12 posts tagged “cbs”

The Independent on Sunday has a good article on American remakes of British shows, though I should add that Britain has had its share of remaking others’. Anyone remember how Married with Children (Married for Life) and Who’s the Boss? (The Upper Hand) did not translate that well in the UK?
   Ready for the American treatment are:

ABC
Life on Mars

CBS
The Eleventh Hour (prod. Jerry Bruckheimer, starring British actor Rufus Sewell)
Worst Week (based on The Worst Week of My Life)

NBC
Top Gear
Gavin and Stacey

Big screen
State of Play (to star Helen Mirren, Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck)

Also coming
The Vicar of Dibley
Footballers’ Wives

   Don’t forget the Americans are also redoing Opportunity Knocks with Ashton Kutcher, though the concept sounds a little different from the original, Kath & Kim from Australia and Good Behavior (née Outrageous Fortune) from New Zealand (already remade in the UK as Honest with Amanda Redman).
   They join The Office, which of course has been a big hit in the US and perhaps led the way with this current crop, long enough for people to have forgotten Cracker with the late Robert Pastorelli. And, of course, American Idol and America’s Got Talent are rehashes of British shows.
   Once upon a time there were many versions of Popstars, which originated in New Zealand. Pity we now license New Zealand Idol, Stars in Their Eyes and Strictly Come Dancing. At least when the Americans remake things, they generally pick better source material.

There is an urban myth that when Scottish Television’s Taggart was aired in the US, it needed subtitles because American audiences could not understand the accent. I’m not so sure, because I understand this is the norm these days on late night TV on CBS and Americans have no problem understanding this:

   What a pity The Late Late Show is not aired in the UK or in New Zealand. I think the Scottish humour works down here better than David Letterman’s. Craig Ferguson’s regular comments about living in the US as a foreigner are very Flight of the Conchords. I have been watching it regularly on YouTube.

As a Miss (Universe) New Zealand judge, I can’t help thinking that pageantry would be an awfully good setting for a Columbo story, rather than the world of Sandra Bullock and Miss Congeniality. But we should have William Shatner guest-star.

Opening scene: Auckland hotel room. Miss Balclutha lies dead with a knife in her back. There is no blood as this is prime-time TV. Miss Titirangi, Miss Balclutha’s roommate, stands by the fireplace, her hands covered in fake-looking blood (which you can show on prime-time TV). A bloated, overweight crime scene photographer takes a snapshot of the body.

Cop 1 (examining the body): Looks like suicide to me.
Cop 2: Yep, let’s put that on the report.

Lt Columbo enters.

Cop 2: Say, Lt Columbo from the LAPD! It’s all right here, sir. It looks like a regular suicide.
Columbo: Is that a fact? You know, here I am on vacation in New Zealand with my wife, Mrs Columbo, and I see all these police cars, and I say to her, I just have to see what the boys in New Zealand are doing.
Cop 1: We appreciate it, Lieutenant, but I think we can handle it.
Columbo: Do you mind if I just look around? My wife, Mrs Columbo, she’s back in the hotel room watching CSI. I don’t like that show. Oh, too much blood, you know how it is.
Cop 2: Sure, Lieutenant. Pity those cops don’t know how to solve crimes like us real ones, huh?
Columbo: Oh, you can say that again.

Columbo turns to Miss Titirangi.

