ThoughtCatalog has done a brilliant top 40 list of the best Roger Ebert movie review take downs. Here are (in my opinion) the best 10:

1. Atlas Shrugged (Part 1) (2011):

“And now I am faced with this movie, the most anticlimactic non-event since Geraldo Rivera broke into Al Capone’s vault…There is also a love scene, which is shown not merely from the waist up but from the ears up. The man keeps his shirt on. This may be disappointing for libertarians, who I believe enjoy rumpy-pumpy as much as anyone.”

2. Armageddon (1998):

“Here it is at last, the first 150-minute trailer. Armageddon is cut together like its own highlights. Take almost any 30 seconds at random, and you’d have a TV ad. The movie is an assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense, and the human desire to be entertained. No matter what they’re charging to get in, it’s worth more to get out.”

3. Battlefield Earth (2000):

“Battlefield Earth is like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time. It’s not merely bad; it’s unpleasant in a hostile way.”

4. Mandingo (1975):

“Mandingo is racist trash, obscene in its manipulation of human beings and feelings, and excruciating to sit through in an audience made up largely of children, as I did last Saturday afternoon. The film has an “R” rating, which didn’t keep many kids out, since most came with their parents… if [Chicago] believes Mandingo should be shown to children, then there are no possible standards left and the only thing to do is transfer the censors to the parks department, where they can supervise paper‑plate‑throwing contests.”

5. Revolver (2005):

“Some of the acting is better than the film deserves. Make that all of the acting. Actually, the film stock itself is better than the film deserves. You know when sometimes a film catches fire inside a projector? If it happened with this one, I suspect the audience might cheer.”

 6. Sex Drive (2008):

“Sex Drive is an exercise in versatile vulgarity. The actors seem to be performing a public reading of the film’s mastery of the subject. Not only are all the usual human reproductive and excretory functions evoked, but new and I think probably impossible ones are included. This movie doesn’t contain ‘offensive language.’ The offensive language contains the movie.”

7. Spice World (1997):

“The Spice Girls are easier to tell apart than the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but that is small consolation: What can you say about five women whose principal distinguishing characteristic is that they have different names? They occupy Spice World as if they were watching it: They’re so detached they can’t even successfully lip-synch their own songs….. Spice World is obviously intended as a ripoff of A Hard Day’s Night which gave The Beatles to the movies…the huge difference, of course, is that the Beatles were talented — while, let’s face it, the Spice Girls could be duplicated by any five women under the age of 30 standing in line at Dunkin’ Donuts.”

8. Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003):

“I like good horror movies. They can exorcise our demons. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre doesn’t want to exorcise anything. It wants to tramp crap through our imaginations and wipe its feet on our dreams….There are a lot of good movies playing right now that can make you feel a little happier, smarter, sexier, funnier, more excited — or more scared, if that’s what you want. This is not one of them. Don’t let it kill 98 minutes of your life.”

9. The Skulls (2000):

“The Skulls is one of the great howlers, a film that bears comparison, yes, with The Greek Tycoon or even The Scarlet Letter. It’s so ludicrous in so many different ways it achieves a kind of forlorn grandeur. It’s in a category by itself.”

10. One Woman or Two (1985):

“Add it all up, and what you’ve got here is a waste of good electricity. I’m not talking about the electricity between the actors. I’m talking about the current to the projector.”

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Roger Ebert: Couldn’t speak towards the end of his life, but always had much to say (photo from shutterstock)

Not only was Roger Ebert a marvelous film critic, he was an astute observer of history current events. He laced his reviews with technical nous and an understanding of political and cultural context, engaging his readers intellect as well as their senses.

Here are a selection of Ebert’s best quotes over the years that show why he is considered the greatest movie reviewer of all time:

1. “Every great film should seem new every time you see it.”

2. “If a movie isn’t a hit right out of the gate, they drop it. Which means that the whole mainstream Hollywood product has been skewed toward violence and vulgar teen comedy.”

3. “Class is often invisible in America in the movies, and usually not the subject of the film.”

4. “If a movie is really working, you forget for two hours your Social Security number and where your car is parked. You are having a vicarious experience. You are identifying, in one way or another, with the people on the screen.”

5. “It’s funny that there was so much disturbance about having a Catholic in the White House with Kennedy, and when we finally get a religion in the White House that’s causing a lot of conflicts, and concerns, and disturbances for a lot of people, it’s in the Bush Administration.”

6. “I don’t think Bush was legitimately elected President.”

7. “No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.”

8. “I am utterly bored by celebrity interviews. Most celebrities are devoid of interest.”

9. “The fact is, most people are not going to be rich someday.”

10. “I don’t give the studios advanced quotes or an advanced look at my reviews. I think the readers deserve to read my reviews before the studios do.”

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This weekend sees the return of HBO’s epic television series Game of Thrones. Those who are still uninitiated in the wheeling-and-dealings of the Seven Kingdoms must look upon their friends’ excited talk of ‘the Dothraki’ or ‘the Night’s Watch’ with a mix of confusion and condolence, assuming this must be the result of having given up on the hope of anymore sexual relationships. I know that’s how I felt when I was first told about the show. Now I am counting down the days until the new season (and I watch about 4 TV shows a year). What is it that has led to the show expanding its audience beyond the typical fantasy fan? It’s not just graphic violence and soft-core pornography, though that always helps. It’s because with Game of Thrones, all that ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ stuff is really just decoration. At its heart, this is a story abut power and it’s influence on those who wield it, those who fear it and those who chase it.

French Philosopher, Michel Foucault told us that ‘Power is everywhere: not that it engulfs everything, but that it comes from everywhere.’ This premise is explored consistently through the narrative of Game of Thrones. Inspired by the War of the Roses in Medieval England, it follows the stories of several nobel families as they try and advance their competing claims for the monarchy of Westeros (which really is just a thinly disguised United Kingdom). Rejecting the Good/Bad dichotomy that dominates most of our film and TV, the characters of the show are products of the grey realm of self-interest. For example, perhaps the most popular character on the show is a whoring, hedonistic dwarf called Tyrion, who makes up for his lack of size by manipulating and manoeuvring his way around the court with Machiavellian precision, ensuring the throne stays in his family’s illegitimate possession for now. The moral ambiguity of such characters allows those watching at home to empathize with almost all of the players in this expansive and elaborate game. Except Joffrey of course. He is just a bastard.

Yet even Joffrey can find himself an equivalent from the U.S political class as shown below in this hilarious comparison (it sucks to be Newt):

(Source for image unknown)

This could be seen as giving a show with swords and witches too much gravitas but it wouldn’t be first time the U.S political class has caught its reflection in the world of the fantastical. The National Review placed the Lord of the Rings trilogy at number 11 in its list of ‘The Best Conservative Movies’, seeing in its moralistic confrontation between heroes and villains a metaphor ‘perfectly pitched for the post-9/11 world.’ Of course the National Review, as you’d expect from the bastard brainchild of William F. Buckley, has only got about 3 things right in its 50+ year history but this may be one of them. Author J.R.R Tolkien wrote the novel during and in the aftermath of World War Two, when Great Britain and the U.S.A were unquestionably the good guys, standing up to the Nazi army. Later, the films would capture the public imagination in the early 2000′s as politicians on both sides of the Atlantic tried to convince us that the War-on-Terror was a similar ethical crusade. If that was the parable for then, Game of Thrones tells the story of the aftermath in the West. It’s fractured political landscape, with it’s atmosphere of a nation in decline from its glorious past and constant talk of succession from the union, parallels both Britain and America today.

Where Game of Thrones differs from real politics is that in the show we actually get to see narcissistic calculations of ruling elite. Gone is the rhetoric of ‘helping the community’ that continues cloak our representative democracy, despite it being an long open secret that our governments no longer represent their citizens but their financial backers. At least the candidates for rule in Game of Thrones do not patronise their citizens by pretending things will be significantly different for them under one king or the other; it is naked gamesmanship and a lust for power that drives these kings, just as it does those in Washington or Westminster, only they are not honest about this.

Also, the viewers know that the show’s narrative carries an irony of which the warring kings are unaware: while they squabble over control of the land, the kingdom is facing imminent destruction at the hands of a supernatural force rising north of the wall.  Much as our politicians myopically respond to scientific prophecies of climate change or overpopulation, they ignore any warnings given about this impending doom, far too immersed in their attempts to consolidate authority to deal with such a distraction. Films like Independence Day tells us that humanity would bind together to fight an outside enemy if we had to but in reality, much like these characters, our rules would likely be too trapped in the mindset of competition to stop making political triangulations, still trying to protect their future positions of dominance. I haven’t read the books so I don’t know what comes next but I am secretly hoping for all parties to be surprised by a peasants revolt that beheads of the whole lot of them!

So, far from being the escapism usually associated with fantasy, perhaps we are all watching Game of Thrones because it, with its ‘Red Gods’ and ‘White Walkers’, provides more political realism than we see in our news. While it isn’t The Wire (nothing ever could be), if you are happy to ignore the mild misogyny and orientalism it tells an interesting tale of the nature of power at a time when people are questioning their system of governance and its ability to actually help the majority of citizens. As we try and imagine new ways to construct the society we could do worse than remember as this show tells us, ‘Power resides only where men believe it resides. It’s a trick. A shadow on the wall.’

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By Chez Pazienza: 1978′s Force Ten from Navarone wasn’t really a great movie; it certainly suffered from being a sequel to a much better movie, 1961′s The Guns of Navarone, starring Gregory Peck and David Niven. Yet still it holds a bit of a place in my heart simply because I saw it when I was a kid and enjoyed it thoroughly if for no other reason than the fact that as an eight-year-old I was basking in the glow of Star Wars and believed that Harrison Ford — who had a starring role in Force Ten — could do no wrong.

Oddly, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about this movie lately, mostly because of its central set piece, which involves the detonation of a dam in World War II-torn Yugoslavia that eventually leads to the destruction of a supposedly impregnable bridge the Germans are using to provide troops and supplies to the war effort. Basically, what happens is that the characters of Mallory and Miller, played by Robert Shaw and Edward Fox, plant charges and blow the dam from the inside out, which causes the water it’s holding back to break through and rush violently against the bridge downriver, collapsing it.

The thing is, when the charges first go off, nothing happens. The dam still stands as Mallory and Miller run to get out of it. In fact, there’s frustration among rest of the allied strike force that the mission might be a complete failure, seeing as how the explosives seemed to have no effect on the dam. It isn’t until many minutes later that alarms go off, the dam begins to quake and crack, and water from the other side starts gushing through it, bringing it down piece by piece. The charges worked, it just took a little while — because the reality is that all you had to do was weaken the dam in the right places, and after that nature would take its course.

For the past few years now I’ve been chronicling the near-sociopathic arrogance of NBC’s management, detailing each time the suits at 30 Rock — news guys like Steve Capus, Phil Griffin, and Jim Bell and former programming gods Jeff Zucker and Ben Silverman — made a decision so inexplicably ridiculous or unforgivably obscene that it threatened to put the reputation of the entire network in jeopardy. I admit that there were several times that I truly thought NBC would suffer immediate audience blowback for its sins, but strangely it never really did; yes, there was some bad press from the likes of me and other more prominent media critics, but in the end business went on as usual for the peacock. And I think ultimately that’s what emboldened the executive assholes at NBC: Each time they did something inexcusable and didn’t face the instant wrath of the viewing public — the kind of outrage that threatened their bottom line — they simply smirked and moved on, believing they were bulletproof and that nothing they did could permanently damage the NBC brand.

Bombarding viewers with insipid, lowest-common-denominator programming? No big deal. Airing the ghastly final videotaped manifesto of Virginia Tech Killer Seung-Hui Cho? So what. Botching the departure of Jay Leno then firing Conan O’Brien and publicly trashing him just seven months into his stint on The Tonight Show so that they could bring Leno back? Bring it on. Canning Ann Curry after fourteen years on the Today show and just one in the anchor chair, then basically putting a target on Savannah Guthrie’s back right off the bat? “Whatever! I do what I want!”

Here’s the thing, though: While independently each of these things wasn’t enough to do any serious damage to NBC, together they all have had an impact. Even if, again, it’s as simple as having giving the management behind these decisions the false bravado to believe that they had the authority to operate with impunity. The last personnel shake-up in particular — the one involving Ann Curry — has proven itself to be a staggeringly ill-advised overreach on the part of Capus, Bell and the rest of the Today show execs.

A story by the AP published just a couple of days ago details how audiences are abandoning the former morning news juggernaut in droves and how many say it’s because of NBC’s deplorable treatment of Curry, who may not have been everyone’s favorite news-reader but who worked hard for her shot at the main anchor chair and who remained loyal as a dog throughout her career at NBC. Morning television is a truly unique animal and NBC had dominated it for almost two decades by playing up its Today show crew as members of every American’s family. It wasn’t simply brilliant marketing; when you consider the camaraderie, liveliness, passion and genuine news savvy demonstrated by Today’s team, it was kind of the truth. But then NBC management, reassured by the lack of predicted devastation in the wake of the Conan O’Brien debacle, decided to not only dismiss but publicly flog a member of that family. It made NBC’s suits look like monsters, its promotion of the Today show crew look like bullshit, and the show itself look like just another cynically manufactured TV product. And so viewers left. And then haven’t come back.

