TVSquad

That sound you hear is the planet dying, just a little bit.

The syndicated talk shows (and I use that term very, very loosely) Jerry Springer and Maury have been renewed through the 2010 season. Yes, that's right, for three more seasons. Springer will start its 17th season this fall and Maury its 10th.

That means we'll have three more glorious seasons of actors ordinary citizens throwing chairs at each other and wrestling and three more intriguing years of morons ordinary citizens taking paternity tests to see if they're the father of a woman's baby.

Maury Povich and Connie Chung are giving back to their community in Montana by launching an online newspaper, The Flathead Beacon.

It sounds like one of the locations on Lost ("Jack, you have to lead everyone to the flathead beacon or we'll never be rescued!), but The Flathead Beacon is a new daily online newspaper that Povich and Chung have recently launched. It promises to be really focused on life and business in Flathead Valley. In addition to the online edtion, there will be a weekly print edition too.

This all sounds great, especially in this age where newspapers are dying. Let's just hope that Povich doesn't eventually change the newspapers focus to cheating husbands, fights, and paternity tests.

[via Romenesko]

In today's Philadelphia Inquirer, three female media figures talk to writer Gail Shister about the high expectations on Katie Couric, who is (altogether now) the first solo female weeknight anchor in network history. All three experts think that people are expecting Couric to turn things around quickly, mainly because of her historic ascension to the CBS Evening News anchor chair. But things don't usually work that way.

One of the experts interviewed was Connie Chung, who knows about this issue more than most; she spent two largely tension-filled years of the mid-nineties co-anchoring the CBS news with Dan Rather. "All this takes an enormous amount of time," she told Shister. "TV viewing rarely changes dramatically, whereas programmers do. I think Katie's holding her own nicely." She goes on to say that experts should stop constantly judging Couric.

I tend to agree with Connie. Yes, Couric's ratings aren't good (in fact, the article states, the November ratings were slightly lower than they were when Bob Schieffer was anchor). But she should be given room to find her legs, no pun intended. She did a pretty nice job on Election Night, which bodes well for her ability to cover breaking stories down the road.

I remember the first night of Connie Chung's highly touted CNN show a few years ago. The one that lasted about 3 minutes, like most of Chung's shows do. She had Jon Stewart on as a guest, and she said to him - in all seriousness and with a straight face - that he should consider being a network news anchor. The look on Stewart's face was priceless. Was she serious? In fact, if I remember correctly, Stewart couldn't even hide his shock, asking, "are you serious?" She was clueless, ill at ease, and embarrassing.

That came to mind after watching Chung's performance on the last episode of her dreadful MSNBC show with husband/sleazemonger Maury Povich. Now she's telling everyone (including Keith Olbermann last night) that it was a joke! She was just kidding!

Um, Connie? No shit it was a joke. No one in their right mind has thought otherwise. Everyone thinks it was just weird.

I've been writing for years that Connie Chung is a terrible newsperson. So I'm hoping that this caberet act will finally make producers and other news execs finally slap their heads and say, "don't hire this woman for the news." Maybe she can join hubby Maury on his show. Maybe she can sing during commercial breaks, or run paternity results back and forth to the lab for Povich.

Jon Stewart started off with some joke about auctions. It was a reference to an eBay comment from the pre-show warm-up, so the audience was pretty excited to hear it. I suppose it was nice that he began with a light joke because what came next was absolutely horrifying. They rolled a clip of Connie Chung's farewell from Weekends with Maury and Ohmigod What Have They Done with Connie Chung?! It was... disturbing, to say the least. If you really feel like watching the mess that is Chung rolling around on a piano, YouTube has video. The pianist looked too busy feigning enjoyment to actually play the piano.

Okay, show of hands from those people who are absolutely, totally surprised that Weekends with Maury and Connie is being canceled by MSNBC. No one, huh? Well, that's because you are a such a smart audience.

