TV Watch: Two excellent things about CBS's choice of Stephen Colbert to succeed David Letterman

Rush asks over and over, do we really care what he thinks about it? Great point, Rush! Who in his right mind could possibly care? Except for the fact that you've got still got a lot of people listening to you who aren't in their right mind.

by Ken

It really seems as if some note should be taken of the news that Stephen Colbert has been named to succeed David Letterman as host of CBS's Late Show -- at some date to be determined next year after Dave finally packs it in.

Two things occur to me -- both good, let me hasten to say. I'm certainly not claiming that they're profound. In fact, it mayt be their very obviousness that makes them so, well, obvious.

(1) Stephen C is wicked smart, and wicked funny, and a long-experienced entertainer, and also has an uncommon awareness of the world around him and a seemingly deep-rooted attachment to truth, as opposed to the commodity of "truthiness" he gave a name to. What's more his worldview is (and I'm sorry that these are terrible words; they're just the best I could come up with) idiosyncratic and offbeat relative to the run of career comics who tend to slide into network late-night chairs -- in other words, a really apt successor to Dave. (And I speak here as someone whose experience of Dave-watching goes back to his NBC daytime show.)

(2) We really don't know who the Stephen Colbert of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (or whatever CBS chooses to call the extravaganaza) will be. The standard word is that he will be dropping the persona -- of a fake-right-wing blowhard -- that he created for his Comedy Central show. But then, that persona wasn't all that different from the personae we saw during his time with The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, where his tone was carefully modulated to that of the story he was presenting.

I don't doubt we're going to see a different Stephen C from the ones we've seen before, and since we haven't seen it yet, we can't know what it's going to be. Given the list of qualities/qualifications I listed above, I'm not at all bothered by this. In fact, I think it's rather fun. I'm guessing, though, that whoever or whatever the new Stephen C turns out to be, he's not going to be all that unrecognizable.

In this connection, you might want to take a look at washingtonpost.com's Alyssa Rosenberg's "Five parts of Stephen Colbert's fictional persona he should bring to 'The Late Show.'" My guess is that Stephen C isn't going to abandon anything he thinks might work for him in the context of his new format and audience. After all, he has to hope that one important component of that audience is going to be his present one.

Meanwhile, there's a question getting attention that I probably wouldn't have troubled with on my own but that seems to me to have legitimacy, and undoubtedly was agonized over by the responsible CBS executives: What about the Right?

One answer is Rush Limbaugh's already-famous one, as discussed atop this post by The Young Turks. In case we care about the view of a giant sack of stinky caca. By contrast, Aaron Blake of washingtonpost.com's "The Fix" blog has addressed this question in a fairly interesting way (lots links onsite):

Conservatives largely silent on CBS’s pick of Colbert

BY AARON BLAKE

April 10 at 3:04 pm

In its new "Late Show" host, CBS has picked someone who has been bashing conservatives for years using his faux-conservative newsman persona.

But to this point, conservatives have been largely quiet -- and some have even been favorable -- about the pick of Stephen Colbert.

Conservative talker Rush Limbaugh is about the one big-name conservative to speak out against Colbert so far. On his show Thursday, he called the selection of Colbert the equivalent of declaring "war on the Heartland of America."

"No longer is comedy going to be a covert assault on traditional American values, conservatives," Limbaugh said. "There's no unity in this hire. They've hired a partisan, so-called comedian to run a comedy show."

But as Chris Cillizza notes over on The Fix, one conservative radio host even appeared to praise the pick:



Despite regularly lampooning conservatives, Colbert has often been somewhat cagey about his own personal politics, as Cillizza notes.

But he has also said quite clearly that he's liberal.

During an appearance on NPR in 2005, Colbert said he discovered his liberal politics while building his persona as a correspondent on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart."

"Jon asked me to have a political opinion, and it turned out that I had one," Colbert said. "But I didn't realize quite how liberal I was until I was asked to make passionate comedic choices, as opposed to necessarily successful comedic choices."

In the end, I think a good part of the answer to the question "What about the Right?" is another question: How many hard-core right-wingers have been serious Dave-watchers?

Lotsa luck, Stephen C! It should be interesting.

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TV Watch: As of now, the message from "Breaking Bad" to non-Blu-ray fans seems to be: Drop dead!

[Click to enlarge -- it gets really big!]

by Ken

I resorted to my Plan C last night and watched the Breaking Bad finale in real time, and then the finale of the final-half-season after-show, Talking Bad. They were fine. No complaints about them. They did what the situation called on them to do.

But I might explain that my Plan A was to schlepp to Astoria to watch the episode live on the movie screen of the Museum of the Moving Image. The series is so meticulously photographed and edited that I bet it would look fabulous in big-screen format. (As I've mentioned, this is how I was introduced to The Sopranos. via an MMI marathon.) And I thought it might be fun to group-watch the episode in a theaterful of BB fanatics. Alas, though I think I RSVP-ed within an hour of receipt of the e-invite, as I found out a couple of days later, that was apparently too late! Oh well. It would have meant about 2½ hours' round-trip travel time.

Plan B was trickier. As long as I was going to be home after all, I thought, maybe I'll catch one of the many Breaking Bad repeat airings and take advantage of the opportunity to watch the Good Wife season premiere in HD. (When I got my first HD TV, I made the decision to leave my DVR on a non-HD TV, so I can't record in HD.) But then it occurred to me that CBS might have its legendary "football shift" on, whereby if it has a late Sunday football game, its whole Sunday primet-time schedule can be pushed back to, well, whenever the hell they feel like running it. I believe the network markets its schedule officially as "Bunch o' Crap Sunday." Which meant that I would be foregoing the Breaking Bad finale, or possibly the new Boardwalk Empire episode or the Homeland season premiere, for a show that would start . . . well, who knew when.

So instead, I set my (non-HD) DVR to record The Good Wife, kicking in an extra hour of recording time "just in case." And I watched Breaking Bad and Talking Bad, and as I said, that was fine. I'll probably have something to say in an upcoming "TV Watch" piece. That's not what I want to talk about now, though.

All through the run of the Breaking Bad after-show, Talking Bad, though the second half of Season 5, host Chris Hardwick -- who, let me say once again, has done a bang-up job -- has been talking up this gonzo complete-series video release that's in the works. During last night's hour-long final Talking Bad outing, series creator Vince Gilligan said how proud he is of the package they've put together, and mentioned that the script for a scene he wrote for the final episode, which for reasons of money and time was never even shot, is included in the package. Yes!

Of course all this time I've been wondering what kind of mixture of genuinely worthwhile supplementary material and ridiculous garbage is being thrown into the package, and what sort of price it's going to carry. As it turns out, I didn't have to worry, as I'll explain in a moment.

As to what's in the package, here's a list that appears in the amazon.com listing, to which, by the way, the Breaking Bad Shop links:

The Complete Series Collector's Set Includes:
• Collectible replica money barrel
• Over 55 hours of special features from all seasons
• All new two-hour documentary
• 16 page booklet with letter from Vince Gilligan
• Commemorative challenge coin designed by Vince Gilligan
• Los Pollos Hermanos apron

I'm certainly on board for the "over 55 hours of special features from all seasons," the "All new two-hour documentary," and (at least in theory) the "16 page booklet with letter from Vince Gilligan" (the obvious question being what's in the booklet). I don't want to be wasting money on the "collectible replica money barrel," the "commemorative challenge coin," or the Los Pollos Hermanos apron. (I have some sympathy for the idea of the apron, but my guess is that the actual object won't be durable enough to be used as an apron, and as a mere tchotchke it's of no interest to me.)

As it turns out, though, it appears to be academic. What's listed on Amazon is exclusively "Breaking Bad: The Complete Series (+UltraViolet Digital Copy) [Blu-ray]." The set isn't due out till November 26, and it's certainly possible that the full marketing plan hasn't been developed, but as of now all that's listed is this Blu-ray edition -- at $299.99 list, $209.99 (30 percent off) Amazon pre-order price. For non-Blu-ray fans, that's a net saving of $209.99 plus tax. Of course it also means no DVDs.

