An Appreciation: Ed McMahon (1923-2009)

Although he did other things in his 86 years, Ed McMahon, who died Tuesday in Los Angeles, will be remembered mostly as the man who sat next to Johnny Carson, except when more important celebrities came between them.

Notwithstanding the dozen years of hosting "Star Search," a role in the 1997 Tom Arnold sitcom "The Tom Show," a high-profile Cash4Gold ad during the last Super Bowl and all that knocking on people's doors in the name of American Family Publishers, McMahon was a professional sidekick, a less-than-equal partner in an enterprise of which he was nevertheless a vital part: Thinking of Johnny, one proceeds quickly and naturally to Ed, who, by dint of association, was almost as famous as his boss -- I say "almost" to include that fraction of the world that may have seen or heard of Carson but never watched his show.

It's easy to underestimate his accomplishment -- or even to wonder whether it should be called an accomplishment at all. We live in a nation of aspiring quarterbacks, pitchers, lead singers and presidents, where we are told to dream big and have it all. (The vice presidency of the United States is regarded as a rarefied form of failure.) But in a world where everyone is innately a star, what does it mean to settle for life as a mere moon?

Read the rest of Robert Lloyd's appreciation of Ed McMahon here.

Read the full obituary here.

Want 'Killer Hair'?

Should you desire to write detective fiction, you will want to give your detective some distinguishing decorative characteristic. Since all the plots have been written three times over already, it's how you dress them up that counts.

Will your hero/heroine be a clown detective, a gardener detective, a detective made of cheese? They say it's best to write what you know, which is why my detective would be a TV critic detective (possible titles: "Saturday Night Dead," "Mary Tyler Murder," "Beverly Hills 9021Ohmygod"), just as forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs made hers a forensic anthropologist -- her novels inspired the television series "Bones" -- and Ellen Byerrum, who has worked as a reporter in Washington, D.C., made hers a reporter in Washington, D.C.

Two novels from Byerrum's Crimes of Fashion series have been adapted by Lifetime for the small screen, which is the right-sized screen for them. The first, “Killer Hair,” premieres Sunday, and although it is less than perfect -- the mystery not especially gripping, the resolution almost arbitrary, the characters low on substance and sometimes sense -- it is nevertheless pretty consistently enjoyable. And it has the advantage over many Lifetime movies in that no one is terminally ill, unless you want to consider murder a kind of fatal condition.

Read the full review.

(Photo courtesy David Dolsen/Lifetime Movie)

Reviews: 'The Othersiders,' 'Brain Rush,' 'Destroy Build Destroy' and 'Survive This'

Cartoon Network's new reality shows, kid style, are variations on grown-up shows.

Cartoon Network premieres four new shows this week, none of them cartoons. These aren't the first CN shows to feature real people: There have been live-action "Ben 10" movies, based on the animated series, and the "Roger Rabbit"-style "Out of Jimmy's Head" in 2006. Indeed, the network's first real original production, "Space Ghost Coast to Coast," was cobbled together around interviews with living, breathing humans. (There is also a live-action "Scooby Doo" prequel slated for the fall.) And Adult Swim, CN's late-night alter ego, has the live-action "Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!" and "Saul of the Mole Men."

The new series are gathered together under the rubric CN Real, which is less a programming bloc than a sub-brand. (Two of the shows premiere tonight and two on Saturday.) As in the past, the current incursion of flesh and blood into the network's formerly fully 2-D Tooniverse has been met with dismay by (mostly adult) animation fans and CN purists -- I was about to write that it is a "hot topic of debate," but really there is no debate at all, just a collection of complementary assessments posted on various Internet message boards as to why this is a bad direction to take.

The point might be made that these shows -- by definition -- have not been created for that particular audience, but to serve younger, less particular CN viewers, and perhaps to steal a few new ones from Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. While any but the most juvenile cartoons are suitable for adults -- there is nothing guilty about the pleasure I get from "The Powerpuff Girls" -- most live-action teen shows are set up to mirror their audience.

Read entire review: Cartoon Network's new reality shows, kid style

-- Robert Lloyd

Photo: The teens in "The Othersiders" visit reportedly haunted places to assess whether unquiet spirits are there.  Credit: Peter "Hopper" Stone / Cartoon Network

Review: 'True Blood'

HBO's vampire dramedy “ True Blood” returns Sunday night for a second season of gore and guts and breasts and buttocks. The action may take place in the South, but the show itself is truly set in a place called Premium Cable.

Read the full story.