Granted it’s not simply the crew that’s changed, nor the attitude of NBC toward that crew — and by extension the audience — it’s Today’s decision to air personality and pop culture-driven crap over actual information (again a product of management hubris and myopia). Think about it: If you can really air an interview with Kris Jenner in which she incessantly plugs her horrid family’s reality show and prattles on about her breast implants instead of cutting away to the national moment of silence on 9/11, you deserve whatever thrashing you get from the audience and the media. This is the new model of NBC morning programming, though — and between it and the network’s abiding belief that it can arrogantly and wantonly screw over its talent and draw the outrage of its viewers, NBC may finally be suffering some of the serious, lasting consequences that it foolishly believed it was immune to.

The network should have known it had it coming.

NBC’s management has spent years detonating charges in the dam. It was only a matter of time before nature took its course.

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The NewsRoom: Could it make a real difference?

By Chez Pazienza: A few weeks back I banged out a column for this site that took issue with what I called the misguided, “pipe-dreamy idealism” of Aaron Sorkin’s new HBO show, The Newsroom. After watching only the season premiere I didn’t necessarily claim to know whether the show would eventually wind up being genuinely good TV, but I did think that it had all the necessary ingredients to be cloying and obnoxious as hell. From Sorkin’s at times insufferably overbearing sanctimony, to characters I didn’t really care much about, to, yes, a lack of foundation in anything approaching the real world when it came to how the show portrayed the world of television news, I just wasn’t sure it would keep my attention for long let alone have the kind of impact it was obvious Sorkin was hoping it would on the industry I’d devoted almost two decades of my life to. In that original piece, I said that TV newspeople on the whole simply aren’t idealistic enough these days to be affected by anything that tries so blatantly to both lecture them and appeal to their sense of dignity.

Well, three episodes later I have to admit that I’m kind of hooked by the show — and I actually do wonder if it’s possible that it might be able to have some kind of positive effect on the way news is done in this country. Let me explain why: Other than the ones currently overseas dodging sniper fire and possibly the phalanx of Kool-Aid-drinking dolts at Fox News, there isn’t an American television journalist alive who isn’t paying at least some attention to this damn show. TV people are self-obsessed creatures who traditionally love reading, seeing and hearing stories about themselves, particularly ones that make them appear noble and principled. Everybody loves feeling like a star, like they’re worthy of the attention and of being portrayed as the hero — people in the TV news industry more so than many simply because they want so badly to believe that what they do makes a difference, that it matters. And in Sorkin’s admittedly fairy tale world, television journalists matter very much, or at least they can. And that might be why the show has some small potential to succeed at changing television news for the better.

Two nights ago, on his show on CNN, Anderson Cooper tore into bug-fuck crazy national disgrace Michele Bachmann over the recent, very public nervous breakdown which caused her to claim that the United States government is being infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood. For those mercifully born deaf, Bachmann has been haranguing anyone who’ll listen with hysterical warnings about certain U.S. officials — among them Huma Abedin, the Deputy Chief of Staff to Hillary Clinton — whom she believes might actually be secret warriors in the service of jihad, or some such horseshit. The only “evidence” she has to go on when it comes to this supposed conspiracy involves the discredited rantings of Frank Gaffney — a guy whose theories are so fucking divorced from reality that even the GOP doesn’t want anything to do with him — but that of course isn’t stopping Bachmann from making herself look not only foolish but dangerously unhinged by belting this crap out like a town crier to anyone who’ll listen.

It goes without saying that Bachmann is a liar and a loon, but, in keeping with tradition, it’s rare that anyone in the mainstream, “objective” media calls her out for it. Granted, Cooper has in the past been willing to put his foot down when it comes to specious arguments and general political shenanigans, but he was especially pointed and brutal on Bachmann the other night, essentially coming right out and saying that she doesn’t have a shred of evidence to back up any of her ludicrous claims and that her conduct was thoroughly unbecoming of a member of Congress. Now remember that while you and I understand fully that the responsibility of the fourth estate is to call a lie a lie when it sees one, most journalists are reluctant these days to do just that — and that’s something The Newsroom has taken aim at since its debut. In fact, last Sunday’s episode dealt specifically with that unfortunate fact about the modern news media.

