According to the DNA tests, I am not the father of Anna Nicole Smith’s baby.
In case you were wondering.
Thank a more minor deity you're here!
Just watched the first Thank God You’re Here, which is a show where they throw an unprepared star into an improv scene.
Not life-changing, but a good basic improv show. If you enjoy creative challenge, this is a one to watch. Now, they’re stacking the results a bit, bringing in some stars who have a background in improv…. but perhaps not to the results they expected. Jennifer Coolidge, well, didn’t bring her A game.
It’s also a rather watery form of improv. Only the actor thrown in is improving; the other actors are clearly trying to stick close to a script, rather violently steering the scene back to it when need be… and thus you don’t get the surprising developments that can arise in such situation. (And this means that the scene doesn’t die even when the actor makes a basic improv faus pax, such as saying “no” to something pushed on him. Wayne Knight was funny despite making this error.) The “contest” aspect of this is unneeded, the “critique” of each performance by the talented Dave Foley is quite hollow to avoid criticizing the lamer efforts.
So it’s not ideal… but despite it all, it’s still fairly fun.
Mr. B.C., R.I.P.
Evanier reportsthe death of Johnny Hart. Younger folks – heck, folks of my age who haven’t delved into cartoon history – would be forgiven for thinking of him as just a somewhat trite factory cartoonist who turned to a sometimes ugly form of evangelism. (Some people can combine humor with their evangelism, but at best Hart could do one or the other.)
But if you ever get the chance to read the first collection of “B.C.”, 1959′s Hey, B.C.!, do. Here was stuff that was edgy and fresh and funny. I really can’t chart the strips whole path into blandness, but it’s worth it for that first batch.
A buncha shows get the ax
Just saw that a bunch of shows are coming to an end. The only part of it that is even vaguely bad news in the Nativerse is the loss of Six Degrees, which returned in a watchable (but also missable) form. I think I may have watched a full episode of Seventh Heaven when it was first on, but haven’t been called back to it since. I kept forgetting to watch Wedding Bells, so okay, that’s a little bad news – a show has gone from launched to axed without my watching it, maybe it was great and my review woud’ve saved it, but I doubt it. And if there’s any hope that Studio 60 will see a second season to work past its rather notably huge kinks, it’s the fact that the show they replaced it with tanked quickly, so the failure could be blamed on bad time slot (following a hot show though it may be!)
