tca press tour

Culture-Wrecking Duo Gene Simmons and Mark Burnett Team Up Again For ‘Jingles’

8:35AM Defamer Hollywood | Half the stories on this sluggish midsummer news day seem to concern the same bad idea at CBS: Jingles, the Mark Burnett-produced product placement platform reality series squaring songwriters off against each other in the pursuit of… the perfect ad jingle. We can’t make this up, folks, and even if we could we probably wouldn’t want to — especially not the part in which the newsworthiest elements of the show are its judges: A kerfuffle-plagued, ex-Wal-Mart marketing guru and — seriously, we’re too exhausted/sad/Dark Knighted-out to fuck with you — Gene Simmons: Simmons will be joined by an “advisory panel”€ that include Madison Avenue gurus Linda Kaplan Thaler and Julie Roehm. But Simmons will be the final authority on the show who decides which contestants are eliminated each week. More »

Seth MacFarlane’s Reign Of Offensiveness Now Includes AIDS Jokes About Karl Rove

9:10AM Defamer Hollywood | Kudos today to James Hibberd, the Hollywood Reporter TV blogger who is perhaps the only reason we have any clue (or rather, care to have any clue) about the horrors unfolding presently at the Television Critics Association summer press tour. Apparently the Florence Henderson/Ed Asner days are over, with the one-two punch of confirmed buddies Karl Rove and Seth MacFarlane taking over Monday as the off-colour star tandem to beat. More »

It’s Time: Kill the TCA Press Tour

9:00AM Defamer Hollywood | As far as circles of hell go, we’ve already established you can’t really do much worse than the Television Critics Association semi-annual press tours — the gaseous summer version of which is feeding the palms in Beverly Hills as we speak. But it’s not just the bloggers and bitter ideologues who have ruined the bed-in between networks, stars and the writers who love them (until the expense account runs out, anyway); we’re learning more today about why the TCA tour may have bottomed out earlier than predicted, featuring an opening cavalcade of virtually uncoverable has-beens and hypocrites who don’t bode well for the future of, well, anything. From the WaPo: