Roger Catlin | TV Eye

The Britney Ban

The Associated Press got a little attention last year when it imposed a weeklong ban of news of Paris Hilton, the heiress socialite people were so sick of reading about.

Time for the wire service (which came under a little attack at Saturday’s debate) to impose a new ban: On the alleged "news" of Britney Spears.

Unless she releases a new album or goes on tour, how about not reporting on her domestic disputes or bouts of health? How about that, huh?

If just those things were criteria for news substance, there’d be about 10,000 other stories about similarly unlucky women each day.

Except that this unlucky woman conducts her sad business under the glare of what looks to be a growing squad of invasive cameras, who flash and film more incessantly than ever, if the tape of her hospitalization that looks like a lightning storm is any indication.

I saw it in spite of trying to avoid all Britney “news” myself, that's how pervasive this obsession is.

In Lieu of a List

I've successfully avoided crafting any Top 10 lists this year for the first time in eons.

The lists, we all know, exist not so much to put a year in context as to fill space during the slowest news weeks.

And I've put up with enough of those fake lists all year that make up long TV countdown specials on TV Land ("100 Greatest TV Icons"), network TV ("100 Greatest Movies," "25 Greatest Grammy Moments") and especially VH1 ("Greatest songs of the 80s," "25 Greatest Celebrity Hookups" and on and on).

The more fanciful of these year end lists have had to do with celebrity trainwrecks -- celebrities whose actions have apparently appalled the news media so much that they couldn't help but report on them all year long. This is deeply disingenuous stuff. The idea that there are more celebrity crises in 2007 than any other year was only because everything they did was covered in such a frenzied way -- causing in some cases the very crises.

The drinking and drying out habits of Lindsay Lohan would seem to naturally lose interest as her movies get worse. Not so. Britney Spears maybe really hoped paparazzi would quit hanging out when she shaved her head; she only got them to glom on tighter. I don't want to get all "Leave Britney Alone" here, but the reason she ran over three people's feet is because they were all paparazzi who either wouldn't get out of the way of her car, or were blinding her with flashes or both. They should just back out of the way.

When all is said in done, the death of Benazir Bhutto will get less round-the-clock coverage than Anna Nicole Smith's did.

And it's not because celebrities have become train wrecks -- the news media has. 

Blue Black Eye

The statue of Noah Webster is back. It’s been gone for more than a year from the front of our town's main library, where it stood oddly for a half century, looking like an alien in its big almond head, weird cloak and menacing extra-long finger, long since broken off.

The main fun fact about the statue is that it’s an early work by the guy who went on to design a much bigger and just as bizarre sculpture – Crazy Horse – which lures tourists to its ever ongoing building site not far from Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. With Webster he was still clearly mastering the form.

At any rate, the statue was gone for a year not due to the usual cause of missing statues – college pranks – but because it was being spiffed up and restored (the finger is back!) just as it was being protected from the warzone of construction that led to the huge invasive megacomplex that’s been named to tie into one of Webster’s accomplishments, the Blue Back speller.

So instead of standing as a beacon to further scholars – heck, the library is still closed, not to reopen until 2008 – he’s back as an unintentional shill for overbuilt commerce. No wonder his head seems bowed even further. Blue Black Square is open.

Not So Phenomenal

I've seen a lot of performers die in live shows, but a couple of them did for our entertainment tonight on a very special Halloween edition of "Phenomenon."

The showdown for mentalists is a little mental itself, and it had the power to make "Bionic Woman" disappear for a night.

The guy who made himself dead freaked out Raven, who let out a scream and ran from the guy after he willed his heart to stop beating, again for our entertainment.

Wow, kind of makes you wish you were still being interrupted by trick or treaters, since this is what qualifies as entertainment on All Hallow's Eve. And what passes for a mentalist is someone apparently who can guess what somebody's going to say, having already written it and locked it in a box, or in one case having tattooed it on your shoulder a month earlier.

Still, the guy who feigned death got generally kind word from the two judges, Criss Angel and Uri Geller, who were generally kind of nice to everyone, at least until one guy came up claiming to channeling some dead guy (again to Raven, having the worst luck of the three "celebs" there to help). He thrashed and looked like he was in pain, so only the dead guy could tell him that Raven was hiding a small metal truck. Criss Angel pooh-poohed the charade and offered him a million bucks if he could say what was written on a piece of paper in his pocket. They even looked like they were going to fight before a commercial break intervened.

As for the poor celebrity helper, if she's ever asked to participate on "Phenomenon" again, you don't need Poe to quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

Cow Flop

West Hartford Center is already a mess of traffic, what with the building of the mega complex Blue Back Square and the attendant construction on seemingly every abutting street.

But now there is also the cow parade, that collection of fancifully painted herd that brings another few thousands people choking the streets of the center.

It’s only been four years since the last cow parade was here. It seemed whimsical at the time, dozens of lifesize cow sculptures done up in fanciful designs. Except for the ones that were straight ads, there were more than a few with authentic artistic intent.

It’s hard to get mad at it all, right?

Children are delighted, thousands of dollars are made for charity and some dude in town gets rich, rich, rich.

It bills itself as “the largest public art event in the world.” And despite that exaggeration, it really has very little to do with art at all.

Dust to Dusty

The latest casualty among the nation’s TV critics is the reigning dean of the profession, Dusty Saunders of the Denver Post, who took the buyout offered there.