[Click to enlarge -- this gets really big too!]

There is a DVD alternative listed, supposedly comprising "Seasons 1-5," on 18 DVDs, but since this set is apparently already available, I'm guessing that in fact it contains Seasons 1-4 plus the first half of Season 5. Given the dishonest decision made by the network and/or producers to present what were really Seasons 5 and 6 as two halves of Season 5, it seems to me that the Breaking Bad producers and merchandisers have a particular obligtation to be crystal-clear about this. So far, what I'm seeing is murk. At the online Breaking Bad Shop there are separate listings for "Season 5" and "Final Season," the latter currently in pre-order. Apparently the marketing people seem determined to maximize confusion.

To make matters worse, as of this morning there were already 33 reviews up on the Amazon listing for the "Complete Series" package. This is pretty impressive considering that the item is almost two months away from existing. Of course most of the review are babbling on about the show. Anyone who imagines that at this point a review of the show is relevant to potential customers is someone I doubt very much I want to hear from about it. Even more nefariously, there were also 33 reviews -- the most conspicuous of which are the same reviews -- on the listing for the DVDs of "Seasons 1-5."

I assume the complete series will eventually be made available in some form to non-Blu-ray fans of the show, and as I noted, we're still almost two months away from the release date, and plans do evolve. But I have to say, I got a jolt when I went online today to check out the famous complete-series set I've been haring so much about. I thought all I was going to have to decide was whether the price was a budget-buster for me, and that in all likelihood I would be clicking on the "buy now" button.

Oops!

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For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

TV Non-Watch: What would happen if one of your "major" TV networks was swallowed up by the earth (and a few cable networks with it)?

If I don't have access to CBS programming by the time new episodes of The Good Wife begin airing in the fall, I'll be peeved. Otherwise, I think I'm good.

by Ken

It sounds like science fiction, doesn't it? An entire Big Four TV network simply disappearing? As is known to those of you who also reside in Time Warner Cable Country, and especially those of you who get your CBS programming from CBS Owned-and-Operated stations (meaning in Los Angeles, New York, Dallas-Fort Worth, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, and Pittsburgh), the CBS stations have gone poof! And with them CBS's cable properties: Showtime, The Movie Channel, Flix, and the Smithsonian Channel -- poof!

I don't know about you, but I really didn't expect it to come to this. I was vaguely aware of the possibility, thanks to what appeared to be a fairly massive CBS promotional campaign demonizing dastardly TWC for daring to threaten to deprive the citizenry of this indispensable programming. It would be, so the ads went, an assault virtually without precedent in the history of mankind.

At least from my perch it appeared that TWC was spending a small fraction of CBS's outlay to fight back, but offered us the interesting claim, unmentioned in the CBS promotional onslaught, that CBS was demanding increases of six (or was it seven?) times in payments for its programming. Even allowing for some fudging in the calculations, that sounds pretty startling, and one wonders how the CBS propagandists could have failed to mention it. If those numbers reflect anything vaguely close to reality, increases of that order, sure to be demanded by other purveyors of programming to cable, would seem to lead inescapably to dramatic increases in my cable bill, which is already astronomical.

What's interesting, though, is how little I'm feeling the loss, now that the great CBS blackout is in place. It's August, of course, so we're still a month or two away from new episodes of The Good Wife. That's something I would really miss should CBS still be MIA come new-season time. Other than that? Well, as I've mentioned, in the last season or two I've become kind of fond of Blue Bloods. I would certainly miss new episodes of The Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men, but it's not as if we cable consumers would suffer any great deprivation of either show, which pop up all over the damned cable band.

And you know, as far as I've been able to reckon, that's about it. The CBS ads are careful to include NFL programming among the deprivations TWC was threatening to inflict on us, and I guess for a lot of people the loss of CBS's AFC coverage will be a bitter blow. After all, how is a football fan supposed to survive with nothing but Fox's NFC coverage, and ESPN's Sunday Night Football, and NBC's Monday Night Football? Or whatever it is that the NFL currently licenses networks other than CBS to offer. I guess this would once have mattered to me, but for years now I've noticed that the onset of a new NFL season, which once filled me with anticipation, now fills me with dread. You would probably have to tie me down to get me to watch an NFL game now.

