Changing Channels

Profiles in poor taste, No. 126: ESPN

Hmmm. A slasher movie called Sorority Row sponsoring a Florida State football game. Am I the only one who remembers Ted Bundy?

The terrors of Swedish television

As a kid, I found both the Jolly Green Giant and Mr. Clean at least mildly alarming, so I'm sympathetic to the tens of thousands of Swedes huddled in terror before the image of Adina Fohlin, the model singing a Scandanavian folk song in a stark commercial for Apoliva skin-care products. They've even formed a Facebook group, I Am Scared Of The Girl In The Apoliva Commercial, with nearly 100,000 members. It's not really surprising, since the girl is singing, "I like to eat the livers of Norwegian babies!" Okay, I am possibly making that up, though since she's singing in Swedish, who knows?

Ed McMahon, RIP

Ed McMahon, who turned the job of second-banana into a first-class career, died Tuesday after a long fight with cancer and other illnesses. McMahonspent 35 years as Johnny Carson's sidekick on two different shows. Though his role on both the 1950s game Who Do You Trust and the Tonight Show consisted of little more than laughing heartily at Johnny Carson's jokes -- and, of course, opening the Tonight Show with a resounding "H-e-e-e-e-e-ere's Johnny!" -- McMahon managed to spin it off into innumerable commercial pitches. As recently as February's Super Bowl, he was hilariously mocking himself 2009 in an ad forCash4Gold, repeating his final line on the Tonight Show  -- "Goodbye, old friend" -- to a solid-gold toilet, then braying, "H-e-e-e-e-e-ere's money!" He was 86.

Ovation, the most unwatchable channel on television

The cable channel Ovation TV's motto is "Make life creative." I suggest a change to "Make television unwatchable." I just tried to watch an Ovation telecast of Surviving Picasso, an unusually frank 1996 biopic starring Anthony Hopkins and Natascha McElhone. Ovation crammed a truly incredible 55 minutes of commercials into the movie, which is two hours long -- that is, one minute of advertising for every two minutes of content. Good God, why not just declare yourself a shopping channel and be done with it?

And the winners are...

Just for the record, the winners of that Harry Potter paraphernalia I was giving away a couple of weeks ago were Lisa Singer of Brooklyn, N.Y. (the DVD), Pat Boyle of Hillsdale, N.J. (a magic amulet) and Tomas Otero of Miami (another amulet). I would advise everybody to be extremely polite to Pat and Tomas, who now have the power to turn you into a frog. But go ahead and dump on Lisa the same way you did before -- no matter what those guys at Blu-Ray say, that DVD has no magical powers.

Read this quick, before ABC fires Jimmy Kimmel

Ever wonder what would happen if somebody slipped truth serum into the martinis at the network upfronts in New York? I'm thinking it would sound a lot like Jimmy Kimmel's routine during ABC's presentation to advertisers Tuesday.

Kimmel on the quality of ABC's new shows:

“Let’s get real here. Let’s get Dr. Phil-real here. These new fall shows? We’re going to cancel about 90 percent of them. Maybe more.”

Kimmel on ABC's sales pitch to advertisers:

“Every year we lie to you and every year you come back for more. You don’t need an upfront. You need therapy. We completely lie to you, and then you pass those lies onto your clients.”

Kimmel on NBC jumping the upfront gun, unveiling its new shows two weeks ahead of everybody else:

“NBC got such a head start, they’ve already had time to cancel half their schedule.”

Kimmel on product-placement ads:

“Next year on Grey’s Anatomy, your product could kill Dr. Izzie. It just depends on how much you want to pay.”

Contest: Win a date with Harry Potter...or Dr. Laura

Two rather odd contests going on around here these days. One is being conducted by Fort Lauderdale radio station WFTL (850 AM), which is bringing Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the iron maiden of radio shrinks, to town. Schlessinger, whose show airs on WFTL from 9 a.m. to noon on weekdays, is appearing at Coral Springs Center for the Arts for one show only on May 14 at 7:30 -- but the only way to get tickets is to listen to the station for contest calls or apply on-line.

