Funny blog entry by the Seattle Post- Intelligencer's "TV Gal", Melanie McFarland: she has come up with a metric called the "Ming-Na Measure". Now, this is not a measure of a show's chances for success (or more likely, failure) merely by Ming-Na's presence on it, though her track record outside of ER isn't stellar. Apparently, the Ming-Na Measure gagues the potential length of a show's run by how the actress reacts during the press conference for the program held at the TCA press tour.For instance, her consternation at critics' questions about how her new show, Fox's Vanished, is similar to another new pilot, NBC's Kidnapped, tells McFarland that the show probably won't last a month. Given how similarly McFarland said she reacted at the press tour conference for her last colossal failure, last year's NBC fertility clinic drama Inconceivable, chances are the critic's right on the money with this one.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
7-26-2006 @ 1:25PM
bsimmons said...
Isn't there a similar metric for Ted McGinley appearing on a show and that's show's imminent demise?
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7-26-2006 @ 1:51PM
corbett said...
What's a fertility critic?
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7-26-2006 @ 5:03PM
Joel Keller said...
What do you mean, Corbett?
Actually, thanks for pointing that out. I fixed it.
Reply
8-15-2006 @ 12:47PM
J said...
How hateful to make one poor actress the butt of such an article. She sits there, knowing little more of the final disposition of the plot than anybody else on earth, making herself available for questions, and one "critic" -- simply to smart off when an executive producer won't tell her the solution of his mystery before the first episode has aired -- decides to devise a cutesy narrative of PR failure and put thoughts into her head. The pack mentality of the journalists in Pasadena, the fact that they all wrote exactly the same silly story about how serials are an affront to the public, their shallowness, the fact that so many of the covered the events as if the events were the shows, their boorishness toward their hosts, their whining about the drinks or the venues or the air conditioning -- in the apparent belief that their readers give a damn -- is a disgrace to journalism. I've never been so attentive to TV journalism as I have been this year, which is why I'm only just realizing that it is the absolute nadir of entertainment coverage and criticism. They review ongoing shows as if they were completed artifacts, whose endgames they already know, or ought to, and they criticize the elements as if they won't be able to serve purposes that the writers cannot even divine. Either they pretend an Olympian knowledge of the shows' destinies that they can't possibly possess, or they bitch that they don't possess it, or they just make a blow up doll out of Ming-Na and throw darts at her. Preposterous and odious.
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