In a move that everyone saw coming from several miles away, except perhaps Maury Povich and Connie Chung, the cable news network has canceled the show, which premiered on January 7th of this year to much fanfare. After the premiere, the audience never re-materialized, despite the fact that the show aired twice on both Saturdays and Sundays. In addition, Povich was slapped with a sexual harassment suit from a producer of his syndicated talk show, which probably didn't help his chances of renewal over at MSNBC.

The last Weekends with Maury and Connie will air this upcoming Saturday at 10am. On Sunday, with plenty of free time on his hands, Maury will begin his task of making sure every single man and boy has a DNA test to prove that he is the father of their own child.

No, you haven't tuned into the alternate universe version of TV Squad. What you are seeing here is true blue. According to Extra, Rosie O'Donnell has been named as the replacement for Meredith Riviera on ABC's The View. Meredith is replacing Katie Couric on NBC's Today show when Katie moves to anchor the CBS Evening News this summer. Rosie was on the short list of candidates that included Connie Chung, Patricia Heaton from Everybody Loves Raymond and current CNN American Morning anchor Soledad O'Brien.

ABC will make the official announcement on Friday, April 28th. From 1996-2001 O'Donnell hosted her own syndicated daytime talk show that was a critical and popular success. She is currently executive producer of The Big Gay Show, a comedy sketch show that will appear on the Logo network.

[via Zap2It -- thanks Anthony!]

A producer on Maury Povich's daytime talk show has filed a $100 million lawsuit against him, NBC Universal and other staff members on the show. The court papers say that not only was she forced to watch porno movies, suffer sexual remarks, and expose her body in undercover assignments, she was also forced to endure the details of another staff member's affair with Povich.

The defendants deny all charges. The woman says she is in therapy because of what happened to her. Wow, just add some screaming and a blood test, and it's like an episode of the show.

I'm so glad that last night Mad TV did a takeoff on Weekends With Maury and Connie (Bobby Lee as Connie - ha!). This has got to be the worst show on television. At least Wife Swap has kids you might feel sorry for.

This show so badly wants to be The Daily Show it's embarrassing (Daily Show co-creator Lizz Winstead is the executive producer). It wants to take current events and politics and give them an irreverent spin, while also tackling some serious issues with serious interviews. But the result is horrifying. Maury Povich gave up his membership card many years ago, when he started his sleazefest morning show, and Connie Chung continues to be the most laughable, incompetent newsperson since Ted Baxter. I still cringe when I think about her first CNN show a several years back, when she had Jon Stewart on and seriously told him he could be a major network news anchor. Stewart was stunned she was serious, as was all of America.

I also hate how at the beginning of the show, one of them actually says "Welcome To Weekends With Maury and Connie," 10 seconds after the announcer has already mentioned the title twice. Couldn't they just say "welcome to the show," instead of referring to themselves like that?

This is a show that could actually work - maybe even with a husband and wife team - but they have to get rid of Povich and Chung and retool it.

The new, young faces of World News Tonight debut this evening on ABC. Five months after Peter Jennings' death from lung cancer, Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff will co-host the nightly newscast. They are the first network anchor team since Dan Rather and Connie Chung shared the desk at CBS in the 1990s. But, don't expect to see them sharing the desk very often. Vargas says it's not going to be two anchors sharing 22 minutes of news, rather, one of them will most likely be reporting anchoring from the field while the other reads the rest of the news from the desk. In fact, tonight's debut of the new format has Vargas at the anchor desk and Woodruff off in Iran. I imagine this is what the anchoring-from-the-field schtick is going to be like: Vargas and Woodruff sharing different "in-depth" or "special" reports about issues rather than day-to-day news events. The purpose of Woodruff's visit to Iran tonight is to help bring better understanding to Americans about a very powerful country that has been on the Bush Administration's radar ever since it was included in the "axis of evil".

Vargas and Woodruff take over the #2-rated newscast in the nation, with Brian Williams and NBC still on top. CBS has yet to decide what it will do with its open anchor position and there are still whispers that Katie Couric is in contention.