Joey’s Crappy Day

I was watching CNN’s pre-debate coverage tonight. The anchor of the show was talking to a reporter at the Democratic debate site and mention that only Clinton and Obama were invited. Then she mentioned that there was actually one more Democrat still in the running, Mike Gravel and asked the on-site reporter why he wasn’t invited. Of course when she made this mention, she called him Mike Gavel and then called him Mike Gravel, but with the emphasis on the wrong syllable. Moral of the story? She didn’t have a clue who Mike Gravel is and was just reading the questions off a prompter. I would think that someone should have gone over that with her in the show prep, but apparently it didn’t happen.

Ironically, by making her ignorance of Mike Gravel known, she ended up answering her own question. He wasn’t invited because most of America doesn’t even know who he is and he consistently gets 0% of the vote in the primaries as a result. He’s actually a pretty cool dude and is worth checking out. While I don’t think he’s Presidential material, I do think he’s cabinet worthy if he’d be willing to take a post.

It’s things like this that made me get rid of cable television. It’s another advertisement for the 1/2 Hour News Hour on Fox News. The show is supposed to be a satire… I guess. Sean Hannity’s reaction, or lack thereof, is pretty telling.

One question rattling through my brain is, did they even test it on a real audience? The only good joke in this clip was that Rush Limbaugh was President, and amazingly they even included a laugh track on that one.

Fox and others seem to be playing up the fact that the show is being made by Joel Surnow, who also makes their hit show “24.” I guess this fact alone will get a few people to watch, but probably not past the first episode.

On a side note, I just watched my first episode of “24″ the other day. I was completely unimpressed, but I did like the sound the clock makes when it’s ticking before a commercial break. The show was full of bad acting and the plot seems to be typical of most of the night time soap operas that seem to be so popular these days.

Earlier this year I heard about about a new television show on one of the radio programs that I enjoy. The new TV show would be a half hour “fake” news program in the style of The Daily Show. The difference would be that this new show, to be aired on the Fox News Channel, will have a decided right-wing slant. You can check out a clip from the pilot on YouTube.

Before I even viewed the clip above, I knew that this show was probably going to be bad at best, utterly horrible at second best, and suicidally painful at worst. It looks like my worst fears have been realized, the show is awful, at least I am assuming so from this clip. The jokes are stale, the acting is… atrocious (shutter), and the use of a laugh track with a live audience in studio is just plain insulting to both me and them!