Film and Television

The whole brouhaha over the revelation that Ashlee Simpson was lip-synching her songs on SNL is hardly a surprise to anyone who has actually seen Ashlee Simpson “sing” (the only people fooled by her are the nine-year-olds who buy her albums). The real story is what this scandal says about SNL, the folks who used to expose and ridicule this kind of cheap fraud rather than committing it.

The real story was summed up very nicely in, of all places, a comment left on former-kid-actor-turned-author Wil Wheaton’s blog.

i missed the ASHLEE SIMPSON fiasco for many of the same reasons you and TONY PIERCE mentioned…it is hard to maintain your edge when you’ve been cutting with it for 35 years…when i think of SNL now…i think of bad television parodies…loud, senseless, time consuming sketches that that seem to have been made to order copies of all that have been played out on SNL before…the ASHLEE episode is the kind of pop SNL used to avoid…such candy coated pop was a favorite SNL target for derisive humor…now the humor is lost in the parody of itself that SNL has become…is this a sign post that SNL can look to as a signal that a change is needed…or will the irony of it all be lost to them…at some point you have to have different aspirations than to be the 7,462th man on the moon…too many trips to the same old place…there are other planets out there to explore…is anyone ready to make the trip?

USA Network has ordered a TV series based on the hit USA miniseries THE 4400. But it’s not as simple as it sounds. Behind that series order is an interesting business story, as reported at zap2it.com, of deal-making and awkward timing.

“The 4400” was caught in a business vortex not of its own making. Its studio, Viacom Productions, has been folded into Paramount Network Productions; and its broadcast outlet, USA Network, was involved in the recent merger between Universal and NBC.

There was, according to other press reports, protracted haggling between NBC, its broadcast partners USA and SciFi, and supplier Paramount. NBC reportedly wanted to retain some rebroadcast rights (ala MONK on ABC & USA, “Law and Order” on NBC and USA, etc.). There was even some question about which NBC/Universal network the series version of THE 4400 would actually air on.

Once that was all ironed out, more problems remained.

When “The 4400” finished its run, none of the producers or actors was retained on contract. The executive producer and show runner, Ira Steven Behr, has since gone on to CBS’ “dr. vegas,” while his predecessor, Rene Echevarria, is now working on NBC’s midseason drama “Medium.”

DR VEGAS isn’t exactly wowing audiences, and the rumor is the show is destined for cancellation. The folks behind THE 4400 are well aware of that… and have been hinting that showrunner Ira Behr may soon be free.

“Maira and I are going to talk about the possibility of having him come over,” says co-executive producer Scott Peters, “because we’re not going to be up and running until March in terms of shooting. This means we have to start writing earlier than that, but not tomorrow.”

Meaning, they can wait for DR. VEGAS to tank. The big hurdle now is getting the cast back for the series…

As the production team reassembles, a bigger challenge may be reassembling the large cast for the drama, in which 4,400 people returned mysteriously in a ball of light. Some had been missing a short time, some for decades. All hadn’t aged and didn’t remember where they had been. Some returned with extraordinary or even dangerous abilities.

The cast included Joel Gretsch (“Taken”) and Jacqueline McKenzie as federal agents dealing with the returnees, with Peter Coyote as their boss. Among those playing returnees were Mahershalalhashbaz Ali, Laura Allen, Patrick Flueger and Michael Moriarty. Mark Valley (“Keen Eddie”), currently a regular on ABC’s “Boston Legal,” joined midway through the run, as did Billy Campbell.

“We’re still negotiating with actors I want,” Peters says. “I want everybody back, because there’s a winning combination. Right now, Joel and Jackie are definitely coming back, which is good, because it would be an awfully difficult show to do without them. It would be hard to do it without any of them, as a matter of fact, because they’re all integral to the success of the show. We have to get Billy Campbell back. He’s tied up at the moment, but we’re going to try to figure out a way to get him back.

Zap2it.com is reporting that ABC is moving forward on a private eye drama from “Usual Suspects” scribe Christopher McQuarrie called HARD TIME.

The drama focuses on a convict who gets out of jail and becomes a successful investigator thanks to his ability to see misdeeds from the perspective of the criminal.

Um…wasn’t that THE ROCKFORD FILES?

Variety reports that SciFi may have been right to cancel FARSCAPE last season.

“Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars” tallied so-so ratings (1.9 million overall viewers) for the channel. Though the two-night event topped 18-49 rankings among basic cablers in its timeslot, the “Farscape” bow paled in comparison to recent Sci Fi original premieres “Stargate Atlantis” (4.2 million) and eighth-season launch of “Stargate SG-1” (3.2 million).

I wonder how it fared compared to the GROWING PAINS reunion the same night…?

My brother Tod Goldberg, in his Las Vegas Mercury column this week, recounts what he learned during his one year foray in the infomercial business:

1. When they say, “If you call now, we’ll cut the price in half,” what they mean is, if you call at any time, ever. And when they say operators are standing by, they mean minimum wage, barely literate mutants who will, at any given time, give the home phone number of an account executive out to a dissatisfied owner of a facial product that purports to make you look 20 years younger but that usually is about as effective as a bottle of Jergens, are standing by.

2. There exists a gold-plated ThighMaster.

3. If the company you work for gets rid of the free bagels and coffee and fires people in the Human Resources Department, it’s time to begin preparing your resume.

4. If someone from a Chilean port city calls to complain about receiving a massive shipment of therapeutic rice-filled pillows infested with vermin, just take a message, quietly log out of your computer, say goodbye to all your friends and exit the building immediately.

5. When preparing to launch the Ed McMahon Miracle Fryer infomercial, do not ask in the middle of a meeting, “Isn’t it weird that there isn’t anything remotely miraculous about this product and that no actual frying takes place?”

I knew, after the season finale of STAR TREK ENTERPRISE, that if the show continued, it was going to suck. It was a Planet of the Apes-esque ending where Capt. Archer wakes up on earth during world war II, is captured by the Nazis, and… they’re aliens. You know an sf show is on its last gasp when they start trotting out the Nazis. This was a new low for STAR TREK, which is saying a lot, considering they did a whole episode a season or two back about the Captain’s sick dog.

My writing partner William Rabkin caught the season premiere of ENTERPRISE before I did, and sent me this email while I was in Canada:

I bet you never dreamed that the season premiere would be Nazi aliens versus… Brooklyn gangsters! And in the same wardrobe as Oxmix and the other guy from “A Piece of the Action,” but without any personality.

I thought he had to be joking. Sadly, he wasn’t. I just saw the show for myself. It was astonishingly awful. It’s time UPN pulled the plug on ENTERPRISE. At this point, it would be a mercy killing. It’s too late for the show to die with dignity…