In an episode entitled I’ll Try To Fix You, fictional news anchor Will McAvoy and his producing team label several governmental figures, as well as political pundits, flat-out liars. Among them: lo and behold, Michele Bachmann, who within the context of the show had just called for an investigation into whether some of the views of her fellow members of Congress were “anti-American” (something she actually did four years ago). The crew of the fictional show News Night weren’t having any of it and demanded evidence, labeling her claims irresponsible and McCarthy-like and having no basis in fact. As is typical on the show, it’s the kind of thing you wish you’d see a non-partisan national news department actually do but which almost never happens.

I’m certainly not saying that Cooper watched Sunday’s episode of The Newsroom and decided suddenly that he’d seen the light and that it was his ethical obligation to pin Bachmann to the mat. Coop’s good at his job and he doesn’t necessarily need a TV show to remind him of his duties. But all those young journalists working behind the scenes on his show and at other national media outlets, the ones who likely have their DVRs programmed to record HBO every Sunday night — is it possible that they can be influenced by the kind of clarion call to a higher purpose the show hopes to represent? If you watch the show and try to see yourself as one of the admittedly paper-thin characters simply because your life somewhat resembles his or hers from a professional standpoint, can that push you to imagine that their ideals can be yours?

I’m not sure if The Newsroom really has the power to overhaul television news from the ground up or if it can change many of the cynical minds within the business, but if it manages to light a fire under even a few asses of the people who once believed that the news matters, who knows what that might lead to. What if TV journalists started looking at the fictional News Night and thinking, “Why the hell can’t we do that?”

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The Newsroom: Not realistic

By Chez Pazienza: Like just about anybody who’s spent a good portion of his or her career in the TV news industry, I watched Aaron Sorkin’s new show, The Newsroom, on HBO a couple of nights ago. I did this because, like anybody who’s spent a good portion of his or her career in the TV news industry, I desperately seek the validation of strangers, love talking and hearing about myself and especially enjoy anything that paints the profession I chose years ago in a light other than thoroughly, hostilely negative.

Critics have famously savaged the show so far and I can certainly see why: It has Sorkin’s inky fingerprints all over it, which can be a very good but also a very bad thing. Yeah, the dialogue is spectacular, but that becomes a problem when you realize — and you realize immediately — that everybody on the show is wittier and better with words than you or anyone you’ve ever met and certainly anyone currently working in cable news. I appreciate Sorkin’s desire to “reclaim” TV journalism as a respectable profession and to portray those who practice it as noble creatures fighting the good fight in the name of truth, justice and the erstwhile American way, but there are two problems with The Newsroom that kneecap its good intentions.

First of all, it takes Sorkin’s generally preachy nature to entirely new levels of sanctimony, with almost every character on the show acting at all times as, as one critic put it, a “Sorkin Belief Delivery System.” Second, and most importantly, TV news people on the whole just ain’t that idealistic — not anymore. It’s tough to make anybody in a cable newsroom heroic and for that conceit to not be met with outright laughter. We’ve all got TVs. We have the internet. We know who the hell these people are who are bringing us the news every day and night, and while I really appreciated the show drawing a nice little line between the committed, borderline-crazy journalists who actually go out and get shot at in the field and the pampered management pussies back in the climate controlled office with the Nespresso machines and clean toilets every 50 feet, the fact is that there’s a systemic problem within the industry that’s insurmountable. It involves corporate control, the abiding requirements of shareholders and the consequent drive for ratings at all costs. It involves the need to turn a profit, the largest one possible. It’s a fine little pipe dream to imagine that these realities can be overcome by sheer force of moral will, but in the end it’s just that: a pipe dream.

Take, for example, NBC News’s latest galactic high-profile fuck-up. I realize that by this point I should just stop writing about NBC Universal since the company’s special brand of journalistic and ethical bankruptcy might legitimately be able to be blamed on institutional sociopathy. That’s the only explanation I can come up with anymore. Everything NBC Uni touches turns to shit and whenever the suits at the top try to correct a mess they’ve made they only wind up making it much, much worse. We all remember the Conan/Leno debacle, and now, with the headlines only recently dry on that, comes NBC’s decision to push Ann Curry out of the Today show after 15-years on the air and a mere one year as co-host of the now-vulnerable morning news juggernaut. What’s more, as with Conan, the network will reportedly throw a massive sum of money at Curry in exchange for her getting lost: $10 million.