(Photo courtesy HBO)

Review: 'Top Chef Masters'

The knives are out -- but at least they're in nobody's back.

Reality television gets a lot of mileage out of bad behavior; framed as comedy or drama, strife is the fuel on which it runs. ("Coming up! Something awful!") Over the last week and a half, for instance, NBC has been making hay from the hash that narcissist-provocateurs Spencer and Heidi Pratt have made, or attempted to make, of "I'm a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!," its bungle-in-the-jungle survival contest. That the pair are trouble is what makes them valuable to the network, which has worked hard to keep them on board, even though the sensible thing, in "real life," would be to keep them away.

Like many other reality TV stars, the Pratts -- who got famous on "The Hills," MTV's semi-nonfictional version of "That Girl" -- inhabit a world where notoriety, indeed the mere luck to be noticed, passes for accomplishment. But there is another sort of reality television that celebrates actual excellence, although -- as in "Project Runway" and "Top Chef" -- it often surrounds that celebration with boasting, backbiting and interpersonal discord.

I am that perhaps odd duck who thinks that amity, cooperation and achievement at no one else's expense can be exciting to watch. Indeed, it seems to me that television, scripted and unscripted -- postscripted might be a better word -- is far too heavily invested in manufactured, or at least artificially enhanced, conflict and crisis. And so I find “Top Chef Masters,” a spinoff of "Top Chef" that premieres tonight on Bravo, a real mental vacation. A thing of pure delight, it takes all the ego out of the equation and leaves only the art.

Read the entire review.

-- Robert Lloyd

Photo: Tim Love, left, and Christopher Lee battle it out on the collegial “Top Chef Masters.”  Credit: Bravo

In IFC, 'F' also stands for fun

While television drama tends to concentrate on a few subjects (crime, disease, family dysfunction and combinations thereof, sometimes involving aliens and/or monsters), comedy can be about anything at all. This coming week, the Independent Film Channel, not adhering religiously to its name, offers three new unpredictable series, two British imports and one straight out of Brooklyn.

“Ideal,” one of the imports, premieres Sunday; the pun contained in its title is the one obvious thing in this strangely peopled but finely observed downbeat farce about a pot dealer and the people who pass in and out of his messy apartment. Huge and hugely disheveled actor-comedian Johnny Vegas ("Bleak House") stars as Moz, a man of large appetites but little ambition (and even less hygiene), a subsistence-level pusher who mostly recycles drugs confiscated from other dealers by his best friend, a police constable. (Like Mary- Louise Parker's character on "Weeds," he doesn't deal hard drugs or sell pot to kids, which gives him baseline acceptability.) The comedy of despair and dissolution comes more naturally to the British than to Americans somehow -- it might have something to do with the Blitz or our own fear of being contaminated by squalor. From the two episodes available for review, it's difficult to know what sort of show it means to be -- there are realistic domestic details, yet there is also a man in a mouse mask -- but it has finished five seasons in Britain, and a little research reveals it will be surprisingly eventful for a series about people who spend a lot of time stoned.

Read the full story here.

Review: 'I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here' (updated)

"I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here" -- or, as I like to think of it, "Get Me a Celebrity, I’m Out of Here" -- is NBC’s belated sequel to an ABC series from 2003 which was itself based on a British show whose ninth edition will air later this year, and which has also fathered France’s "Je suis une celebrite, sortez-moi de la!" and Germany’s "Ich bin ein Star – Holt mich hier raus!" Like "Survivor" it drops people into a harsh environment in which they are forced to do tricks and win friends to stay in the game; and like "Big Brother" it watches them cohabit in something like real time; and like any show with the word "celebrity" in the title, it features mildly famous people who have nothing more pressing to do.

Most are not new to reality shows; a few owe the whole of their fame to them. The 11 players airlifted into the Costa Rican jungle several days back include actors Stephen Baldwin and Lou Diamond Phillips; former pro wrestler Torrie Wilson; former pro basketball player John Salley; Patricia Blagojevich (wife of and stand-in for impeached Illinois Gov. Rod); the comedy team known as Frangela; quirky "American Idol" contestant Sanjaya Malakar; and Janice Dickinson of Oxygen’s "The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency," and a veteran of the British "Celebrity" -- a fact not mentioned here, perhaps to bolster the impression that this is an original idea. (It may account for her calm, and for some jungle knowledge about rats and campfires.)