Columbo: Ma’am, can you help me out here?
Miss Titirangi: Of course, Lieutenant, but you have to know I’m pretty shaken up. I came back—I’ve been assigned as her roommate—and just found her like … that.
Columbo: Oh, I didn’t want to know all that. I was just wondering if you could stand over there so I could be nearer the fireplace. This coat, you know, it doesn’t have lining, and it’s colder here in New Zealand than in LA in April.
Miss Titirangi: That’s fine Lieutenant. Would you like a drink?
Columbo: No, Ma’am, I’m fine. But I just have to ask myself something.
Miss Titirangi: Yes?
Columbo (eyeing the coffee table): You see that DVD of Miss Congeniality that she has on the coffee table? I find that strange.
Miss Titirangi: Why is that strange, Lieutenant? A lot of us in beauty pageants have seen that film. Michael Caine is so dreamy. If you’re into old dudes.
Columbo: Aw, he’s not that old. Is he old? Maybe you’re right. But can I ask you one more question?
Miss Titirangi: Er, OK.
Columbo: Why is it that the store security sticker is still on it? She hasn’t watched it. So why would she kill herself?
Miss Titirangi: Well, you know, she was always a bit … unstable. I hear that she’s not even from Balclutha.

Columbo, seemingly satisfied, begins stepping toward the door.

Columbo: One more question, Ma’am. I won’t be a minute.
Miss Titirangi: Make it fast, Lieutenant.
Columbo (going to the coffee table, picking up items): And you see this greeting card she bought? She hasn’t filled it out yet.
Miss Titirangi (getting frustrated): She was a beauty queen. Maybe she was illiterate?
Columbo: I have to ask myself why she would even buy that if she was planning to kill herself.
Cop 2: Lieutenant, we might have to wrap it up here.
Columbo: That’s fine, Constable, I really should get back to my hotel room and see my wife, Mrs Columbo.

Columbo and the cops begin leaving. Columbo turns around.

Columbo (to Miss Titirangi): One more thing, Ma’am.
Miss Titirangi (irate): Yes, Lieutenant?
Columbo: How come your roommate left an envelope under the couch?
Miss Titirangi: What envelope?
Cop 1: Wow, he’s good, I never saw that.
Cop 2: Yeah, well you sat your Police College exam six times, Einstein.
Cop 1: Better than sitting it seven times. And you’re not in Guatemala now, Dr Ropata.
Columbo: This envelope, under the couch. I wonder what’s inside. Can we open it? Can we do that, Ma’am?
Miss Titirangi (irate and puzzled): Sure.

Columbo retrieves the envelope and opens it, pulling out photographs.

Cop 1 (examining the photographs): That’s Miss Titirangi!
Cop 2: Wow, that’s some serious girl-on-girl action.
Columbo: Is that you, Ma’am?
Miss Titirangi: No! Oh, just stop it! Stop it!
Cop 2: Your conscience finally got you, hey Miss?
Miss Titirangi: No, the questions! Stop him asking questions!
Columbo: One more question, Ma’am.
Miss Titirangi: No! OK, I did it, just stop asking me stuff! I can’t handle it!
Columbo: It won’t take any time, just one more.
Miss Titirangi: Stop it! Stop it! I did it, I knifed her in the back, see? She was blackmailing me with those photos, saying that she’d show them to the judges, especially Jack! And he’s the mean one! I came up behind her after she had been to Whitcoulls for the DVD and the greeting card! Please, lock me up. I confess. I’ll do life. Just no more questions!

Cop 1 and Cop 2 begin putting handcuffs on Miss Titirangi.

Cop 1: You have the right to remain silent …

Fade out. CBS’s ‘Mystery Movie Theme’ plays.

Author’s note: to the Trekkies expecting a walk-on from William Shatner, you’re too late. He played the crime scene photographer at the beginning.
   N. B.: This did not happen at this year’s pageant. Not exactly like this, anyway.

I always enjoyed seeing Johnny Carson on late night TV. I didn’t know he was still alive.
   Oh, wait! It’s John McCain!

   White folks all kinda look the same.

If anyone was going to get WGA writers back on their show, that was David Letterman. Reuter reports that the late-night talk show host will be back on CBS on January 2, with his company, Worldwide Pants, Inc., paying, inter alia, royalties from internet broadcasts to its writers. Both The Late Show and the Craig Ferguson show, also owned by Worldwide Pants, will be back.
   Since Letterman himself is a union member, and since he showed immense goodwill by paying his whole staff till December 31 whether a new show was made or not, this is good karma for he with the gap.
   Rival Jay Leno will be back the same night on NBC, but without writers.

