The Mature Thing To Do [Simpsons Clip With Celebrity Cartoonists]

via videosift.com

3 Minutes And 4 Seconds Of Elmo And Celebrity Ricky Gervais

Looks Like The Internet Came Through With The Mad Men Animated GIF I Wanted.

"Huh, Collateral Damage"

George Clooney has made a defecation out of one of my all-time-favorite nonfiction books. (Thanks, jerk. Really: Thanks. Thanks especially for the ham-fisted, Big Lebowski stunt casting.)

Beep Boop* seems enthusiastic about this turkey; though Videogum is more in my camp—but: Why trust us? Why not view the trailer and a clip or two from the actual Jon Ronson documentary and decide for yourself?

[Note: This last clip is of Jim Channon, the man Jeff Bridges is playing in the Clooney adaptation. Do you not notice how much more amazing and wildly implausible and frankly more compelling the real guy is?! Ahhhhhhhhrrrrrrrggggggghhhhh!!!1!!]

*My 2003-era blog idols are in their twilight.

In this video: By re-showing a clip The Daily Show took out of context, Bill O'Reilly proves that The Daily Show had judiciously re-packaged the clip in a pretty accurate and funny new context. Then some CNN pundits ignore that fact and say inane things.

Limit Your Exposure [To Mad Men Season 3 Spoilers]

Here, Alan Sepinwall is unsuccessful at getting show creator Matthew Weiner to admit why he set the new season in 1963: to stage an elaborate Dallas homage around the Kennedy assassination. [Draper's Season 3 Episode 1 lie about being an accountant investigating Jimmy Hoffa spins off the rails! He's kept secrets before, but can he keep state secrets?]

Did you know Baby Boomers are stupid, spoiled and narcissistic? Here, Frank Rich argues why the zeitgeist chooses the Mad Men season premiere over the Woodstock anniversary. [Hint: Black Camelot]

Here we learn "Pete’s big issue is that all the metrics for his manhood are fucked."

Kids In The Hall Season 1 Notes

By now, I think most everyone is aware of how good the troupe is at playing rich female characters. Something I don't hear enough people say, though, is how good Scott Thompson is at making fun of heterosexual machismo. This bit is admittedly broad, but he sells it well. I mean, hey, I LOL'd:

Conan Father's Day Bit

Perfectly executed.

[UPDATE] Horror Stories From SNL in 1995

A choice excerpt, because I don't feel like I have sold this piece well yet. Skip to the end, if you don't like Roseanne, but do like stories about Norm MacDonald punching people:

Lately, the extracurricular action in the writers’ room has been more colorful than a lot of the writing.

The show hosted by Sarah Jessica Parker, in November, included a song contrasting love’s higher and lower impulses. Michael McKean sang chastely to Parker, plunking an acoustic guitar; then Sandler cranked up his electric guitar to underscore sophomoric lines like “I’m gonna give ya the wood!”

During rewrites of the piece, Kightlinger jokingly suggested to the group that the song be made even more explicit—and found herself the target of a crude barrage. “A couple of them turned on her,” says a close friend of Kightlinger’s, “with these really vicious, mean sexual things. . . . She’s one of the strongest people I know. Very tough to faze. And it made her cry.”

Kightlinger, who wrote for Roseanne last year, has been reciprocally shocked by the thin skin of her new colleagues. “I’ve had to pare down my sarcasm big-time,” she says, adding that she now feels “really positive” about SNL. “In the writers’ room at Roseanne, you could shit on each other and everybody would laugh. But here, it’s like, ‘Wait a second—that’s a piece I’ve worked on, dah, dah, dah.’ It gets personal in a hurry.”

In December, Ian Maxtone-Graham, a self-described anti-smoking zealot, complained about Norm MacDonald’s lighting up in the writers’ room. MacDonald shrugged it off. So Maxtone-Graham extinguished the cigarette by squirting MacDonald in the face with a water pistol. MacDonald punched Maxtone-Graham in the head, knocking him to the floor.

I Did An Interview With Peep Show Co-creator Jesse Armstrong

It's up at the website for the PRI-syndicated radio show, The Sound Of Young America. Here's the opening blurb:

Jesse Armstrong is one of the co-creators and writers of the BAFTA-winning BBC sitcom Peep Show. (A BAFTA is like a British Emmy.) Now entering its sixth series, with a US version in development at Spike TV, Peep Show is a funny, but cringe-inducing, depiction of the lives of two twenty-something flat mates, played by past "The Sound of Young America" guest David Mitchell and comedy partner Robert Webb. No less an authority on UK comedy than Ricky Gervais called it "The only British thing that I was really blown away by in the last few years."

Armstrong has also written for other acclaimed television series, including the sketch series That Mitchell & Web Look and the political satire The Thick of It.

[Hey, TSOYA visitors: Wh's'happening?]

The Babysitters' Club Theme Song

Summary: Giggling holiday consumerism. Headbands in vibrant colors. A reaffirmation of the reliability of friends, specifically girlfriends who share membership in a childcare guild.