It’s a tough time for everybody in newspapers, an industry in a tailspin in part because owners are driving readers here online where there isn’t a fraction of the ads (but thanks for being here anyway).

But TV critics seem especially endangered of late. Neal Justin of Minneapolis Star Tribune lost his beat in the insane mass reshuffling there; Mark McGuire in Albany will move to cover sports, Bill Goodykoontz Arizona has moved to a more nebulous job covering pop culture at the Arizona Republic.

Like most of us, Dusty began his career doing actual news at the paper, except in his case it was about the time TV was just coming to the Mile High City.

In his farewell column, he writes of chatting up a guy named Johnny Carson a bit after he had taken the “Tonight” show job and tells a few more tales of his celebrity encounters, including a tennis match against Bill Cosby that sounds right out of “I Spy.”

For the industry, he helped found the TV Critics Association which brings order and dignity to the twice annual presentations by the networks which are junkets no more. He remained a presence on tour, continuing to ask tough questions and able to see through the sales pitches of network execs better than most of us.

We gave Dusty a joke prize for winning Dean of TV Critics in the alt-TCA Awards last summer voted by his peers. We should have given him something better.

Tinseltown Toy Takeover

Let’s say you didn’t care a whit about Spider-Man 3.

Then you wouldn’t be interested in the sale items at Toys R Us, which include a Spider-Man 3 action figure, a Spider-Man 3 talking command Spiderman, a Spider-Man 3 computer game, a Spider-Man 3 red action suit, a Spider-Man 3 mega tent, Spider-Man 3 ooze action figures, Spider-Man 3 mega bloks set, Spider-Man 3 monster truck, Spider-Man 3 spider web copter, Spider-Man 3 bump ‘n go vehicle, Spider-Man 3 bike, Spider-Man 3 trike, Spider-Man 3 ride-on, Spider-Man 3 action attack vehicle, Spider-Man 3 sandstorm playset, Spider-Man 3 Spi-dog, Spider-Man 3 puzzle, and even Spider-Man 3 versions of Monopoly and Sorry.

The commercial overkill can put you in a black Spider-Man mood.

Birkhead Revisited

Larry Birkhead, in his tousled hair and rather empty look, comes off as the biggest celebrity-related nonentitiy since Kato Kaelin.

Like him, nobody knows much about him, yet he’s in every headline, more famous than the secretary of state on shows like “Inside Edition” and “Entertainment Tonight” – which have replaced local news shows in some sorry markets.

And there’s something about that name – Larry! – that makes me think Dannielynn will roll her eyes once she’s old enough to get a load of biological papa, too.

He brings to mind no less than Larry Fortensky – who may well be a Birkhead grandpa or distant uncle with the same blank look, blonde wash and stunned blank appearance that comes with slamming up against celebrity spotlight at 80 miles an hour.

(Fortensky, may I remind you, was the man-hunk that Liz Taylor hooked up with in rehab back when she was 59. He became her eighth husband  – yes, we had our gossip tinderkegs back then too).

Why else is Larry funny?

Well it probably goes back to one Mr. Fine, the Bozo-haired non-Howard among the Three Stooges. And Birkhead would look just as silly had he been named Curly or Moe (or Shemp) (or Curly Joe).

Larry Harmon was the guy who bought the rights to Bozo the clown and, for a time, the Three Stooges, too. Larry Sanders was the name of the paranoid talk show host so well embodied by Garry Shandling, who has just issued a fussy CD boxed set of the influential show.

But what about that other sitcom, just as iconic in its way: “Hello Larry,” the 1979 “Diff’rent Strokes” spinoff starring McLean Stevenson (and Joey Travolta), the very picture of an anonymous sitcom.

Birkhead’s rich! rich! rich! and from the looks of him will probably burn through his baby daughter’s dough pretty quick. Stepping into the role as Mr. Megabucks at the end of this tawdry tragedy (for all the fuss, just another bad celeb overdose), Birkenhead is to Anna Nicole, as Anna Nicole was to her elderly billionaire husband – eager young beneficiary.

And if once he starts to need work and is handed the same kind of roles as Kaelin got, (in “Celebrity Boot Camp,” “Dorm Daze 2” and “Cyborg 3: The Recycler”), well, we can’t wait.

A New Emphasis at Blockbuster

Back when I actually used to go to Blockbuster, I knew they made a big deal out of never ever stocking X rated or NR movies to protect people from themselves.

The video business must be changing since I’ve just seen an ad for the Unrated version of "Black X-Mas” –- “with more gore than ever before,” the announcer breathlessly promises.

The tag line is: “Rent it exclusively at Blockbuster.”

So not only is the unrated gore-fest allowed now at Blockbuster, the company made a special deal so it is the only place gore fans could get it.

Regarding Senor Slant

Dread was about the only feeling I got when I started seeing billboards atop the building extolling the mysterious Senor Slant, extolling a new publication, ostensibly from my same company, called CT Slant.

Oh great: At a time when too many people already assume a bias in their mainstream press, we’re going to accentuate it with a name like Slant?

And if it this were the long discussed, extended hand to Hartford’s Spanish-speaking community didn’t the little plastic man in the mustache and Panama hat accompanying the ad seem a little clichéd if not stereotyped?

There was no internal tipoff of this new publication, of course. Nothing in the intranet site or via e-mail. God forbid we’d know anything more than anybody driving by on I-84.

But I finally saw a copy today and figured out what it was.