I don’t know how I missed this, but after browsing Rachel’s blog here on Vox I stumbled on it: Late Show Writers on Strike.
   As has been reported in the news, David Letterman is continuing to pay his staff to December 31 out of his own pocket, even though no shows are going out due to the writers’ strike in the US. You know the man’s a good boss when folks have stuck by him for over two decades.
   The blog shows you can’t keep good writers down. They are writing, and you know, someone could pinch this stuff for a great show. Writers like Eric Roberts and Matt Stangel—or whatever their names are, since we don’t always see the credits—are at it, and the whole team is working hard to keep their humour in the public arena so Dave doesn’t outsource new scripts to South Asia.
   If the show comes back on before the strike is resolved, do look out for the following warning signs.

Top 10 signs The Late Show writing staff has been replaced:
10. Jokes relating to Ganguly and Rahul begin appearing.
9. Richard Simmons’ interview goes on for twice as long as usual.
8. Oprah begins asking if she can return as a guest.
7. Comparisons are made between The Late Show and Bosom Buddies.
6. Comparisons are made between The Late Show and The Tonight Show.
5. Michael Richards, in a free appearance, is announced as guest host for Dr Martin Luther King Jr Day.
4. Scripts refer to ‘Johnny’ and ‘Ed’.
3. Dave compliments Regis.
2. Top 10 lists are one item short.

I didn’t know that the British colloquialism knockers was used Stateside, but Heidi Klum has proved me wrong with this TVC for CBS’s telecast of the Victoria’s Secret show.

   Opinion on YouTube is divided on whether this makes Miss Klum attractive or not.

There have been rumours that NBC was planning to cancel Journeyman, but the latest news is that four more episodes have been ordered.
   I hate hearing of these cancellation rumours, especially since the show has only had three episodes aired and the network presumes that it can gauge its popularity from that.
   If networks went with ratings this closely, we would never have had additional seasons of The Dick van Dyke Show, a sitcom which many would agree set the template for its modern counterparts. I am sure readers out there can think of more examples of shows that faltered early but found their feet later.
   But with this interconnected world, it will make those of us outside the United States think twice about watching any American show, for fear of investing our time and finding out that it was all in vain. Or, it will force us back into one-hour shows with no story arcs extending beyond one episode.
   I watched The Pretender for years, but I understand the network concluded it was cheaper to buy football games and cancelled it. Fans of Tru Calling (sorry, I was not one) were also left hanging, even if New Zealand was the first country to get the second season. I have no idea why anyone would watch The Nine on prime-time here in New Zealand, considering it meets an early end. John Doe was another. Mr & Mrs Smith, the series about the two spies who often pose as an undercover married couple, only finished its season in Australia: the Americans saw seven and I think we only got to that number, too. That one where John Stamos played a thief and Ian McShane his Dad—whatever that was—I enjoyed that, too. Day Break was a seven-episode affair on ABC in the States; fortunately, we got to see all 13 of that excellent drama, a sort of Americanized Life on Mars.
   US networks have no need to care about foreign markets, as they can get sufficient business domestically, but it can make us eye their new offerings with suspicion.
   So now we come to one of the best dramas of their new season, from two blokes who had worked on The West Wing. Dan Vasser is a journalist who begins, inexplicably, time-travelling. There are shades of Quantum Leap, but the character development and drive are a lot stronger. Scots actor Kevin McKidd, whom I last saw in a Christmas Father Ted special stuck in the lingerie store, is brilliant. (Moon Bloodgood, ex-Day Break, and Gretchen Egolf, whom I last saw in Martial Law, are welcome returning faces.)
   It is a clever drama and we know the American audience is actually smart and sophisticated: if it can follow the many threads of Heroes, which airs before Journeyman, then this should be a walk in the park.
   This is where the Brits get things right: there is more judgement on merit, not ratings, and a good drama is given a chance to build up loyalty. The US networks, with their knee-jerk reactions and inability to see what forces might be keeping a good series down, are less able to do this—with serious long-term consequences.
   So I applaud NBC for ordering the four extra episodes, and can assure them that Journeyman will be more than able to build an audience domestically and internationally. The opinions of foreigners like us—I am prepared to buy the DVD already on the strength of the three episodes and knowing creator Kevin Falls’s work—must count for something.

