Thursday, January 26, 2006

Besides the Hamas victory, the other two major stories of the week are NBC's cancelling The West Wing and ABC's killing Emily's Reasons Why Not after just one episode. What gives? Only Lisa de Moraes can explain. First, as for The West Wing, it seems the producers thought the transition from one presidency to the next provided a "really wonderful way to end the series." And apparently we are in for a surprise, after producers had "quite a brawl" over who should win the next election. Do we really think they would allow a Republican to win?

With regard to Emily's Reasons Why Not, ABC's Steve McPherson explained the show didn't get to "where it needed to be." (Has he even seen Boogie Nights?) Even better is de Moraes's vicious analysis of ABC News's anchor team of Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff:

Even on the promo clip shown to critics of various scenes of each out in the field, Woodruff looked like he'd just stepped off the cover of GQ, while Vargas looked like she'd gone out to walk her dog and found herself in Iraq.

Up on the stage, Vargas prattled on merrily about how having anchors out in the field changes the way they cover a story. "I mean, when I was in Iraq for that week, I did sometimes three reports for each broadcast, and those reports were two, three, four minutes long. We covered the story of the elections in Iraq that week far differently having an anchor on the ground than we would have having a correspondent there," she said, oblivious to how bad that sounded.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Loved the mini-rant on the anchor/talking heads. I worked in TV news for 25 years as a photojournalist and reporter and can tell you my take on those people is that they are sooooo full of themselves they can't see who they really are: actors. and mediocre ones at that.

Jay D. Homnick said...

Kudos to David Skinner for his blog alerting us to the Smoking Gun story on Frey a few days before it exploded onto the broader scene. I read every word of their original piece and then followed all the stages until the Oprah implosion.

My own column sought the positive (sort of) side of the saga.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0106/homnick.php3

Anonymous said...

West Wing prediction:

The Republican candidate might win, but only because/if:

a) he's played by Alan Alda;
b) he has a last-minute epiphany wherein he realizes that he's really a Democrat at heart (see, inter alia, "Commander in Chief")