Roger Catlin | TV Eye

CBS Comedies Return; Laughs Don't

The first big block of scripted network shows returned to air Monday following the fallow period of repeats of the 100-day writers strike.

They were all the Monday night comedies on CBS. It’s the one night CBS puts on comedies, and it’s one of the few networks that bothers to even program a couple of hours of such shows, which used to be so dominant on TV.

By now, "The Big Bang Theory" has been put in the lead spot at 8 p.m., considering how well the freshman drama has been doing in the ratings. But judging from Monday’s new episode it seems that it hasn’t progressed much from its original premise – a couple of nerds living together and trying to impress the hot girl who lived next door. A lot of the comedy seemed built around the most crude elements, which only got worse as the night went on.

"How I Met Your Mother," which followed, stuck to a St. Patrick’s Day theme. But it’s also sticking to that odd format of a narrator telling his terminally bored kids how he and their mother met. After all this time, they’re still dropping clues. My theory now is that while the unseen narrator has met their mother, he was never their father. Or maybe I’m not watching enough. Anyway, the lead guy goes out bar hopping with Barney and they find women with big bottles of tequila and extremely deep navels. Guess I hadn’t been doing enough body shots to pick up on this advantage. Anyway, Ted finds anything amoral he does is rewarded until he loses his cell phone. I’m not sure I like anyone in this show any more. And as with "Big Bang" there wasn’t a single laugh for me at all.

Nor were there any in “Two and a Half Men” which by now, at 9 p.m., is practically all about sex. Two more odious brothers you couldn’t ask for than the two played by Charlie Sheen and Jon Cryer (Sheen is supposed to be a professional songwriter? A more joyless one was never seen). The studio audience shrieks as if they’ve been dosed with nitrous oxide, but still no laughs for me in the show or in the tedious Ben Stiller trailer for his summer film, whose premiere they promote as if it’s going to be actually something to see.

I don’t count "The New Adventures of Old Christine" among all these duds because it’s been new along this year (since it didn’t start until midseason). And the show's always been pretty funny. Julia Louis Dryfus is talented enough to put a smile on your face from the situations she’s in (tonight, trying to smoke pot for the first time). It gives me an idea – maybe the rest of the night would have been funnier that way.

Writers Return to Late Night

"Our writers are back and they are sexy!" Stephen Colbert said at the top of his show Wednesday. "Who wrote this?"

On his first show with writers officially back from the 10-day Writers Guild of America, the host of "the Colbert Report" fanned himself with a script and announced "I survived the writers' strike. Finally this morning I was able to shave my strike beard -- downtown."

The writers filed out to applause and got pencils one by one from the host (among them, oddly, Tiki Barber, Kevin Bacon and Mr. Met -- who knew?).

Earlier there was an exchange with Jon Stewart at the end of "The Daily Show."

"Nice to have the writers back, huh, my friend?" Stewart said.

"Yeah but now I got another strike to deal with," Colbert said. "The coffee-getters union went on strike this morning."

Why not get your own coffee? Stewart asked.

"Do I look like a scab?" Colbert replied.

Over on "The Tonight Show," Jay Leno was full of jokes about Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Roger Clemens. Leno tied the return of the writers with the failure of Paris Hilton's latest movie. One joke was about the new Clapper, which even this blog wrote about months ago.

When a joke went badly, he asked, "Are you sure the writers are back?"

The bookers hadn't quite caught up with the end of the strike. He had another animal handler as a guest. Russell Crowe was coming on tomorrow.

Jimmy Kimmel started his show with his sidekicks throwing confetti over the end of the strike. "Sit back and get ready for top notch professionally made comedy tonight. And I'll let you know when it kicks in."

"I'm just happy to get new episodes of 'Army Wives' back," he added.

Conan O'Brien noted the end of the strike on Wednesday's "Late Night" as well. "I just want to say personally it's great to have the back," he said. "In fact they wrote that."

the Max Weinberg Seven played "Welcome Back, Kotter" to welcome them.

And O'Brien played highlights of the show's 25 strike shows, including some Guitar Hero action, climbing to the cieling and overhearing the studio tour, playing rockabilly with the band, activating a zip line (to save Lincoln), a disco laser light show, putting the desk at the rear of the seats, having a rocket race and of course his rumble with Colbert and Stewart.

NBC's Return Plans

On the first day since the strike ended, NBC posted dates for the return of many of its series Wednesday.

