COMMANDO NANNY?!?

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Are you kidding me? This is the drivel they cancelled Angel for?

Commando Nanny - "An ex-British commando moves to Los Angeles looking for mercenary work in Central America but winds up as a nanny."

Are you serious? I mean, really? Wow. I didn't get this at all, until I saw the name behind it: Mark Burnett. Apparently it's his life story, and since all of the networks are now Burnett-whores, it suddenly makes sense. Now the real question is this: Why can we not get "Eco Challenge" on network TV (the only thing even *close* to real in 'reality' TV?)

"Blue Collar TV will be a combination of sketch comedy and reality TV featuring an ensemble cast (including Jeff Foxworthy and Bill Engvall). It will be shot in Atlanta."

How many ways can you come up with to use the "You might be a redneck if..." joke? Seriously? I liked Bill Engvall's "Here's your sign" bit...10 years ago. Foxworthy's schtick was interesting for about 10 seconds.

"In Studio 7, seven twentysomethings hang out in a New York apartment for a week before they are escorted to a dark studio somewhere in Manhattan. Then, they play a weekly game of winners and losers. The last roommate standing wins $100,000."

No comment. (hobbes vomits)

"Boundary Mountain is an escapist playground for wealthy tourists and extreme sports enthusiasts, but to the Carver family, it's home."

This has "steaming load" written all over it. How heartwarming can we get? I guess they need to start trying out shmaltzy 'compelling' (aka: overacted) crap to replace 7th Heaven, since it's running out of precocious little kids to power it. And the cast is just oh-so pretty. I mean, really! LOOK AT THEM! It's like a frigging Clearasil commercial! Trendy Colorado yuppies with perfect skin, hair and teeth whine about the burdens they bear.

I give most of this crap a life span of about ten minutes. Then, the mouthbreathers we call executives at WB will program in some midseason replacements that are actually well written and entertaining (probably because they have had to scramble to find them, and haven't micromanaged them into oblivion). However, once they figure that out and said shows threaten to capture an audience they'll can them too (after preempting them with Celebrity Chutes and Ladders 2-hour specials for 3 weeks), only to replace them with some lame-@$$ 'reality' (and I use the term loosely) show like "Am I Hot - the Homeless Edition".

Maybe I'm just being cynical, but it seems to me that there are three problems here (well, probably more but these are the three that stand out to me):

1. Lack of Talent. Studio execs these days are content to rip off whatever the hot show of the week is (CSI: Fresno, anyone?), rather than actually try to come up with something new and (gasp) entertaining. It seems that any time a show actually finds an audience it is through total blind luck and happens in spite of the executives' actions. If I were them, I would pull a George Costanza. Basically, take every impulse you have, and do the exact opposite.

2. Lack of Patience. It seems as though if a show doesn't become a smash hit right out of the gate, it's toast. It's as if these knuckle-draggers think that good marketing is all it takes to determine if a show will succeed. If they advertise the crap out of a show, and it doesn't immediately set ratings records, they assume it will never find an audience and make preparations to dump it. Using this new criteria, shows like Cheers and Seinfeld would be footnotes that barely lasted through the first commercial break.

3. 'Reality' TV. This is a scourge that is very rapidly wiping out television as we know it. No longer do you have the burden of being creative and attempting to find talented people to write, direct and act in programs. Now you can just take a bunch of inbred, malajusted social deviants, put them together in a room and let them degenerate into Lord of the Flies, and we call that entertainment. It's cheap and requires no talent, so even if it doesn't do terribly well the network still makes money. As Weird Al said, "Next week on FOX, watch lions eat Christians!"

We are going to have to come up with some new form of medium to replace TV (whether it be DVD, Flash/Web, etc.). Because at this point, network TV is pretty much becoming a wasteland and anyone who actually has synapses firing in their brain is likely too intelligent for what passes for programming at this point.

And it's not just WB that's doing this. It's all the networks. They keep pulling from the same stagnant pool of retread execs who have mostly unlimited power and (apparently) no requirement to produce results. And they keep producing the same derivitive manure that all the other major networks do, while immediately killing anything that requires higher brain function to 'get' (that would be me talking to you, FOX. Can you say 'Firefly'? 'Keen Eddie'? Umm, yeah.) For the life of me, I can't figure out how come 'Monk' is still on the air. It should have died long ago (fortunately for us it didn't). Maybe USA Network isn't a real network?

I am in the wrong business. Anyone want to help me start my own network?