I found this memorandum to President Bush on the CBS site and he was right all along about Mandela being dead.

111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron
P.O. Box 34567
Houston, Texas 77034
04 May 1995

MEMORANDUM FOR George W. Bush, Washington, D.C.

1. The man whom you met as former South African President Nelson Mandela was actually a double. Whereabouts of the original unknown.
2. Saddam Hussein had WMDs, not found in Iraq as they were used on South African presidential residence.

TERRY B. KILLIAN
Lt. Col.
Commander

The remaining conclusions were drawn by the CIA, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson and a 1970s episode of The Goodies set in South Africa.

I see Mr Dan Rather is suing CBS for $70 million. Wow, for that, he can buy a cranky judge a pair of pants. I originally read the article on AP, but here is a version from the folks at E! News:

In the lawsuit filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Rather accuses CBS of violating his contract by purposely cutting into his allotted airtime on 60 Minutes and of committing fraud by conducting a biased inquiry into the incident that came to be known as “Rathergate,” seriously damaging his reputation in the process.

   I’ll see if I can track the statement of claim down if we get some time here, but the inquiry, from my recollection, was hardly biased.
   At the centre were the Rathergate documents (or Killian documents), which were critical of the service from a young George W. Bush in the US National Guard. They were the subject of one of my articles in Desktop many moons ago, and I was interviewed around that time about my analysis. There are a few records of that interview around the web, but here is a part that I located, which I repost as a reasonably definitive analysis of the documents’ typography:

   Dan Rather, of CBS, claims in his defense of the documents that the Times Roman typeface has been around since 1931. That is true, but the specific cut of the typeface used in the letters is post 1985. According to Mr. Yan, “Every time a font is recut for a different machine, experts are able to tell. Each laser printer, each digital file, has subtle differences.” But, Dan Rather being the professional journalist he is certainly must know more about typeface than all the leading font developers and computer script geeks in the world do.
   Mr. Yan went on to state, “Specifically, the typeface in the letters appears to be Times Roman, as licensed by Linotype of Germany, after 1985. It is not Times New Roman as Mr. Rather claims (as 'New Times Roman' [sic]), which is different again—that is very evident from the PDFs. (Hence in a lawsuit I worked on in 2001, the typeface was designed in 1954 but could only possibly have come off a Hewlett Packard LaserJet III post 1993). Despite reproduction, the proportions and sizes of the letters relative to each other remain the same and are identifiable to any true typographic expert.” Now, I bet you won't hear this full explanation on CBS’s 60 Minutes I, II, or any other number they want to throw out.
   Can CBS find a typewriter hiding somewhere in a barn outside New York City that might be able to produce this exact typeface that Mr. Rather claims was bestowed upon these typewritten documents? Quite possibly they could, but the only typewriter that could of come close to resembling a Times typeface was an IBM Selectric and those letters don’t have the Times cut Mr. Rather is defending. To further the point of the ease of telling forgery typed documents Mr. Yan stated, “Even to a layperson, the Selectric Golfball settings would seem looser (i.e. the type is not so close together).”
   Still Mr. Rather claims that other documents from the White House have superscript. “Superscript letters,” Mr. Yan shared, “on old typewriters were either (a) in the same size but raised or (b) were separate, selected letters in a cut that made them visually the same weight. The 60 Minutes documents have superscript letters that could only have been proportionally and mathematically reduced on a computer.”
   Finally according to Mr. Yan the defenders of these documents make “very fundamental errors, they can be argued against by any first-year design student studying typography. They also seem to be skewing the issue away from the typeface, which the one matter that effortlessly categorizes CBS documents as counterfeit.”