"My Name is Earl" will lead the pack with its first post-strike episode April 3. The other Thursday night comedies, "30 Rock," "The Office" and "Scrubs" return a week later on April 10, when "ER" will also be back.

New episodes of "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" resume April 15; "Law & Order" returns April 23.

Looking further out, NBC announced it had picked up the freshman series "Chuck" and "Life" for the 2008-2009 season, as well as "Heroes." None of the three are expected to be back with new episodes this season.

Plans for other NBC shows are yet to be announced, a network press release said.

CBS Says: Back to Work!

The strike is over, shows are coming back, and CBS has a schedule for how the new episodes will roll out this spring, issued today.

Comedies return first, with "How I Met Your Mother," "The Big Bang Theory" and "Two and a Half Men" to show the first of nine expected new episode on March 17.

The first of eight episodes expected for "CSI: Miami" airs March 24; the first of five new episodes of "Cold Case" runs March 30.

April showers viewers with new episodes, starting April 2 when "Criminal Minds" and "CSI: NY" show the first of seven episodes planned for each title. "CSI" and "Without a Trace" begin of their six new episodes April 3. On April 4, "Ghost Whisperer" and "Numbers" run the first of six new episodes they'll make before the end of the season.

"NCIS" runs the first of seven expected new episodes April 8. The first of just four new episodes of "Moonlight" airs April 11. The comedy "Rules of Engagement" will return April 14 with the first of six expected new episodes.

"The Unit," "Cane" and "Shark" are on a previously announced hiatus to accommodate the launches of "Big Brother," "Jericho" and "Dexter," the network said.  But of them, only "Shark" is producing new episodes -- four of them -- for a return date to be determined.

Also, CBS will resume production of the midseason drama "Swingtown," which has yet to appear.

Mulling the Deal

At the purposely dressed down awards ceremony for the Writers Guild of America East in New York Saturday, talk turned naturally to the proposal presented hours earlier at a membership meeting at a Times Square hotel.

Leadership seemed to be pushing the newest deal, which many admitted was not the perfect deal, but good enough to justify being out on the picket lines three months, reports say. Its provisions, which provide payment for online running of shows for the first time, certainly wouldn’t have been something that networks would have voluntarily shared without the action.

And after the votes come in Sunday, there is a possibility writers will be back to work Monday, which means late night shows will benefit first (Conan O’Brien won’t have to spin his ring for entertainment any longer); then sitcoms could return by April. Dramas will take longer to return to air, and some shows may just wait for the fall season to continue.

And what of the stripped down WGA Awards that the deal so far overshadowed? Diablo Cody won best original screenplay for "Juno" and Joel and Ethan Coen won best adapted screenplay for "No Country for Old Men."

Among TV shows, "The Wire" won best drama, "30 Rock" best comedy and "Mad Men" best new series.

Of the awards for individual episodes, "The Sopranos" episode "The Second Coming" (in which A.J. commits suicide) won drama. The season finale of "The Office," titled "the Job," in which Michael has his failed job intereview in New York, won best comedy episode.

It was the Christmas 2006 episode of "The Simpsons," "Kill Gill Volumes 1 & 2" that won best animated episode.

"The Colbert Report" won best comedy/variety show including talk. It has been operating without writers during the last month of the strike.

Directors and Producers Agree

The settlement of the Directors Guild of America with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers after just five days of talks puts pressure on the writers guild to follow suit.

The tentative new agreement, hammered out even though the directors contract doesn't expire for months, provided for a "solid wage increases with no rollbacks" according to a guild press release. In addition, it offers "precedent-setting jurisdiction over new media and a doubling of the residuals rate."

Writers immediately were wary of the agreement, citing past inadequate agreements with the directors.

Guild president Michael Apted said the three year agreement involved a lot of give and take from both sides.

The writers' guild didn't immediately issue its own statement. But networks have been making do with a combination of reality shows and some imports from cable. The latest of them, "Nashville Star," going from USA network to NBC this summer, is both.

XOXO AWOL

"Gossip Girl" wasn't supposed to end its season the way it did Wednesday. It was just the last episode finished before the writers' strike halted production.

Still, there was some symmetry in the 13th season tying the season together up to now. It was about to end with another split between on and off best friends Blair Waldorf and Serena van der Woodsen, on the heels of another scandal that would send one of them away from their privileged upper East Side.

Once again it involved betrayal, social climbing and electronically-enhanced scandal-mongering.