And of course what New York fans are threatened with the loss of is principally Jets games. Jets games? I would think that by now there was some movement to keep them off the air on purely football-friendly grounds.

Do I have to add that I haven't watched 60 Minutes -- something else that once played an important role in my weekly life -- in maybe 15 years? Or that I don't knowingly watch anything else produced by CBS News? All in all, the CBS-TWC dispute (I'll refrain from calling it "the CBS extortion bid," since I really don't know enough to conclude that as a matter of fact) has for me served primarily to underscore just how little CBS programming I watch.

And what of the cable networks? Well, I don't know what Flix is, and while I should probably be watching what is no doubt stimulating and enlightening programming on the Smithsonian Channel, and I don't offhand recall ever tuning to it.

As for Showtime, I think I'm fine till the next season of Nurse Jackie. (There is another season in the works, isn't there?) I was recording episodes of the new season of Dexter, but I have yet to watch any. The last time I watched a movie on any of the Showtime channels was -- well, I don't remember. (Sorry, CBS.)

And The Movie Channel? You've got to be kidding. If I'm lucky, maybe once a year I find something on it that I want to watch. The only reason I still have it is that the last time I inquired, I wouldn't have saved anything by axing it. And the way things work with me and Time Warner Cable, I wouldn't have been surprised if it wound up costing me more to not get TMC.

In any case, the last communication I had from TWC said that while TMC is kaput, I now have "courtesy access to Encore as replacement programming on a temporary basis," and in fact I should be getting Starz programming as a replacement for Showtime. I once subscribed to Starz and Encore but gave them up in a desperate attempt many years ago to trim my cable bill. I've got a way better shot at finding something to watch on them than on TMC -- or probably even Showtime.

In my experience with TWC everything costs more. Like when I added my phone service to my TWC "package." That would surely save me money, wouldn't it? As far as I can tell, it didn't. And when the installation was done, my kitchen phone no longer rang. I pointed this out to the installer, who insisted that this couldn't possibly be connected to anything he had done in the installation. Except that beforehand that phone rang; suddenly it didn't. The phone works, mind you. It just doesn't ring. Oh well.

And oh yes, starting this month, I get the privilege of paying $5.99 a month (plus the associated taxes and whatnot, no doubt) for the modem that was installed at the time. When I saw this announcement, I suddenly remembered a postcard received many months ago informing me of this upcoming change. I suppose I could have done something about buying the same sort of modem. But I didn't. And now TWC gets to dig deeper into my pocket.

Which is basically how I think of the company -- as an ongoing, protracted drain on my wallet, like via suction or something. It's why for years I've assiduously avoided dealings with the company, except when absolutely necessary. Anytime I contacted them, it seemed to wind up costing me money. I admit I had an easier time this summer when I upgraded one of my boxes to an HD box to accommodate my new TV and when I asked for help with my old DVR box, which turned out to be a museum piece. The replacement box not only is about a third the size but works about 1000 times better. I wonder how many years of substandard service I endured unnecessarily, because I was simply afraid to press TWC on the subject.

So you see, I'm not exactly a TWC enthusiast, and still, in the CBS imbroglio my sympathies are pretty one-sided. I'm not sure I would be any more aggrieved if it had been NBC or CBS (or Fox) that had gone poof! Probably not, which is a reminder of how dramatically my viewing of network TV has declined.

I suppose it will be of some comfort to CBS to know that it's got all those Jets fans on its side.

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For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

If CBS had treated the Super Bowl blackout as "news," who would have been more upset, viewers or advertisers?

"CBS buys the rights to Super Bowl broadcasts to make buckets of money, not to serve the public. Yet there were an estimated one hundred and eight million Americans watching the broadcast. The network's obligations to such a vast viewership should have led it to privilege the imperatives of journalism over those of commerce."

