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TV Big Shot

It's game week at TTOTD.

But, today's little Thing is a pointer to TV Big Shot---it's like Fantasy Football for TV Nerds. You buy shows, create a mini network and see how they do in the ratings. (BTW, I'm doing really well in the Fantasy Football league I was coerced into joining, who knew?) So, I bought some shows. I balanced cheap shows like Kitchen Confidential and Reaper which may pay off benefits in moderate ratings for a low price (Isn't that the modern TV programmers modis operandi? That explains the glut of reality shows.) with high profile shows like Private Practice and Ugly Betty. We'll see how it goes.


10m


One show I picked is a drama I screened a few months ago, Dirty Sexy Money. I think this show might be big and have at least one big season. It's a big old-time soap with an okay mystery at the center, a great cast, fast pacing, clever writing and more edge-pushing than most soaps. There's really only one likable character, Peter Krause as the family lawyer, Nick George. As you've probably gathered from the promos, Krause is running around getting the evil, rich spoiled family out of trouble. The great thing about Krause, as he was on Six Feet Under, is he can be both a sympathetic and jerk character in the same scene. If he was a genuinely good guy, you'd be mad at him for putting up with the craziness. That's the other good part about the show, almost no one else is a moral, good person. It's a show of highly motivated, good looking Larry Davids without the apologies. Fortunately, one of the benefits of a highly capitalistic society is that seeing rich people suffer is almost a mechanism of the zeitgeist. In that way, Dirty Sexy Money almost fulfills a social mandate. Yeah, evil rich people is a cliche, but clever, spoiled, whiney, well-acted rich people transcends. The twist is that all these spoiled kids have their political, religious (a entitled New Yawk social climbing Minister) and talent-based jobs paid for by Daddy Evilbucks (Donald Sutherland in a great scene-chewing role). And it's by the people who brought us Arrested Development.

It's a good show. I put the show on my team. So, it'll probably get cancelled.

A quick mini-review: Pushing Daisies is a very pretty, cute show about a dark topic that could at any minute devolve into preciousness. Check it out, give it three episodes.