No one is close to coming to an idea of who Gossip Girl actually is (and that's never really been part of the drama). The romance between Serena and Dan is moving along slowly (he told her he loves her). But Dan's dad Rufus is still awfully rusty when it comes to dating. Once the battle of blonde moms is over, now he's trying to date brunettes and messing it up.

Chuck and Nate are no longer best friends, owing to the scandal that's driving Blair away. And rather than a social event that ends in fisticuffs, there was a nocturnal dip in the school pool that got everybody in trouble.

The show got some authenticity from being shot in actual NYC locales, including the steps of the Met. But it wasn't authentic in one way: You couldn't see pickets. Starting next week, they rerun in earnest, starting with the pilot.

Late Night's Return: The Morning After

Having watched the returning late night shows back to back to back into the wee hours and slept (very briefly) on it, I was struck this morning by how the presence of writers or critical lack thereof seemed to make little difference in either the tone or content of the major shows.

Leno may have been jotting down and refining gags for eight weeks -- enough to fill a first night monologue before he turned to audience questions (“When ya comin’ to Daytona Beach?”).

Given the luxury of time, Conan O’Brien toyed with an idea he said he’s long had – dancing crazily while Max Weinberg 7 played, or showing what he does all day in his office (apparently, playing a lot of electric guitar and annoying his fellow staffers).

Letterman seemed to spend a few minutes chatting with an associate producer as if he hatched the idea for "Know Your Staff" not knowing if he’d go back to air with writers or not (the agreement was signed only Dec. 21).

It’s the kind of bit you’d do if you didn’t have material or guests, and he apparently had both.

Especially writers.

In addition to his own staff, his embarrassment of riches included the odd sight of writers who had been striking other late night shows as well. Tim Carvell and Steve Bodow of “the Daily Show,” Laura Krafft and Jay Katsir from “the Colbert Report” (both Comedy Central shows returning without writers Monday) and even Chris Albers from “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” joined Nora Ephron, Alan Zwiebel and other picketing writers in reading Top 10 entries, category: Demands of the Striking Writers.

(To be fair, Alber’s quip was “I don’t have a joke. I just want to remind everyone that we’re on strike, so none of us are responsible for this lame list”).

But from a bit that ended in an unfunny writers plea from Bill Sheff to an opening of high-kicking dancers holding picket signs (a troupe called the Eugene V. Debs, Letterman wittily added), the return show’s humor was at odds with the deadly serious cause at hand – just as it was on other shows.

And overall, if his show (and Craig Ferguson’s) did somewhat less than blow the writerless shows out of the water, it may have been because he was showing solidarity with the picket lines (“I won’t be fully funny until the strike ends!” he seemed to be the covenant).

Lots was made of Hilary Clinton’s taped intro for Letterman (Her scripted line: “Dave has been off the air for eight long weeks because of the writers strike. Tonight he’s back. Oh well, all good things come to an end”). But it looked like Nixon’s “sock it to me?” bit for “Laugh-In” and lasted only a bit longer.

Mike Huckabee’s appearance on “The Tonight Show” was more significant, possibly in a negative way for the candidate. He had to leave Iowa on the eve of the caucuses there to appear, and had to cross a picket line to do so. En route, he said he thought there had been a settlement.

Huckabee is one candidate who can at least trade jokes (he credited his success on the campaign to reminding voters of “the guy they work with rather than the guy who laid them off”).

Leno may have had him on a bit longer than usual to stretch the show out – his other guests were Emeril Lagasse and the rapper Chingy. But he also placed him in Kevin Eubanks’ band so he could play some electric bass meant to remind viewers of candidate Bill Clinton playing sax on “The Arsenio Hall Show” in 1992.

Leno may run out of jokes as the nights go on (Kimmel and Conan seem on the verge of running out already – though O’Brien is silly enough to keep the laughs coming on spur-of-the-moment physical reactions).

But a bigger issue may be guests.

So far all NBC seems to be coughing up for the lead spot are game show hosts – Bob Saget of “1 vs. 100” on Conan last night; Howie Mandel of "Deal or No Deal" on Leno tonight.

Even the musical guests may be suffering. Rappers may be blithely unfamiliar with the labor issues at hand (Lupe Fiasco said “Welcome back Dave” before his selection and that was it), but others at least at first seemed second-tier.

Kimmel's performance by Kid Rock was a recycled song from New Year's Rockin' Eve.

