Jennifer Lopez and Steven Tyler are joining American Idolas judges, says the Hollywood Reporter. Randy Jackson remains, at least until the first time he calls JLo "dog." The outfit Lopez is wearing in the photo to your left is, I suspect, not the official judge's uniform. By the way, if you actually care about anything in this item, there's something seriously wrong with you.
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WSFL anchor Lisa Hayward busted for DUI
The worst TV week of the summer (I hope)
It's not August yet, but the dog days are surely upon us where television is concerned. Perhaps in an effort to make the new season that starts in September look better, the networks are bombarding us with cheapjack reality shows made with little money but lots of hostility.
It says something creepily unpleasant about broadcast-network executives that all three of the shows debuting over the next two days are based on the principle of public humiliation of the innocent. And if any of the shows become hits, it will say something creepily unpleasant about us.
Easily the worst of the bunch -- in fact, there's a good argument to be made that it's one of the most atrocious TV shows of all time -- is NBC's Breakthrough with Tony Robbins. Hosted by the I'm-OK-you're-a-pile-of-crap motivational guru himself, the show offers help to people with hard-luck stories in return for tearful self-debasement.
It's a couples version of the original sob-sister reality show, the 1950s era Queen for a Day, in which female contestants recited every tragic detail of their train-wreck lives (My kids were kicked out of school for setting fire to a teacher! My husband left me for a cocker spaniel!) for a studio audience, which rewarded the most piteous story with a new washing machine. Read my full review of Breakthrough with Tony Robbins, along with Fox MasterChef and The CW's Plane Jane, in Tuesday's Miami Herald.
Busting the welfare queens at the Pentagon
A most peculiar thing happened last week: The Washington Post ripped a federal welfare boondoggle to 
shreds, exposing tens of billions of dollars of waste, duplication and bureaucratic excess . . . and conservatives didn't erupt in astonishment and praise. In fact, they didn't raise a peep.
That's because the welfare queens ripping off taxpayer dollars in this case aren't poverty pimps waving the bloody flag of race and class, but military-industrial hustlers exploiting the war on terrorism to build themselves opulent and powerful fiefdoms.
At a time when newspapers are shrinking, not many ran The Post's 16,000-word Top Secret America series, a rough map of the murky yet vast labyrinth of intelligence and defense agencies that securitycrats have burrowed into the federal budget since Sept. 11.
But if you care at all about either the wholesale waste of federal dollars or the real capabilities of the U.S. government to detect and prevent terrorist attacks, The Post series is worth tracking down on the Internet.If anything, its conclusion -- that we've created a surveillance-industrial complex ``so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within or exactly how many agencies do the same work'' -- is modestly understated. Read my full op-ed piece on national-security welfare in Tuesday's Miami Herald.
Oliver Stone stands by his man Adolf
Step aside, you international Zionist conspirators, you're no match for Oliver Stone. In an interview published over the weekend in the London Sunday Times, Stone repeated yet again that his forthcoming 10-part documentary on Showtime will put Adolf Hitler "in context" and not focus on that distracting stuff about the Holocaust. The real victims were the Soviets, who were just standing there innocently invading Poland along with the Nazis when Hitler treacherously turned on them. "Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people, 25 or 30 million," Stone explained.
The reason we're all such dummies that Stone has to continually explain this to us is, he says, obvious: "The Jewish domination of the media." (Except Showtime, I guess.) "There's a major lobby in the United States," Stone continued. "They are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington. Israel has bleeped up United States foreign policy for years." Listening to Stone for a while is almost enough to make Time magazine sound sane when it pinpoints Cuba and North Korea as the best refuges in event of a worldwide zombie attack.
Screen Gems: TV the week of July 25
Mad Men (10 p.m Sunday, AMC) -- Not since Dynasty ended its 1985 season with the whole cast lying in a pile of bloody bodies after a terrorist attack has a hit show wiped its slate so clean as Mad Mendid in its last episode of 2009. The 1960s ad agency in which the show is set was breaking up, along with the marriage of ace executive Don Draper. I'd tell what's going on as the fourth season gets away, but then I'd have to kill you, and the Herald's circulation department will go into one of its hey-readers-don't-grow-on-trees tantrums. Let's just say, you're gonna be very surprised.
