Yakety-Yak Attack
Talk shows are the cockroaches of TV: no matter how many you kill, there’s always some pesky new ones to take their place. Next month Martin Short, Queen Latifah and radio psychologist Joy Browne will launch their own shows despite recent talk casualties like Howie Mandel and sagging ratings for Rosie, Jerry and Roseanne. Maya Angelou, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, Martin Luther King III and even former porn star Traci Lords are all reportedly in negotiations to join the gabfest. Why push into such loquacious territory? “I have all these people who slop makeup on me and make me look adorable,” says Dr. Browne. So that’s what motivated Howie.
It’s All a Plot
“X-Files” star David Duchovny doesn’t just play a conspiracy theorist on TV. Now he’s suing 20th Century Fox, parent company of the network that broadcasts his hit show. The star, who plays an FBI agent obsessed with paranoid plots, claims the company has cheated him out of a reported $25 million in profit sharing by giving its own stations cut-rate deals for the show. He also says Fox conspired with series producer and creator Chris Carter–who’s not named as a defendant in the lawsuit– to cover up the deal. Ladies and gentle-men of the jury, the truth is out there.
The Skinny on Carnie
Unlike the patient, there was a lot less to Carnie Wilson’s online stomach stapling than met the eye. The Web site that broadcast the live operation, www.adoctorinyourhouse.com, was so overloaded by curiosity seekers that thousands of people couldn’t access it. Not that it mattered. The grainy, shadowy video made the patient look more like an angry cloud formation. In fact, viewers never actually saw Carnie’s procedure. While a camera showed doctors hovering in her operating room, the surgery shots were recorded footage of another patient spliced into the “live” broadcast. “Carnie didn’t want it to be about her internal organs,” says a Web-site spokesman. Fat chance.