Given that ABC’s Good Morning America has been making strides in its eternal death-struggle against Today lately, and that the person in the co-anchor chair is the one thing to noticeably change about the show in the past couple of years, it’s completely expected that NBC Uni execs would knee-jerk and blame the sudden ratings “crisis” on poor Curry. I mean, she’s the only thing different — it’s gotta be her fault. Screw the fickle nature of audiences and the intrinsically cyclical nature of ratings popularity — it’s all Ann. Get rid of her and everything should go back to normal, right? Problem solved! High-five! Let’s go get a martini for lunch and pretend we’re on Mad Men.

Like a lot of people, I’ve never been a huge fan of Curry’s on-air talents. She’s a fine news-reader and her fill-in host skills are up to par, but it should’ve been clear from the beginning not only that she wasn’t cut out for the full-time hosting gig but that co-host Matt Lauer couldn’t hide his condescension toward her. Why should it have been clear? Because Ann Curry had been on the air on the Today show for 14-fucking-years. It’s not like she was some nobody plucked from obscurity out of market 293, the Sarah Palin of TV personalities; she had a decade-and-a-half to show NBC and the audience everything each needed to see. They both knew exactly who they were getting and while it’s genuinely admirable for NBC to promote a long-time, loyal employee, you don’t “try out” a long-time, loyal employee at the very substantial risk of having to publicly shit-can that person after — in keeping with NBC tradition — a very short amount of time because you decide he or she just isn’t cutting it. That leads to a PR disaster, which is exactly what NBC now has on its hands. Again. It’s made Ann Curry into a martyr, another sacrifice on the altar of corporate arrogance, soullessness and stupidity — someone blithely being paid an obscene amount of money not to work while millions of Americans struggle, and yet someone who will still come off looking like a victim that average folks can identify with because she’s getting screwed so royally.

This is reality. This is what television news is these days. And it’s like that everywhere — at least at every major media outlet. NBC Uni Comcast is especially egregious, correlating to the fact that it’s the largest and most vertically integrated media conglomerate in the known universe, but the basic principles — or lack thereof — are the same across the board.

That high-minded idealism and genuflection to the ghosts of Murrow and Sevareid still exists among a very select group of journalists in the television news industry, but those journalists don’t have the power to push back against the pervading culture that keeps them and everyone else in TV news cranking out crap — and even if they do, they’re likely too cynical to make the effort.

Like most of what Sorkin does, The Newsroom is decent fiction. But that’s all it is: fiction.

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Jeff Zucker: Failing upwards (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Chez Pazienza: Here’s a little something just about everyone in the television business knows: Once you become a high-powered executive, it’s almost impossible to fuck yourself and your reputation so badly that you’ll never work again.

Let’s say you’re some poor mid-level schmuck, doing whatever it is you do right now for a living, and you almost single-handedly make, let’s say, some gargantuan mistake that turns your company into a worldwide laughingstock and threatens to crater an upcoming multi-million dollar merger that’s going to make it the most powerful organization of its kind in the world — there’s a pretty good chance you’ll be radioactive for about the next hundred or so years. Not in television, though — and not if you’re an executive.

Case in point: Jeff Zucker, the former boy wonder of NBC Universal whose breathtaking arrogance and bottomless reservoir of short-sighted quick fixes and dumb-ass gimmickry turned the once-mighty NBC into a perennial last-place loser and whose name became synonymous with epic failure. It was Zucker who was personally responsible for the now legendary clusterfuck that turned NBC’s prime time inside out, led to an affiliate rebellion and eventually culminated in the ugly public departure of Conan O’Brien, all in the name of keeping Jay Leno fat, happy and, most importantly, safely in place at the network. Zucker ultimately left NBC in disgrace, but the important thing to remember is that disgrace is a stench that washes off damn quickly in the amoral world of the television suit.

Zucker’s got name recognition. And he’s got a reputation for putting clever ways of bringing in revenue above actually putting decent programming on the air — and that’s really all anybody cares about anymore in TV. Which is why his name is apparently now being bandied about as a possible candidate for not one but two stratospheric television news positions. Turner President Phil Kent is reportedly considering Zucker as a replacement for CNN Worldwide CEO Jim Walton, whose contract is up in December; Walton’s renewal is on very shaky ground in the wake of an almost staggering drought of ratings, with CNN pulling in record low numbers for months now. Meanwhile, Tribune Co. might also be considering Zucker to help lead the company out of its own wasteland, one brought on by a 2008 Chapter 11 filing that it’s now trying to emerge from.