   My view is: Dan Rather was lucky that he lasted as long as he did for a story based on forged documents. He could have gone the same way as his producer, Mary Mapes, who was fired.
   What we cannot comment on, without seeing the contracts, is this additional contention in the claim:

According to Rather's complaint, he extended his tenure as anchor of the network news broadcast in 2002 with a contract guaranteeing him $6 million-per-year and top billing on the midweek 60 Minutes spin-off if he happened to leave his anchor position before March 2006.

   However, the suit does go on about his post-Rathergate experiences:

   Rather's contract entitled him to a regular correspondent's position on 60 Minutes.
   Rather had eight segments on the air in 2005, all of which, according to him, he had to fight tooth and nail for and he still ended up with half as many reports as his colleagues.
   “He was provided with very little staff support, very few of his suggested stories were approved, editing services were denied to him, and the broadcast of the few stories he was permitted to do was delayed and then played on carefully selected evenings, when low viewership was anticipated,” the lawsuit states.

   I remember some press reports at the time that we would see Rather on 60 Minutes even after he stepped down as the anchor of the flagship news programme.
   I imagine that CBS would have been careful about airing his segments because mud sticks, so as an outsider I can’t say that Rather’s claims are without merit.
   But to allege that he was made a patsy for the White House—given the network’s anti-war stance—is a bit hard to believe.
   What does surprise me is this in the E! report:

CBS … forced him to issue a public apology on Sept. 20, 2004—“despite his own personal feelings that no public apology from him was warranted.”

   Personally, I think the apology was warranted. His own reputation was saved in part because of it—but now we learn that he didn’t feel sorry for duping the American public with fake documents, Rather might have to take a hit.
   Apparently, he wasn’t responsible for the errors, according to his complaint. At the time, however, the inquiry panel found:

   He relied on a trusted producer and didn't check the story for accuracy or, apparently, even see it before he introduced it on the program, the panel said.
   CBS rushed the story on the air and then blindly defended it when holes became apparent, said the panel, which was unable to say conclusively whether memos disparaging Bush's service were real or fake.

   As the President’s opponents will tell us, there is plenty of stuff which one can use to criticize Dubya. Resorting to fakery was unnecessary, especially using something that could be so readily exposed.
   The conservative press is already fuming:

Dan Rather’s lawsuit against CBS should be dismissed, both in court and in public opinion, as a shameless and ridiculous effort to retract his on-air apologies for his smearing of President Bush with bogus National Guard documents in 2004. The New York Times reports Rather is suing CBS for what he claims is the network’s “‘biased’ and incomplete investigation of the flawed Guard broadcast.” That’s rich, since it was Rather’s reporting itself that was biased and incomplete.

   The timing of reviews of Mr Rather’s report on the Boeing Dreamliner or 787 cannot do the man much good now, either. On Wired yesterday:

By taking a cheap shot at Boeing, Dan Rather may be headed for a comeback less graceful than Britney Spears' performance at the MTV Music Awards.

Aaron Rowe at Wired, who is trained in researching materials’ engineering, investigated Rather’s 787 report. He calls those summarizing his report to be ‘misleading’, but stops short at doing the same to Mr Rather. It does seem he’s been found not guilty by Mr Rowe, who raises the possibility that ‘Perhaps this is part of an attempt by Rather to make a comeback after the debacle that resulted in his departure from CBS News.’
   That may be all it is. Rather knows how the media work. He has been part of them and he has been the subject of them. And just a few triggers can get people re-reporting things inaccurately.
   It’s certainly getting him in the headlines, to be sure. Just like another person we thought we would not hear from again.
   In that context, Rather is still a pretty shrewd chap in his mid-70s.
   And now that the President is so unpopular, through the vagaries of the MSM, Rather might actually wind up looking more innocent.