TVSquad

You know, one of the great/sad things about satire is that sometimes it's almost too close to real life. Take this Onion headline:

CBS To Release Own Version Of NBC's The Office

Funny, yes, but given a television landscape riddled with unoriginal concepts, the idea of one network doing it's own version of another network's show (which, in turn, is based on another show) doesn't seem that unrealistic.

Anyone who's heard The Onion Radio News knows that The Onion's ingenious brand of fake print news doesn't always translate well to a verbal spoken medium. The format is pitch-perfect on the page but, when you listen to it, the stories' scripted nature make them come across more like a comedy sketch and less like a news story.

With the folks at The Onion starting a 24-hour online fake news network called The Onion News Network, or ONN, the same problem occurs. The Onion's president, Sean Mills, told Variety, with tongue apparently planted firmly in cheek, that ONN is not trying to be like The Daily Show or "Weekend Update" on SNL. "Those are parody shows, and this is serious news," said Mills. "There's no studio audience, and no one's in on the joke. What we are trying to create is a broadcast-quality newscast on the Internet."

One of the saddest changes in the television landscape has been the disappearance of the theme song. They're really not that important to the people who create TV shows now (or the networks who want to get more commercials in). Lost has just a single note as their theme song, ER has changed and shortened their theme song, Jericho has static, and Heroes doesn't have a theme song or credits either.

Luckily, the shows that still have theme songs also have opening credits. Shows like The Office and Dexter all have theme songs and opening credits. They're classic TV openings. Of course, it's nothing like years gone by, where almost all shows had theme song and opening credits. The Onion has picked 22 that they feel fit their shows perfectly. I don't know if that is the same as "best opening sequences," but the choices are interesting, quirky, a little maddening, and they left out a few, as I'm sure you'll agree.

God bless The Onion. I haven't read it in a while, but whenever I go back to it, the fine folks there never fail to give me a good belly laugh. In the current issue, "columnist" Artie Mayer laments the forgotten early days of his favorite show in an essay entitled "Studio 60 Was Better When It First Came Out".

If you read through the essay, you can tell what argument they're mocking here: the age-old argument that Saturday Night Live was better when it first came on the air. But I like how it was mocked here; Mayer (a made-up name, by the way) decries how the show has slid downhill from its premiere episode from four weeks ago.

"In Studio 60's heyday, they would do this thing where Judd (Hirsch) would come out before the opening credits and deliver this long, angry monologue about the current state of network television. I used to sit in front of the TV, just waiting for him to unleash his famous catchphrase, 'It's not going to be a very good show tonight.' But they haven't done that for a while," he writes. He also laments how they keep using the same ten characters in every show and how the episodes all have the same structure. Funny stuff.

Interesting piece by Noel Murray over at The Onion's AV Club. He calls Hell's Kitchen entertaining, but "one of the least transparent of the competitive reality shows." He argues that we always see the personal lives of the contestants on shows like Survivor and Project Runway, but that the players on Hell's Kitchen seem to have no life before or after the show.

But Hell's Kitchen comes from that weird extra-dimensional Fox TV Reality realm, where contestants have no apparent life before or after taping begins-aside from the inevitable glimpse of family members during the finale-and even the game itself seems completely stage-managed. I know Gordon Ramsay's a real dude-I've watched his terrific BBC series Kitchen Nightmares-but I've rarely been convinced that that any of the show's competing chefs have any real interest in cooking for a living, or that their "customers" are anything more than Fox employees and Hollywood extras. (I did see last season's runner-up Ralph on Iron Chef America, though who knows what happened to Michael, who in some kind of shady back-room deal took an apprenticeship with Ramsay over his own restaurant.)

Readers, do you agree?