TVSquad

Okay, I know this isn't really an early look, since the show premieres tonight, but my neighborhood's cable box experienced what the cable company referred to as an unexpected reset, a term which essentially means "No internet for Varun."

However, I still love you guys enough to make some use of the pilot for Anchorwoman Fox sent me. Maybe some people who have never heard of this show -- i.e. most of you -- will decide to watch it.

Anchorwoman is a scripted/reality hybrid series that takes a busty fashion model and places her in a small town news station as an evening news anchor. Okay, so far so good.

The model is Lauren Jones, it is alright that you haven't heard of her. She was a Barker beauty on The Price is Right and a wrestler/diva for WWE: Smackdown. The station is a CBS affiliate (why is this show on Fox?) in my hometown of Tyler, Texas.

I was worried that the show being shot in my hometown would bias my opinion, but the show pretty much did an accurate portrayal of Tyler. They tried to make Tyler, the largest growing city in Texas, seem a little more country than it actually is, but to be fair Tyler really is very conservative and a little hick-ish -- myself excluded.

Although the comedy is scripted, Lauren Jones' job is not. She actually did perform on the news while she was in Tyler, and did a pretty good job of it. In the pilot she was inept as inept can be, but I am sure the point of the series is to watch her grow.

The first episode does a good job of casting allies and villains. There is the reluctant boss Dan Delgado who believes Lauren has what it takes to make the last place news station the reigning champ. On the evil side we have Annalisa Petraglia, the current lead anchor and producer of the evening news. The semi-conceited little lady despises what Jones will do to her "journalistic standards" and unwarrantably bad mouths her the entire episode.

The comedy and editing is a little sloppy, but the premise is interesting enough to make me want to see the second episode. This series will quickly reveal whether it is simply an interesting story for Good Morning America (see below) or it is a show with enough meat to be worth 30-minutes of weekly devotion.