Within (9 p.m. Saturday, Lifetime) -- This movie about a little girl who can see evil spirits in the people around her didn't get a lot of distribution or publicity when it was released in 2009. But it won a ton of awards from horror-movie-geek groups and film festivals -- including several for 9-year-old star Mia Ford.
'Being Human', BBC America's monstrous hit
If you think the concept of Being Human, the BBC's surprise hit series about a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost sharing an apartment, sounds ridiculous, the people who make the show take violent exception. They think it sounds contemptibly stupid, beneath even the lowest conception of television dignity, unwatchable and even unmakeable.
"I laughed ridiculously about it when they suggested it," says Lenora Crichlow, the 25-year-old actress who plays the ghost, Annie. "To be honest, my reaction was, ‘Are you serious?' I take my acting quite seriously. I'd just quit a heavy drama. This sounded like an absurd joke."
And it was, kind of. Toby Whithouse, the show's creator, had filled entire cemeteries with discarded Being Human scripts. The one Crichlow saw had been written in the giddy certainty that it would never be produced. "By the last one, I just assumed the show would never be made," Whithouse admits. "And the moment I realized that, it completely liberated me. Nothing I've ever written was ever easier."
But Being Human turned out to be anything but the campy supernatural ripoff of Three's Company that everybody expected. Instead, it's a wistful, witty and sometimes quite scary meditation on whether life is wasted on the living. Even more surprisingly, it's a (pardon the expression) monstrous hit -- not only in Great Britain, where outraged fans thwarted a BBC attempt to cancel it, but also on this side of the Atlantic, where it pulled in some of the highest ratings in BBC America history last year.
Even now, as the channel prepares to launch the show's second U.S. season at 10 p.m. Saturday, nobody who works on Being Human can quite believe its success.
"It had never really occurred to me that the show might air in the United States," Whithouse muses. "One doesn't want to tempt fate. It had already been a long and exhausting process getting it to the screen. I was just grateful anyone was watching it and enjoying it. A life beyond that, I didn't want to think about it."
TV shows that go bump in the night are hardly a novelty in American television; from The CW's Vampire Diaries and Supernatural to ABC's The Gates to CBS' Ghost Whisperer, TV has more fangs and phantasms than you can shake a crucifix at. What distinguishes Being Human from the rest of the werewolf pack is the degree to which its characters struggle with the complications their supernatural sides complicate the ordinary romantic and work-place dramas of 20-somethings.
Annie the ghost has to stand jealously and invisibly by watching her old boyfriend take up with another girl. George the werewolf (played by Russell Tovey) must explain to landlords why all the furniture is reduced to a heap of kindling every time there's a full moon. And Mitchell the vampire (Aidan Turner) no longer dates, because his kisses inevitably result in something much more gruesome than hickeys.
Their relations with God are even more problematic. When George tells Annie he's no longer an Orthodox Jew and can eat bacon, she curiously inquires, "Do they have rules about being a werewolf as well?" Replies George, his mordant wit wrapped around a core of despair: "I think you'd be hard pressed to find a religion that doesn't frown on it."
If the show's characters emphasize their humanity, that's because they were originally written as humans. Being Human started out as a sort of fractured suburban version of Friends.
"I was hired to devise a show about three college-graduate friends who decide to buy a house together," says Whithouse, a British TV veteran who previously had written a comedy-drama series about nurses as well as the occasional episode for such sci-fi series as Torchwood and Doctor Who.
"I thought it wasn't a particularly thrilling idea, and then -- completely unbidden -- I had the thought of making the three characters a recovering sex addict, a borderline agoraphobic and a very repressed guy with anger-management issues. We liked the way the characters locked together, but we couldn't come up with a story. We decided to have last meeting, and if we couldn't come up with it, we'd call it a day."
