Thursday, 01/29/04

Speaking of people whose last names have Cs and Rs and Ls, former Daily Show correspondent Steve Carell seems to have been signed to play David Brent in NBC's forthcoming catastrophic Americanization of the brilliant BBC sitcom The Office.

The story says NBC is still trying to get Ricky Gervais, the original British star, to reprise his role in the American version. If true, this is NBC being even more fantastically clueless than usual. Gervais co-created and co-wrote the original series as well as starring in it, and he had the power to pull the plug over the BBC's objections after the second season of just six episodes each.

Assuming the American version survives longer than Coupling, the most recent BBC gem that NBC bought and butchered, the American "Office" will have exhausted Gervais' scripts by around Christmas. At that point the show is powerfully likely to tank, and if the quality can't be maintained, Gervais won't have the clout to walk away again. Why should he put his face on what looks like an inevitable, high-profile failure, when he's already getting paid for the US rights and to serve as a script consultant? How do American TV executives get to be such rubes?

[update: The Futon Critic says that I'm wrong, and that the Americanized Office will not be a verbatim copy of the BBC series.] 10:54PM «

Once or twice I year I am obliged by circumstances to dig up Bucket's Quest for Nirvana, a fine Jon Carroll column from 1998 about his idiosyncratic cat. Since the Chronicle's recent redesign, Carroll has not only been cut back to three days a week from five, but he's lost his headlines. One just has to start reading on faith, never knowing where a given column is going to end up. In the future, finding a specific column from this period with the Chronicle's headline-centric search engine is going to be unreasonably difficult. 10:46PM «

Friday, 01/23/04

Gruber and Amy up and had a baby last week.

It's easy to poke fun when some medical drama wraps up a delivery scene with a three-week-old, perfectly clean infant, but I forget that the alternative is sort of intimidating. Congratulations to the happy couple, not least for their intrepid documentation. 10:19AM «

Wednesday, 01/14/04

Speaking of Geoff Nunberg, I realized last month and have neglected to mention that he maintains a web site and includes transcripts of most of his Fresh Air pieces, and other writings. The man is a treasure. Coincidentally, he has an American Prospect article available called "The L-Word", which is exactly the name of the Showtime series which prompted this digression, except that Nunberg and Showtime are not talking about the same word. 05:21PM «

My housemates don't watch much TV, but I decided that Curb Your Enthusiasm and the last gasp of Sex & The City justified footing an HBO bill by myself. Comcast paternalistically ignored my request for the bare-bones "HBO Digital" package and silently subscribed me to every non-porn channel in existence, from China's CCTV to Bloomberg to Trio.

When I called Comcast to inquire, I was told that owing to a promotion, the smorgasboard is the cheapest option going until April 14. Were I to force them to give me the just-plain-HBO package I asked for by name, I'd pay more until then. So, for three months I will receive an amazing bounty of Spanish-language sports networks, and every movie channel I've ever heard of. My deadlines and productivity apparently did not factor into my decision to save money.

One of those movie channels, Showtime, has a new series starting up next week, with Pam Grier, about lesbians living in Los Angeles. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's review is engagingly hyperliterate -- she reads like Fresh Air's linguist correspondent Geoff Nunberg -- and I learned the word "interpellate," which means to pester a government official with a relevant question. I do not fully grasp Sedgwick's usage in context, but I'll take the word. 05:08PM «

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