Conan offered rockabilly revivalist from the 70s, Robert Gordon, who has revived again, sounding a little wavery and looking more like Emeril Lagasse than his stick thin former self.

Attack of the Strike Beards

More than the serious talk about labor, more than the time killing ring-spinning, the first night of new shows for late night Wednesday showed barely a whisker's difference in one other aspect.

The strike beard.

David Letterman grew an inch long white beard that made him look like everything from Robert E. Lee to a Smith brother to a rabbi. And that was just the descriptions Robin Williams came up with in his first moments as first guest.

Letterman's own references were cattledrive cook, lost hiker and Kenny Rogers. He could afford such comparisions because his was the only show late night returning with writers.

Still, his show wasn't all that different than, say Conan O'Brien's, possibly because he also was wearing a strike beard upon his return.

"I know this looks fake," he said of his facial hair. "I did it to show solidarity with my writers and to prove I have some testosterone."

(His own comparison was to Young Kris Kringle from the animated "Santa Claus is Coming to Town").

There was time for someone in his band to sing a song to his strike beard as the camera came in for a close-up. His first guest, Bob Saget said, also in solidarity, "I grew a beard. It's just not visible now."

Along those lines "Late Late Show" host Craig Ferguson began his show with a fake foot-long beard in a bit that showed him just a week ago tending sheep back in Scotland.

"I grew a strike beard," Ferguson said in his return monologue (also courtesy of writers -- he works for Letterman's production company). "It got itchy so I had to shave it off. Then I had to grow it back on again. And that was just the first day. The next day I grew it on my face."

Jay Leno neither had a beard nor mentioned one in his return to the "Tonight" show. But he does have a very big chin, which his main guest Mike Huckabee mentioned in an old filmed bit accompanying the live appearance that took him away from Iowa the night before the caucuses.

Jimmy Kimmel also didn't grow a strike beard. But in his own solidarity, he didn't have a monologue either. And he showed an old comedy bit so writers would get some residuals anyway. He did have his Uncle Frank attempt to shave security guard Guillermo's beard, though, as part of his show that included Andy Dick as guest.

Gettinig a shave is something Johnny Carson famously did during the 1988 strike just to kill time. Killing time was part of many of the shows, with both Kimmel and O'Brien leafing through Christmas cards, and O'Brien also trying to break his own record for keeping his wedding ring spinning on his desk.

Leno let his audience ask questions, as did Letterman, though the latter was certainly scripted. Letterman seemed prepared to do a show without writers if necessary, and interviewed an associate producer in a segment called "Know Your Staff" much like the quiz segment called "Know Your Cuts of Meat."

Letterman had an A-list guest in WIlliams (rapper Lupe Fiasco also performed). But Ferguson had an unusual show in that it had no guests whatsoever. It's almost as if he were so anxious to talk to his audience (or use his writers), he spent his whole hour addressing them in various sketches. 

And while he didn't immediately set up his own barber's chair, Letterman did re-introduce an old segment first introduced during the 1988 writers strike -- and it took bringing back his old producer to do so. So here was "Hal Gurnee's Network Time Wasters" back for the first time in years, with a pair of oddball performers who fit in just perfectly between the recurring hula hoop girl Anna Jack and grinder girl Kiva Kahl, who both, come to think of it, must have been out of work for these past two months as well. And that really drove home the effects of the strike for me.

Dave's Big Advantage

The agreement Friday between Worldwide Pants production company and the Writers Guild of America is a significant one. It allows both "The Late Show with David Letterman" and "The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson," which it also produces to return to air Jan. 2 with writers.

The other late night shows returning Wednesday -- "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno," "Late Night with Conan O'Brien," "Jimmy Kimmel Live" -- will do so without writers.

Letterman was alone among late night hosts to be able to negotiate an interim agreement because he owns the Worldwide Pants production company. The agreement, which guild stewards were calling "a full binding agreement" had the very provisions studios rejected when talks were acrimoniously ended with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers three weeks ago.

Letterman was already funnier than Leno in my book. To have Letterman with writers vs. Leno without is hardly fair.

More than that, the Screen Actors Guild is urging its members to accept bookings on Letterman (and Ferguson) over shows that are going on without writers.

Of the other late night shows coming back without writers, "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report" return without to Comedy Central Jan. 7. The Saturday night "Talk Show with Spike Feresten" is back with a new episode on Fox Jan. 12.