The final meeting dragged along just like all the others until somebody said, "What if we make George, the guy with the anger-management issues, into a werewolf? At least that would give us a story for the first episode." From there the addict quickly turned into a vampire and the agoraphobic into a ghost who couldn't leave the apartment because she was murdered in it.
"But everybody was still skeptical, and none more so than myself," Whithouse says. ‘‘I wrote the first version as a sitcom. It's now buried in a lead-lined casket so that no one can ever read it. I guess I was kind of apologizing -- ‘This is so silly, no one could ever take it seriously, so let's write it like that.' Then I decided to do a complete rewrite from page one. This time, I pretended I was writing a low-budget American indie film, . . . but always, in every version, the bottom line was the characters, the original ones we came up with."
The gritty and pointedly unglamorous indie-film approach finally worked, at least so far as Whithouse was concerned. Not everyone agreed, least of all the BBC programmers. After airing the pilot in February 2008, the network decided it wasn't worth a full-series run and ditched the whole project. It relented only after several months of viewer uproar, and by then most of the actors had signed onto other projects and had to be recast.
"The show was always a hit, just not with the channel," says Crichlow, who wasn't in the pilot. "Of course, now everybody saw it coming, and everybody knew it would be a success. But that's not really
the way it was."
Even after the show's wildly successful first season in Great Britain, Whithouse and the cast were morose about its prospects in the United States. When they went to San Diego last year to publicize the U.S. launch at Comic Con, a convention of fantasy and sci-fi fans, they expected, at best, an indifferent reception.
"We thought we were going to be the poor relation, the forgotten orphan child," Whithouse says. "We were stunned by just how many people had already seen it, getting hold of episodes on the Internet somehow." (That's not the only thing he still marvels at: "Coming down to the hotel lobby seeing women of a certain age dressed as Princess Leia was something of a shock.")
Whithouse hopes those fans will be as pleased with the second season of Being Human as they were with the first. For all its complex characterization, the show also features powerful plotting. The first season revolved around an incipient revolt by a vampire underground disgusted with human control of the world. (‘‘We left them to tend this paradise, this Eden," the vampire leader ranted. "And look what they did.")
This year the threat against Being Human's characters will come from the opposite direction: a religious group that has learned of the supernatural shadow world and is determined to wipe it out.
"In the first season, Annie, George and Mitchell were striving to reclaim their humanity, and the threats against them came from the supernatural world," Whithouse says. ‘‘Now we're going to turn the trope on its head. Instead of humans pursed by monsters, the monsters will be the human prey.
"This is in no way a statement about religion. But if people believe in an invisible, omniscient, all-powerful being, then it's not that big a leap of faith to believe in vampires and werewolves and ghosts. If you believe in God, you have to believe in the devil -- and his agents.
"The human villains of this story line believe that vampires are demons, and ultimately they believe they are doing good by wiping them out. The most interesting thing about villains is when they don't believe they're doing evil, they think they're helping the world get better."
Whithouse and the cast are happy to talk about the second season, which has already aired in Great Britain. But ask about the third, which is about to begin shooting, and suddenly the phone line from London falls silent as a tomb. Though Crichlow is perfectly willing to talk about what she doesn't want to see: an all-musical episode, one of the most popular suggestions on Being Human fan message boards in England.
"Listen, there's a reason that not everybody is writing series for television," she snorts. "The idea of putting a musical together is the most terrifying thing I can imagine. The support for that has just been ridiculous. I can't imagine a TV show doing that."
Crichlow lapses into ominous silence when a reporter tells her that Buffy the Vampire Slayer did just that in a 2002 episode. "Good God," she murmurs. "Don't breathe a word of that to anyone here."
CNN en Espanol's border buscapade
As D-Day for implementation of Arizona's new immigration law approaches, Spanish-language TV is covering the issue practically round-the-clock. CNN en Espanol has ever taken it a step further, sending anchors Gabriela Frias (left) and Juan Carlos Lopez out along the border in a bus to file regular reports. It left El Paso Thursday and will arrive in Phoenix on July 29, the day the law is scheduled to take effect. The team on the bus will file reports throughout each day, including a nightly story on the 7 p.m. Directo Desde EEUU newscast.