Actually, the Tribune job would at least make a minor amount of sense given that Zucker’s forte is conjuring short-lived financial success out of thin air through the implementation of all kinds of silly schemes, cheap on-air trickery and relentless cross-pollination. But when it comes to CNN, here’s the thing: The network is already making money. In fact — it’s still turning an impressive profit even as its ratings tank. CNN could easily not worry one bit about how many people are watching it because it’s feeding off plenty of healthy revenue streams besides the traditional ones cultivated by good ratings. Obviously, though, CNN has a reputation to uphold and being the number three cable news network doesn’t exactly jibe with how it’s been perceived in the past and how it would like to be perceived now and going forward — but bringing somebody like Zucker on board to try to bring in those ratings seems more than a little misguided.

Either way, it looks like we haven’t seen the last of Jeff Zucker. You could’ve predicted from the beginning that there would always be somebody willing to put his special brand of spoiled milk back in the refrigerator in the hope that it’d taste better later. That’s just how things work in corporate television.

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By Chez Pazienza: Let’s start with the obvious: HBO’s new series Girls isn’t for me. What I mean by that is that I’m not its target audience. I’m not a millennial; I’m not female; I’m not a Brooklyn hipster who’s perpetually drowning in his or her own insufferable ennui; I don’t recognize even a hint of myself or my life in any of the dingbat characters or torturous scenarios the show traffics in. I’m sure Lena Dunham is a nice enough person, but there’s nothing about her that makes me think she’s someone I really need to take seriously as a creative talent, let alone the supposed voice of her generation (God help them all).

Granted, I lived in New York City for quite a while and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t familiar with the kind of “girls” Dunham and her cast try to represent for the TV audience; the city is crawling with them. I just don’t think they’re interesting enough to merit the representation. On the contrary, my reaction to any encounter with them typically lies somewhere between cringing painfully and going full-on Inspector Dreyfus whenever somebody mentioned Clouseau’s name.

With that in mind, though, I think that the criticism Lena Dunham’s been on the receiving end of from some in the black and Hispanic community is unfair. In case you haven’t been following — and for your own sake, I hope you actually have better things to do than concern yourself with this kind of “controversy” — a host of socially conscious journalists of color, many of them female, have complained that Dunham’s show is too “white,” that none of the titular girls on Girls are black or brown. The argument is a little dumb at face value, simply because Dunham herself is white and it’s not like that’s something she can change — and while New York City, both real and the depressing hellhole depicted on the show, is indeed a melting pot, let’s be honest and admit that it’s not exactly unlikely that people like Dunham’s character on the show and her small cadre of friends would all be the same shade of white.

Hell, the show wouldn’t be what it is — cloying and insipid — without the pervading stench of white privilege and the ability for characters to mumble complaints about the kind of shit only privileged white kids have the luxury of complaining about. It’s been a common refrain among critics of Girls, but it’s a show about white people problems — and like everyone else, I say that as derogatorily as possible — and trying to shoehorn a demographic into the equation which undoubtedly brings a different set of concerns to the table would be a ham-fisted nod to political correctness and little more. There wouldn’t be anything the least bit honest about Dunham taking that tack — and anyone willing to admit to the world that she’s this tiresome, irritating and unsympathetic is honest if nothing else.

Please understand that I’m certainly not saying that women of color don’t occasionally obsess over some of the same trivialities that a show like Girls attempts to address; everybody has his or her own version of navel-gazing. It’s unfortunate that there isn’t a larger forum for shows that either catered specifically to black and Hispanic female audiences or were able to draw the parallels between all women without trying to force the issue in an effort to ward off exactly the kind of criticism that’s been leveled at Dunham. Those upset about the show’s lack of color, so to speak, have a point when they argue that a series like Girls with an all-black or all-Hispanic cast would very likely never be given the cachet of a time slot on HBO — but again, it’s not like that’s Lena Dunham’s fault, and again, it’s not as if she should be required to adjust her vision for the show simply to satisfy the PC police.

It’s a show about a Lena Dunham-type character and the people she interacts with. And if you’re not included among those people, trust me, you shouldn’t be complaining. You’re a hell of a lot better off.

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(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Chez Pazienza: I moved into a new place in Los Angeles over the weekend. My decision to ultimately put down roots here was the somewhat unexpected culmination of three-and-a-half years spent wandering the wasteland in the aftermath of the break-up of my marriage; since everything went to shit, I’ve pretty much lived out of a suitcase and just moved from place to place, content not to have anything in my life that could be deemed stable simply because my ex-wife taught me in unequivocal terms that nothing is stable, even if you think it is. But you’ve gotta take a chance again at some point, and I’m finally ready to do that.

