? I want to shoot every cast member in the head and piss in the hole. That and according to Jim people who watch these shows in general need to be killed.
J-Rock In 2 Weeks () Post #: 2
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Posted: 9/9/2005 5:49:56 AM
I can't wait to see ER again. I know that sounds gay, but its like the show is finally good now that no one famous is on it. The indian girl from Bend It Like Beckham is probably the best thing that ever happened to that show, plus she is super fine!
STEVE LAGUNA BEACH () Post #: 3
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Posted: 9/9/2005 9:47:18 AM
Laguna Beach 2005 kicks ass. I can't believe what an A-hole Jason is being to Jessica though. Whats up with that? And Steven and Kristin, they're like totally gonna get back together. They're so cute together.
sigh lost () Post #: 4
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Posted: 9/9/2005 9:55:57 AM
was the best show on tv last season...will it stay that way, or jump the shark...that is the question.......

best night for tv is sunday's.....simpsons, family guy, rome, curb, sunday night football, greys anatomy....thank god for dvr.......


Atlas Yeah but () Post #: 5
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Posted: 9/9/2005 10:06:48 AM
Stephan went over to LC's right after his Valentines dinner with Kristen. He totally like LC. Jason is such a player, jeez.
J-Smoove Boston Legal () Post #: 6
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Posted: 9/9/2005 10:13:04 AM
Can't wait for the new season to begin. A funny legal drama with great plot lines to boot. Plus William Shatner is hilarious!
Denny Crane!
Carl Gay? () Post #: 7
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Posted: 9/9/2005 10:13:44 AM
You guys(?) sound like a bunch of broads. At least sigh has it right....simpsons, family guy, rome, curb, sunday night football, greys anatomy....thank god for dvr.......
ED J-(ASS)SMOOTHIE () Post #: 8
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Posted: 9/9/2005 11:33:57 AM
BOSTON LEGAL SUCKS YOU FAG! WHAT THE HELL ARE MURPHY BROWN AND CAPTAIN KIRK DOING IN A COURTROOM ANYHOW?!
Justice Waltrop ED'S TASTE IS SO BAD... () Post #: 9
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Posted: 9/9/2005 11:53:44 AM
He will always be in the mediocre middle of the elephant walk that is his existence.

Boston Legal does rule - Jimmy Spader and Bill Shatner work comedic wonders together, while Candice Bergin's hard feminist edge keeps NOW from trying to burn down the Disney Building.

Besides, who wants hard drama the night before the first workday of the week?
NJ Guido Justice Waltrip () Post #: 10
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Posted: 9/9/2005 12:09:27 PM
I got your hard drama right here....
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