TVSquad

This is a public service announcement to Jason Alexander.

Life after Seinfeld has been really tough for you has it? I mean not as tough as Michael Richards who should follow Isaiah Washington into "pottymouth rehab", but you haven't exactly parlayed your existence into other gigs like Julia Louis-Dreyfus in The New Adventures of Old Christine. Our enthusiasm for the dimwitted loveable man has been curbed towards Larry David, who helped you become a star. Even the virtually unknown Seinfeld writer Spike Feresten has been able to translate writing his soup nazi episode into his own talk show.

All you have to work with is your short lived marriage to Britney Spears. Oh wait. That wasn't you either.

Is this the "ultimate collectible" or just kinda gross?

Someone has put on ebay a piece of gum that Jerry Seinfeld supposedly chewed. I don't really know how you'd check something like that. The owner (owner?) of the gum says that he and a friend were walking near Central Park West about a year ago, spoke to Seinfeld, and then Seinfeld threw something shiny into a trash can. It was foil wrapper, and inside was the gum. So they took it.

If you win the gum (bids are at $6.99 right now), you also get a photo of Seinfeld and Michael Richards taken on the Seinfeld set, and a picture of the trash can.

But as the ebay auction says, it's "NOT INTENDED FOR CONSUMPTION." Something tells me that if the show was still on the air, this would make a good episode.

[via TV Tattle]

When I was a bright, young journalism student back at Rutgers University (Go Scarlet Knights!) I remember a mantra that my professors bore into our brains each and every week: check your sources. If you verify your facts with at least two or three other sources you are good to go. Apparently, the news editors over at WJZ, Baltimore's CBS affiliate, missed that day in class. And, because they did they ended up in an extremely embarrassing situation.

Earlier this week they reported that Michael Richards appeared in blackface at a roast honoring Whoopi Goldberg. They reported this as breaking news not once, but twice, and attributed the story to the website Dateline:Hollywood. Well, it seems that the news department over at WJZ didn't realize that the site satirizes Hollywood. Needless to say, they were red-faced about the entire blackface situation (place groans here) and they ran a brief correction during their 11 p.m. newscast. What they should have really done was fired the staff member(s) who discovered that information and didn't read further about Britney's private areas wanting to talk to the press. They may have gotten and idea that it wasn't a legitimate news site then.

Oh, and someone's internal alarm should have gone off when they saw that story, since it is so familiar to something that happened back in 1993. That's when Ted Danson, who was dating Whoopi Goldberg at the time, appeared in blackface at a Friar's Club roast. Really, it wasn't that long ago, newsies.

The Mayor of Television (hey, they had an election for Mayor of Television? Why didn't anyone tell us??) has invented the Law and Order Fantasy League Game. Basically, you guess which "ripped from the headlines" story one of the Law and Order shows (the original, Criminal Intent, and Special Victims Unit) is going to ripoff write an homage to. Will it be Michael Richards? The O.J. Simpson book controversy?

But you can't just guess which show is going to do which plot and be done with it. You have to tweak it a little bit, so it's "original" (cough cough). So, maybe a former sitcom actor says some nasty racial remarks, only this time it's not at a comedy club, it's at a private party. Or maybe a former pro baseball star (not a football star! accused of killing his parents (not his ex-wife and her friend!) decides to create a web site (not publish a book!) showing pics of the murder scene and how he might have done it.

The Mayor's idea for a Michael Richards-inspired story is more elaborate than mine, and would fit the L&O world nicely.

[via TV Tattle]

One forgotten victim in this whole "Michael Richards goes nuts and screams racist remarks" controversy just might be Kenny Kramer, the real-life guy who was the inspiration for the Cosmo Kramer character on Seinfeld. While it's great to have the fake Kramer be associated with the real Kramer during good times, it can be sort of disconcerting if people start to associate the real Kramer with the fake one when things are bad.

Kramer (the real one) is upset that news outlets such as The Drudge Report and Michael Savage are saying "Kramer's a racist." Personally, I don't see how the two could possibly be confused. I mean, to be honest, do people really even think of the real Kramer that much? I don't think the news outlet's are saying "Kramer's a racist" to confuse anyone, and I don't think it's misleading. They're using the last name because it's the name of one of the most famous (and beloved) characters in TV history.

Richards went on Jesse Jackson's radio show over the weekend to explain himself, apologize, and to begin the "healing." In a related story, the character of Kramer will now be edited out of all the Seinfeld episodes he appears in.

• Have you checked out Trivial TV? It's a great site about, well, TV of course. But it has an incredible search engine for TV schedules. Type in the day, month, and year and you can see the TV network schedules for that night! Very cool.
• Paul Davidson has two TV-related posts up at his blog this week. One is Prison Break: The Drinking Game, and the other is about Battlestar Galactica and Lucy Lawless' fingernail.
• Ken Levine has some thoughts on the O.J. book/TV special (written before they were canceled).
• Entertainment Weekly's PopWatch blog says that John Stamos has pumped so much life into ER that the show just might be renewed for a 15th season.
• A TV Guide reader tells Matt Roush that the reason why Jericho is a hit is because "it's Lost for Republicans."

If you missed Michael Richards' appearance on Letterman's show last night after his racist tirade at a comedy club in West Hollywood, CBS' Late Show Web site has the video, which you can see here.

Setting aside Richards' racial slurs aside for a moment, watching the video of his onstage meltdown made me think of the kind of heated exchanges people get into where one becomes so enraged they reach deep into their reserves for the ultimate atomic bomb of an insult, the one word or phrase they can say that will completely flatten the person who is attacking them, and in Richard's case his racist comments . During his appearance on Letterman's show, Richards acknowledged that he lost his temper, and it seems fairly obvious to me that whatever self-censoring mechanism he had was overrode by his need to take down the people who were heckling him.