| Television Snippets - The Beautiful Canceled Life |
| Written by Max Alexis |
| Sunday, 27 September 2009 |
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The Fall Season has returned and finally our weeks can feel slightly normal. Longstanding favorites like House and Grey's Anatomy returned to their comfortable fan base, while new shows attempted to make their mark and stand up against some veteran shows. Our first major week of regular programming brought us a cancellation, the F-bomb, and a high school choir belting out the competition. FOX's "Animation Domination" Sunday returns tonight and it begins with an episode of The Simpsons written by superfan Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. Rogen, who has lost a huge amount of weight training for The Green Hornet, wrote about a fictional comic book character called Everyman, who becomes a movie. In a parallel to Rogen's own life, Homer Simpson is cast in the role of Everyman, while Rogen plays a trainer who encourages Homer to lose weight and get in shape for the role. The only other celebrity to share the honor of writing a Simpsons episode is Ricky Gervais, who also voiced a character in his episode.
One other little piece of Simpsons news: Said Matt Groening at Comic Con, "This year we will finally get to air the Halloween episode before Halloween." Can't wait. Despite good buzz and reaction, the ABC sci-fi drama V is facing more hurdles. Not only has it been pushed back 2 months, but ABC has now announced that the show will be released in two separate "pods." Uh oh. What does this mean? It means that when V premieres on November 3 at 8:00 pm, they will only show 3 episodes. Then, instead of returning with the rest of the Spring shows (including what will likely be a ratings powerhouse—the final season of LOST), V will return in midseason. Viewers will only get a taste of the show before it goes into hiatus until 4 months later? This sounds like trouble.
Dollhouse made its triumphant return Friday. The show, facing cancellation at all points last season, was miraculously renewed by FOX. No one can be entirely sure why this happened, but maybe they are giving Joss Whedon a chance he didn't have on Firefly, which became a DVD gem with a massive following. Building on the rare opportunity they were given, Dollhouse exploded out of the gate on Friday, delving immediately into the more intricate plots they can now pursue since Echo (Eliza Dushku) has been imprinted with all of her past personalities. During this episode "Vows," Echo ends up surviving because she snaps from one personality into another, taking another step toward the terrifying mastery of personalities the minds behind the Dollhouse seem to fear. Unfortunately, much like the entirety of last season, Dollhouse found itself at the bottom of its time slot, bringing in a weak 2.6 million viewers. While Dollhouse may be on the air for a second season, the Friday Night Death Slot isn't doing them any favors. Taking a quick look at the ratings, FlashForward won the Thursday night 8:00 PM timeslot, debuting to 12.47 million viewers. The best ABC premiere in 2 years, FlashForward and Grey's Anatomy were the clear Thursday winners. This causes a problem, though, for a current gem: NBC's Community. Community only retained 69% of The Office viewers which is a noticeable drop from the week before. Hopefully as Community continues to find its footing, it will also find its audience. Glee continued to win its time slot, with a respectable 7 million viewers, while NBC veterans Heroes and Law and Order: SVU failed to grab a significant share of viewers. While Saturday Night Live's brand new Primetime Update on Thursday Nights has been very funny so far (despite their insistence on using Kenan), the season premiere of SNL itself on Saturday was awful. Starring an untalented Megan Fox (guess what—they joked about her being sexy! Whodathunkit?) and an almost lethargic U2 musical guest, the show lacked any significant spark. Or humor. Even the SNL Digital Short, the brainchild of Andy Sandberg, was hollow and lacking. Yes, even though there were two of them in the show last night. The only thing that will be remembered from this episode is poor Jenny Slate. In her first major sketch on her first episode of the show, a stupid sketch about the word "frickin," Slate accidentally swapped "frickin" for... Well, the non-TV safe version of the word.
Ryan Reynolds will hopefully have a stronger showing next week when he hosts, and Lady Gaga is rarely boring. |
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Mischa Barton's The Beautiful Life is the first cancellation of the Fall 2009 season. Canceled after only two episodes, the show seemed destined to fail from the beginning. Following a highly publicized "meltdown" of Barton over the summer that delayed filming, the show debuted on the CW to a measly 1.5 million viewers. The second episode, seen only by 1 million, was the last that will be aired.