-- Steve Coll, in "The Super Bowl's Journalism Malfunction,"
in newyorker.com's "Daily Comment"

by Ken

Even I, who paid about as little attention as it's possible for a citizen in these parts in A.D. 2013 to pay to the Super Bowl, know about the blackout. And the impression I've gotten from what has filtered through to me is that it became sort of all part of the show that was this thrill-packed 34-31 eventual nail-biter. (And exciting it may have been, but it's a hard sell to make as if a 34-31 football game was a good game.)

Steve notes that going back to the '70s there has been a tradition of imagining terrorist fun 'n' games at American premier fun game. He ventures that when the lights went out at the start of the third quarter last night, he wasn't the only one who flashed back to Thomas Harris's 1975 novel Black Sunday, probably the best-known of the thrillers that have used the Super Bowl as a backdrop for terrorist evil-doing.

But beyond the natural initial period of "disorientation and unease," Steve says, a journalist's natural response is: "Breaking news!"

Surely, I thought upon my couch, CBS, the network of Eric Sevareid, Dan Rather, and "60 Minutes" -- the network that had lately recruited Charlie Rose to anchor its morning show -- would tear into this story.

It did not. What followed was embarrassing and irresponsible. The blackout lasted thirty-four minutes. During that time, CBS acted as if it possessed no news division. It relied on James Brown, the congenial jock-wrangling anchor of "The NFL Today," to handle the story. He and his fellow commentators -- retired quarterback Dan Marino, retired N.F.L. coach Bill Cowher, and retired tight end Shannon Sharpe -- acted as if the unexplained loss of electricity in a stadium filled with seventy thousand-plus people during the most-watched American television event of the year was just a twist in the story of who would win the football game, and nothing more.

Surely there were other questions to ask as the minutes ticked by: Why did the N.F.L. fail, throughout the entire interruption, to provide an informed spokesman to explain the problem and the plan to fix it? Who was responsible for the stadium's operations? What did the local utility, Entergy, have to say? Could the mayor of New Orleans, who was surely in the stadium, be summoned on camera?

And yet, as Steve pieces it together from subsequent reportage, CBS never treated it as anything other than a sporting event. Why, he wonders, didn't CBS president and chief executive Les Moonves "throw the broadcast to his news division in New York for at least an interval, to signal to viewers that the network recognized that something unusual and newsworthy had just occurred, and to attempt to inform them, as best as possible, with reliable reporting?"

Moonves told the Times that he knew he had the option to switch to CBS News in New York, but "we were told it would be twenty minutes.…We knew it wouldn't be down for hours." Even so, why did CBS not immediately scramble its news producers to hunt down subjects for on-air interviews? Why was there no off-air reporting relayed from CBS News to James Brown about whether there was any indication of foul play, or any information at all available beyond the no-commenting, self-protecting public-relations arm of the N.F.L. juggernaut, to which we have become all too accustomed during its systematic campaign of denial about football-related concussions?

Even the sports banter on the "NFL Today" set was timid, seemingly self-modulated to give no offense to CBS bosses, New Orleans, or the N.F.L. What about the risk of hamstring pulls and the like to players who have an unscheduled thirty-minute cooldown right after halftime? We watched players stretching for dull minute after minute but heard little more than vague speculation about "momentum."

As Steve points out, though, "CBS buys the rights to Super Bowl broadcasts to make buckets of money, not to serve the public." And he suggests that the on-air coverage of the blackout, such as it was, was "public-realtions messaging" whose essence was:

"Everything worked exactly as it was supposed to do, and therefore the lights went out for thirty minutes." It was surprising that the joint statement [by Entergy, the utility company, and the operators of the Super Bowl] did not go on to chastise other Super Bowl hosts for failing to have blackouts of their own, since they are apparently signs of a well-oiled utility machine.