Well, That Jim Cramer / Jon Stewart Thing Happened

For anyone looking for the take-away message from the Jon Stewart / Jim Cramer interview this is it:

It was uncomfortable and somewhat breathtaking to watch. What I hope people get from this interview, though, is not just that CNBC is a really shitty journalistic institution. This is how ALL cable news works (and most websites, and some newspapers). Access is so difficult to find that journalists end up being mouthpieces for different points of view rather than arriving at some kind of truth. I have no idea how this problem gets solved, but until it does it seems to me that cable news does more harm than good.

[Via Some Gawker Commenter]

Cramer On Cramer: I Say My Show Works Basically Because I Pull Stock Picks Out Of My Ass

From the May 28, 2007 issue of New York Magazine, Jim Cramer on his show in comparison to his recent sparring partners:

Look at Mad Money in contrast to The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, two programs that ought to be able to sue for libel after being included in the same sentence with Mad Money. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are both very smart, they’re both entertaining, and they both appeal to the kids. But at the end of the day, even they are heavily produced. On Mad Money, we cannot be produced because we are pretty much at the whim of whoever decides to phone in and ask me a question. And even the parts of the show I control are a lot more off the cuff than you would expect or even believe.

[This next part is technically earlier in the article.]

Forget Real World or Survivor—all these reality-TV shows go only part of the way because they’re so heavily produced. I have an hour-and-a-half tape delay. I say whatever pops into my head, and we keep it in the show even if it makes me look like an unsophisticated moron, a way too sophisticated know-it-all, or the worst: when I come off as a Marxist-Leninist, even though I’m a Trotskyite at heart (an easy mistake to make given my close resemblance to Lenin). On some level, the show is dedicated to the proposition that 98 percent of my education, or at least the parts my parents paid for, was not irrelevant, or at least the Western-civ stuff, along with that Shakespeare course, because it lets me confuse the bard with C.R. Bard, the medical-supplies company.

Mercurial? Counter-intuitive? Unapologetically unreliable?

On an unrelated note, the Lenin portrait on his set was one of the things I liked about Jim Cramer years ago:

I Want This To Get Ugly

If you've been following the recent Jim Cramer / Jon Stewart feud, you're probably already aware that Cramer will be appearing on The Daily Show Thursday for the title bout.

Now, up until this point, Stewart has mostly hit three honest and unassailable points:

1. By a luxurious margin, neither CNBC nor Jim Cramer live up to their marketing slogans.
2. Their failure to do so makes them at least as dumb as Rick Santelli's "losers" who took on mortgages they couldn't afford.
3. Like Stewart's last famous cable news target, Crossfire, many of CNBC's shows have titles (Squawk Box, Mad Money, Fast Money) that betray a serious contempt for the viewers' intelligence, while actually attempting to convey a smirking, insouciant camaraderie with the audience.
   

There's a good chance Cramer's appearance will be a gentle ribbing on par with Bill O'Reilly's appearance. However, it would be really great if Stewart and the team ambushed Cramer on the long circulating accusations of his illegal activity and market manipulation.

Here's one example of what I'd like to hear come up, taken from former Columbia Journalism Review editor Mark Mitchell's long expose on a still developing short-selling scandal:

Not long before [Jim] Cramer announced his SEC subpoenas, Rocker sold all of his shares in TheStreet.com. Cramer sold around $2 million of his own shares. If Cramer knew about the SEC investigation before he sold his shares, which was almost certainly the case, he was trading on insider information - another jailable offense.

But Cramer don’t know nothin’ about nothin’. And Herb thinks the SEC investigation is an outrage. So Herb and Cramer have commandeered CNBC. They are live on CNBC. Herb has jabbered something about a conspiracy - a conspiracy to get Herb.

And now Cramer is going to show us something.

He’s pulled out a big, red magic marker. Veins are popping, rope-like, from his bald cranium. And he’s snarling. Cramer is actually snarling while he uses the big red magic marker to scribble something on a piece of paper.

He holds the paper up to the camera.

It’s...it’s his government subpoena...Cramer has vandalized his government subpoena! On live TV... in big red letters...

It says, "BULL!"

[This and more via Daily Kos diarist TocqueDeville]

Newsweek's "The Hills"/"The City" Parody "The District" Is Way, Way Better Than It Has Any Right To Be

It's also (as my high school aged brother pointed out) a surprisingly comprehensive recap if you haven't been following presbo's first 100 days.

Episode 1:



Episode 2:

This Is A Great Video Blog

Someone I Know Was On The Colbert Report

This is semi-old news in the world of my acquaintances, but I just thought I'd post Jon Golbe's November 3rd, 2008 appearance on The Colbert Report. This will probably be the last time (for a while) I'll get to use the "Election 08" tag on this blog:

Sitcom Filmed In IKEA During Store Hours

Q: Is this trailer for Guy Ben-Ner's family sitcom—using busy Ikea showroom floors as a set—any less jarring than the traditional three-camera sitcom (the ones with no fourth wall and a raucous studio audience)?



(It's a rhetorical question; found via Cabinet)

Sterling Cooper 2008 AD: Parallel Universe Alert

Out of character, the cast of AMC's The Hidden Persuaders looka like 'dis:


[via Subtlety in Excess]