I bring all of this up because, given that I’m starting over completely from scratch, I don’t own a TV at the moment. I’ll probably be picking one up over the next couple of days, but for the time being my apartment is mercifully devoid of white noise — which is really all television is anymore, particularly the cable news and election season punditry that my job requires me to pay an at least perfunctory level of attention to.

So, no, I didn’t see Sarah Palin host NBC’s Today show this morning. And I have no doubt that I’m all the better for it. That being said, I don’t need to have seen it to know exactly how it played out and to understand that putting Palin’s stupid ass in front of a camera in a desperate attempt to fend off a threat from a rival network and generate a few extra ratings points while creating a headline or two is really the final nail in the coffin of the once mighty NBC News department. Admittedly, every time I think NBC News has sunk to the lowest point possible — airing the video manifesto of Virginia Tech killer Seung-Hui Cho, exactly as he’d wanted; using news resources and programming to promote its crappy prime time shows and to cross-promote other NBC-Uni networks; making the “N” in NBC stand for “nepotism” by hiring the kids of every big name at the network and every shithead politician in America over real journalists; giving Al Shapton a show, etc. — its team of crack surveyors astonishingly finds new depths to plumb. Inexplicably giving air time to a woman who’s not only proven herself over and over again to be an intellectual featherweight but whose entire vaudevillian shtick involves the ceaseless demonization of media outlets like NBC — there’s just no excuse for that. Not from an ostensibly serious and responsible news operation, one interested in imparting information to the public rather than being little more than another engine for asshole reality TV “celebrities” to ply their wares.

I haven’t heard NBC make half-assed excuses in an attempt to defend its decision to put someone like Palin on the air, but I have to assume that that’s because by this point anyone with a brain has given up and moved on, content to leave NBC News President Steve Capus to giddily wallow in the cesspool he’s created. What’s interesting, though, is the transparent train of thought that went into the decision to give Palin a platform on NBC at the same time ex-Today show host Katie Couric was staking out space over at Good Morning America. In keeping with, again, NBC’s diminishing of its news programming to the status of the ultimate reality TV show, the network suits obviously figured that putting Palin opposite Couric would be the ultimate grudge match, seeing as how Couric legendarily embarrassed Palin on national television a few years back by, you know, asking her questions about what she liked to read. Today show execs saw an opportunity to create controversy and buzz by staging a clumsy rematch on the airwaves and they grabbed onto it with both hands, thoroughly sublimating the fact that by acknowledging Palin’s lingering resentment toward Couric they were implicitly agreeing that Couric may have done something wrong — that the anger Palin feels at being made a fool of is somehow justified and can be blamed on anyone other than her idiot self.

It’s shameful that NBC put Palin on the air. Shameful, but not unexpected — not from NBC. As someone who worked for the network for years, it’s painful to admit that I’d rather not have a TV than have one that gives me access to such deplorable news product.

Although, hey, for one hour Donald Trump wasn’t the most grotesquely opportunistic right-wing reality TV star being given a platform and a paycheck by NBC — so, bravo, guys.

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Paul Krugman has spent a good deal of time blasting apart Paul Ryan's intellectually bankrupt health care plan so one can understand why the esteemed economist is a little irked Politico has decided to award Ryan healthcare policymaker of the year. According to Krugman, political journalists often concentrate on the theater of policy rather than the substance of it – after all, covering politics like a horse race is far better for ratings than poring over policy details:

Even if you like the thrust of Ryan’s ideas, even if you think privatizing Medicare and turning it into a voucher scheme is fine, what became painfully, embarrassingly clear during the debate over the Ryan plan was that Ryan is, well, incompetent; the plan was a mess, from its invocation of ludicrous Heritage Foundation projections to its crazy assertions about what would happen to discretionary spending. It’s true that the plan “got everyone talking”, as Politico says — but mostly it got people talking about what a mess Ryan’s effort was.

Oh, and it was pretty clear that Ryan wasn’t being honest about his own numbers.

What’s going on here, I suppose, is that Politico is mistaking theater for policy. Ryan isn’t an important health care reformer, or even minimally competent in his attempted wonkery, but he plays a deep thinker on TV. And the people at Politico either don’t understand the difference, or they don’t care.

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