Steve recalls that Black Sunday was written "in the aftermath of the 1972 Summer Olympics at Munich, where Palestinian terrorists kidnapped and killed Israeli athletes," and that --

Munich's shadow has informed the planning of every network broadcaster responsible for Olympics coverage in the four decades since. Disaster and counterterrorism preparations are a staple of pre-Games coverage. Network planners take for granted that they must be prepared to convert sports broadcasts to breaking-news broadcasts at any time.

Which brings us back to CBS honcho Les Moonves's comments to the NYT's "Media Decoder." "It was like there was another event inside an event," he said. Which prompts Steve's suggestion: "Another term for that might be news."

"We heard everything from hackers to people who had bet on San Francisco to Beyoncé draining all the energy out of the place at halftime," Moonves continued. And yet his network made no effort on air to sort rumor from fact or to acknowledge the cacophony of questions and speculation coursing through Twitter feeds. CBS rehearsed Beyoncé's halftime performance to within an inch of her dance-step stage marks, but the network of Edward R. Murrow had no plan for the unexpected.

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Mike Wallace (1918-2012)

In a feature at the top of today's Face the Nation broadcast, Morley Safer remembers his longtime 60 Minutes colleague Mike Wallace. (Sorry about the commercial, but it should be only 15 seconds.)

"Mike took to heart the old reporter's pledge to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."

-- Morley Safer

by Ken

Like everyone else remembering Mike Wallace, I suspect, Morley Safer refers early on to "the four dreaded words" that preceded his "visits" to an unsuspecting subject of one of his surprise interviews: "Mike Wallace is here." I wonder, though, how many eulogists are also remembering that "old reporter's pledge" Morley tells us Mike "took to heart": "to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." (Least of all, one suspects, his son Chris, who has made a successful career dragging the family name through the muck of Fox Noise as a thuggish right-wing liar-apologist-propagandist.)

Those of us who are old enough to remember way-back-when remember Mike Wallace as a not especially high-toned TV jack-of-all-trades, whose best-known role may have been that of cigarette pitchman. It was hardly the profile of a future crusading investigative journalist. Indeed he was hardly an obvious fit for CBS News when he signed on in 1963, as Adam Bernstein recalls in his Washington Post obit:

At the time, the so-called "Tiffany network" that had once been home to newsman Edward R. Murrow had the most prestigious pedigree. [Of course this is itself forgetting Murrow's rather various CBS broadcast career, including the celebrity gushfest Person to Person. -- Ed.] Mr. Wallace had a hard time getting anyone to take him seriously.

He later recalled: “The people at CBS said, ‘You mean to say that we’re going to have the fellow who’s measuring the quarter-inch filtered tip of the Parliament cigarettes? That's the same guy who's going to be measuring the missile gap? Not on CBS.' "

But Mr. Wallace said he was determined to change his image as a lightweight. He said he was motivated in large part by the accidental death, in 1962, of his teenage son Peter while hiking through Greece. The elder Wallace took a series of demanding assignments to prove his worth: a tour in Vietnam, on-air reporter for the "CBS Evening News" and questioner on the public-affairs show "Face the Nation."

Viewers who know CBS News only from its Village-friendly outlook of recent decades may wonder what standards Wallace could have been aspiring to when he joined the organization. It sure ain't what it once was, and 60 Minutes in particular ain't. It wouldn't be far off to suggest that the goal became to comfort the comfortable and further afflict the already-afflicted. The "scandals" it uncovers these days generally turn out to be affronts to the well-heeled and high-positioned, pillars of the Village elites and the status quo.

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Sure, Charlie Sheen is an easy target, but consider how well he's been rewarded for flaunting his lack of talent

The first of four of his own cartoons that The New Yorker's Bob Mankoff has personally charliesheenified

by Ken

Okay, it may be going too far to declare Charlie Sheen talentless.* Perhaps it would be more judicious to refer to the absence, in any of his work I've seen, of any talent beyond total lack of inhibition about self-exhibition. (If you're inclined to minimize this, think what it must be to be so shameless about exhibiting that particular self.) I confess that I've actually attended to some of his more astonishing remarks in this latest self-induced orgy of public scrutiny, possibly because -- another confession -- I actually watch Two and a Half Men (I sort of developed the habit a few seasons into the run).