None of those contestants are as beholden to reality television as the now-departed Spencer and Heidi (Montag) Pratt, from MTV’s "The Hills," collectively known as Speidi. Spencer Pratt, an alienating force who strives mightily to live up to his surname, may be the Most Hated Man in Pop Culture right now, to judge by the comments appended to any online article or video clip that features him. On Monday night’s opener, he didn’t promise amity: "I’m not the kind of person that has friends," he said, declaring that he would take things to "the next level of supervillain that they think I am."

Jay Leno leaves 'Tonight' much as he found it

There have been 11 U.S. presidents since 1954 but only four hosts of "The Tonight Show." The latest, Jay Leno, finished his 17-year run Friday night; his last guest was scheduled to be his successor, Conan O'Brien, himself coming off 16 years as the host of the post-"Tonight" "Late Night." Change comes glacially to late-night television: This is a day whose coming was foretold some five years ago, when O'Brien was promised the job, though its most notable upshot -- Leno's intra-network move to NBC prime time -- was a late innovation.

"The Tonight Show" was an American institution when Leno took it over, defined and refined by Johnny Carson over three decades and the model for most of its own competition. The only network job to rival hosting it is anchoring the evening news. If Leno rarely approached his predecessor's heights, if he did not advance or improve or in any significant way re-imagine the brand, he did not destroy it either. He was a caretaker-host and after a slow start against David Letterman's "Late Show" on CBS -- competition created by NBC's decision to give "Tonight" to Leno instead of moving Letterman down from 12:30 -- he pulled ahead in the ratings and maintained the lead.

One's allegiance to Leno or Letterman can be seen as a variation on the old Beatles versus Stones debate: the former safe and mainstream; the latter a little dangerous, working along the unpredictable margins. (It's a glib dichotomy, but useful.) Where Leno sums up an older, more fulsome show-business tradition, Letterman is the godfather to the dry and ironic younger generations of comedy. Drew Barrymore would never have flashed Leno as she did Letterman; Madonna would not have tried her experiment in four-letter words on "The Tonight Show." At the same time, it's hard to imagine Letterman giving Roberto Benigni a ride on his shoulders, as Leno did, or getting into a food fight with Mel Gibson.

Review: 'HGTV $250,000 Challenge'

Premiering Sunday night on HGTV, the four-week “$250,000 Challenge” takes the home makeover that is the foundation of that network's programming and puts it in the hands of amateurs. Five couples from the same street redesign the rooms of their house, with a team eliminated at the end of each episode and a cash prize at the end.

Judging by the catalogs that arrive abundantly at my house, and quite possibly yours, I would say this show represents the very quintessence of the American dream. Can you say "accent wall"? I thought you could.

A rotating cast of personalities from other HGTV series is there to help, advise and judge. Host Drew Lachey (Nick's younger brother and former boy-bandmate, and a "Dancing With the Stars" champ) pitches in as well, lending a hand to each couple in turn, as needed. Every challenge has a special requirement: Kim Myles (“Myles of Style”) wants an item from the old room repurposed; David Bromstad, from “Color Splash,” requires an original work of art for the new bedroom.

Read more: Review: 'HGTV $250,000 Challenge'

-- Robert Lloyd

Photo by Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Time

Review: 'New World Order' on Independent Film Channel

“New World Order,” which premieres tonight on the Independent Film Channel, is a film about people battling with phantoms. They are volunteers in an "information war" who see as clearly, as John saw his four Apocalyptic horsemen and seven trumpeting angels, that 9/11 was an "inside job," that the military-industrial complex killed Kennedy, and that an international "power elite" is plotting to enslave us all, excepting for those it will kill outright.

They are hard to pigeonhole politically, these conspiracy adepts, trusting neither the "socialist Democrats" nor the "fascist Republicans" -- Ron Paul seems to be their man, if anyone is -- yet sounding as often like '60s leftist radicals as right-wing militiamen. They take the 1st Amendment as seriously as any card-carrying member of the ACLU, styling themselves muckrakers and speakers of truth to power, often through a bullhorn.

The man with the biggest bullhorn is Alex Jones, an Austin, Texas-based syndicated radio host and maker of such films as "Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement" (116 five-star reviews on Amazon.com) and "Martial Law 9-11: The Rise of the Police State," and the point through which all the strands connect in this unexpectedly affecting, nonjudgmental documentary by Luke Meyer and Andrew Neel. Meyer and Neel don't get in the way of their subjects; there are no talking heads or title cards to contradict their worldview, or even

Read more: Review: 'New World Order' on Independent Film Channel

-- Robert Lloyd

Photo: Texas-based radio host Alex Jones.  Credit: IFC