Then there's Harry Potter. NBC’s Bonnie Hunt Show, Ellen and Extra are giving away a pair of tickets to the premiere of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince...the premiere in London. (And yeah, they pick up the tab for everything, not just the movie.) What makes this interesting is that the NBC affiliates in just six cities are participating -- and one of them is South Florida's WTVJ-NBC 6. Watch Bonnie Hunt at 3 p.m, Extra at 4:30 p.m. or Ellen at 5 p.m. for "magic words" that you need to enter, then follow the instructions.

Even in the current stock market, my net worth is a little bit less than that of GE. Nonetheless, I've got some Harry Potter swag of my own to give away. To win a BluRay copy of  Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix or a cool Harry Potter pendant that can be used to turn annoying bosses, teachers, parents and/or siblings into toads, just send an email with "Glenn is cooler than Harry Potter" in the subject line to me at ggarvin@MiamiHerald.com. We'll close it on May 15 at 6 p.m. and the winner will be drawn at random.

Swine flu, the panic that never gets old

Believe it or not, kids, when mommy and daddy were little, there were no 24-hour news nets standing by to break into their Los Angeles car-chase coverage with panicky bulletins about how we're all going to die of swine flu. No sir, back in the primitive three-channel TV universe, it was so hard to create mass hysteria over random coughs and ephemeral aches and pains that the federal government had to use tax dollars (no sweat, though; there's always more where those came from) to create advertisements to shriek at Americans that they were all going to die writhing like pigs in Hell.

That video up above includes a few of the ironically named "public service announcements" that broadcast networks were directed to air during the Great Swine Flu Panic of 1976, when the federal government warned that half a million Americans were going to come down with the disease. That estimate was off by about half a million, though, to be fair, swine flu did trigger a minor health-care crisis -- some 500 people contracted Guillain-Barre syndrome from shots administered during the government's vaccination program.

Screen Gems: television the week of April 12

Grey Gardens (8 p.m. Saturday, HBO) -- Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange star as Little Edie and Big Edie Bouvier, eccentric society icons (they were related to Jacqueline Kennedy) who gradually pulled up bridges until they lived in hermit-like isolation in a crumbling 28-room mansion in East Hampton.

World's Funniest Commercials (8 p.m. Sunday, TBS) -- Oh, don't turn up your nose. You know you're gonna watch.

Confessions of a Superhero (9 p.m. Monday, Sundance) -- One answer to the oft-asked question, ''What's going to happen to Lindsey Lohan?'' this documentary focuses on some of show business' oddest celebrities -- four would-be stars who wander Hollywood Boulevard in superhero costumes, signing autographs and posing for photos with tourists.

The Cougar (10 p.m. Wednesday, TV Land) -- An alternate answer to the Lindsay Lohan question, this reality show features a bunch of 20ish men competing for the creaky sexual favors of a 40ish woman, the entire cast being willing to do anything to get on television.

Let me program your TiVo! Just click on my best bets for the week at www.tivo.com/guruguides.

Those Super Bowl ads weren't the only thing that bored Miami

Is it possible the Dolphins have ruined NFL football for South Florida? Though Sunday's game was the second-most-watched of all time, with 147 million people tuning in at some point during the telecast, we sure didn't pay attention the way the rest of the country did. While the game was on 65 percent of the television sets around America, only 59 percent of the Miami/Fort Lauderdale market tuned in. While we're the 16th biggest TV market, we only ranked 43rd in Super Bowl viewers. (Not surprisingly, Pittsburgh and Phoenix had the highest percentage of TV sets tuned into the game, about 70.)  UPDATE: On Tuesday, after tinkering with the numbers some more, Nielsen announced there were actually 151.6 million viewers tuned into the game at some point, making Sunday's Super Bowl the all-time champ.

In other discouraging Super Bowl news, the Nielsen folks have determined that the most-watched ad was Go Daddy's smarmy commercial in which Danica Patrick talks about her enhanced...Internet service. The company promptly issued a triumphant press release bragging that "critics across the board pan Go Daddy's risque Super Bowl Ads, but don't look for the Web hosting company to change its tactics anytime soon." Whew, I was worried there for a minute. What would I write about next year?

Oh, yeah, one more thing. Several Swedish readers have written in to say that Skillnaden ar drinkability, the tagline in one of Sunday's Bud Light ads, means "The difference is drinkability" rather than "Great drinkability" as I reported in an earlier item on this blog. To which I say, what are you guys doing watching American football, anyway? Wasn't the Lidingoloppet on?