FOOTNOTE: *I'm unequipped to account for Charlie's talent, or whatever it is, that seems to make him irresistible to large numbers of women. There may, of course, be talents known only to the parties of the first and second part, or possibly this can be accounted for by a surprisingly large number of women who do it, directly or indirectly, for pay (remember that his TV alter-ego, Charlie Harper, not only is unapologetic about his regular employment of hookers but seems to consider them one of life's most basic necessities), or appreciate Charlie's apparent willingness to spare no expense "to show a girl (and himself, of course) a good time."

Let's come back to that, though. Despite my own morbid curiosity, I doubt that I would have troubled to blog about Charlie except for this batch of self-mashed-up cartoons The New Yorker's Bob Mankoff has just unleashed on us. I've had previous occasion to peek at the blog of the magazine's cartoon editor (who of course is himself a longtime New Yorker cartoonist), but I have to say, I love what he's done this week.

March 3, 2011
CHARLIE SHEEN’S NEW GIG
Posted by Robert Mankoff

There’s a lot to be said for Charlie Sheen. Really. And by God, he’s saying it. But it got my own “tiger blood” up when I found out that the “pure gold” of his quotes were being mashed up with New Yorker cartoons in a way that was too random for my effete sensibility.

So I decided to put my tiger blood to good use. I figured, as Charlie is presently not working anywhere, he might as well appear in a few of my cartoons. And since, given his present state, he might have trouble learning my captions, I thought I’d let him speak in his own voice.

In fact, checking out that first link, I think what Matt Stopera has done at BuzzFeed, tacking Charlie Sheen quotes onto old New Yorker cartoons, is quite wonderful. But there's something special about having the actual cartoon auteur charliesheenify some of his own work, with the following results:


TO FINISH UP ON CHARLIE

In Charlie's story, every time you think, "There must be a limit," you're proved wrong. This week on network TV -- a network other than CBS, notably -- he introduced a stunned world to his "Angels," who are apparently all that remains of the "family" he's been claiming so vehemently to be protecting, now that his twin sons, not yet two years old, have been safely removed from his custody.

There's some sort of grim fascination, a fascination I can't begin to explain, in the worthlessness of Charlie Sheen's Two and a Half Men character Charlie Harper, who manages at the same time to be no more awful than his mooching brother Alan (Jon Cryer). I could fall back on the invariable delight of watching the amazing Holland Taylor (I don't know whether it's her skill as an actress or her ability to home in on scripts that she can dazzle in, but at this point in her career I would watch her do just about anything) as the mother whom both brothers tend to blame for everything, but she doesn't appear in anywhere near enough episodes to furnish much of an alibi. And while Conchata Ferrell is similarly wonderful as Charlie's housekeeper Berta, and is in most every episode, I can't imagine watching the show just for her.

Even as CBS and producer Chuck Lorre appear close to have reached the end of their rope with Charlie -- perhaps even have taken to fantasizing about seeing Charlie at the end of a rope -- it's also true that in his monomaniacal blitherings he's entirely correct when he claims to have made vast quantities of money for other people, including his network and his producer. Of course he's nuts if he thinks he has done or does that causes people to watch him, beyond just "putting it out there"; if it weren't for the people who created and continue to produce and write the show, nobody would watch Charlie. At the same time, without Charlie nobody would watch the show either.

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Daniel Schorr (1916-2010)

"Radio keeps me going": In 2008, at 91, Dan Schorr offered his predictably wise perspective on the state of the news business, and his own career, to WNYC's Leonard Lopate.

"'I consider my presence on the [Nixon] enemies list,' [Schorr] said in a 2009 interview with The Gazette of Montgomery County, Md., 'a greater tribute than the Emmys list.'”

-- from Robert D. Hershey Jr.'s New York Times obit
of Daniel Schorr, who died today at 93

by Ken

In the years when CBS News still mattered, when it still took both the news and itself seriously, Dan Schorr was a mainstay of the operation. And later, when he had to, he invented two new news careers for himself, first on the fledgling CNN, then on public radio.

His great ambition in life, Robert Hershey records in his NYT obit, had been to be a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, and during a three-day tryout in New York he won the editors' attention with a huge scoop on the project that turned out to be Lincoln Center. But the Times, he later found out, was concerned about a pile-up of Jewish bylines. After he returned to his old stomping ground of the Netherlands, his reporting on a major storm attracted the attention of CBS's legendary Edward R. Murrow, who brought him into the fold. His CBS News career got off to an auspicious start and had a pretty fine run (including three Emmys for his Watergate coverage), but came to a wrenching gutless-corporate end.

Mr. Schorr, a protégé of Edward R. Murrow at CBS News, initially made his mark at CBS as a foreign correspondent, most notably in the Soviet Union. He opened the network’s Moscow bureau in 1955 and became well enough acquainted with the Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev — whom he called “the most fascinating person I ever met” — to secure for “Face the Nation” the first television interview for which Khrushchev ever sat. (He had never even done one for Soviet television.) At the end of 1957 Mr. Schorr went home for the holidays and was denied readmission to the Soviet Union.

His 23-year career at CBS was cut short in 1976 when, in what Mr. Schorr later called “the most tumultuous experience of my career,” he obtained a copy of a suppressed House of Representatives committee report on highly dubious activities by the Central Intelligence Agency.

He showed a draft on television and discussed its contents, but when neither of CBS’s book subsidiaries was willing to publish the document, produced by the House Select Committee on Intelligence under Otis G. Pike, a New York Democrat, Mr. Schorr provided it — anonymously, he vainly hoped — to The Village Voice.

This led to threats requiring police protection, to investigations by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Congress, and to Mr. Schorr’s being relieved of reporting duty. Although editorial and public opinion subsequently swung in his favor and Mr. Schorr, who came to be seen as a beleaguered reporter defending a principle, became a popular speaker on the lecture circuit, what he called his “love-hate affair” with CBS News was ended.

A quarter-century later he mused: “Washed away by one controversial leak too many? Undone by a reporting style that proved indigestible to a network worried about affiliates and regulations? Unable to adapt myself to corporate tugs on the reins? Unwilling to exempt my own network from my investigative reporting?” His conclusion: “All of that, I guess.”

(Interviewed in 2008, Mr. Schorr still refused to identify his source for the Pike committee report.)

From that point he had no obvious path in the news business, and had to invent those new careers. He had help with the first one, being in on the founding of CNN with Ted Turner. Having gotten contractual commitments from Turner which theoretically protected the independence of his news judgment, Schorr managed a number of years of pretty productive coexistence. Still, it was Ted Turner.

Eventually, however, Mr. Schorr and Mr. Turner fell out over a CNN plan to team John Connally, the former Texas governor and Nixon Treasury secretary, with Mr. Schorr as commentators at the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas.

It was improper, Mr. Schorr said, to mix a politician with a journalist, and he invoked for the first time the 1979 agreement allowing him to veto assignments. The network asked him to drop that right in early 1985, and when he refused, he was told to take leave until his contract expired that May. Shortly thereafter he joined NPR as a commentator, a position he held until his death.

During those years, I got hooked on NPR's Saturday-morning Weekend Edition, in good part because of anchor Scott Simon, but also in good part for the weekly segment in which he surveyed the week's news with Dan Schorr. When the Sunday edition came into being, I flirted with it for a while, but it didn't have either Simon or Schorr, and in time I drifted away. Eventually I drifted away from the Saturday edition too, but that was after a lot of Saturdays shared with a trusted presence who'd earned a lifetime's worth of trust.

Fittingly, Hershey ends the NYT obit with what Schorr considered "one of his proudest accomplishments":

Mr. Schorr, who won three Emmys for his coverage of Watergate, long maintained that one of his proudest accomplishments was being included on President Nixon’s so-called enemies list as a result of that reporting.

“I consider my presence on the enemies list,” he said in a 2009 interview with The Gazette of Montgomery County, Md., “a greater tribute than the Emmys list.”

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