TVSquad

I've been waiting for Crash the TV series to materialize ever since I heard about it shortly after the movie premiered in May, 2005. The Starz/Lionsgate series will feature 13 episodes with a different cast of characters from the film.

Now I have even more reason to be excited, because Tom Sizemore has joined the series in a recurring role. He'll play Detective Adrian Cooper, whose unorthodox methods cause havoc when he investigates a police-involved shooting. Sizemore joins Dennis Hopper in the series, with Paul Haggis serving as executive producer.

I've had a major crush on Sizemore since he played Sgt. Vinnie Ventresca on China Beach during the 1989-1990 season. Sure, he's had some challenging times. According to his IMDB.com page, in February, 2005, he failed a court-ordered drug test after he was caught trying to use a prosthetic penis to fake the results. And that was the second time he was caught trying that.

Americans are utterly obsessed with celebrities ... particularly their lives away from the limelight. Numerous television "news" programs and magazines highlight stars doing normal things that many of us would do on a daily basis. So, it was only logical that reality series have been built around some of these personalities to highlight their time away from the camera.

Yet it didn't work out as was intended. Rather than showing that these personalities were normal people, they showed the viewers how messed up they, and their families, really were. In some of the earlier Celebreality programs, they even showed unknown weaknesses that fans never knew existed. Despite all of this, viewers have been tuning into these shows each and every week to watch ... just like they would if video of different train wrecks were aired each week.

This fan base has given many of these stars a second, third, or fourth chance at success -- even if their boat sailed a long time ago. Such is the case during the Reality Revolution, where even the most famous can receive fifteen more minutes of fame.

Hey, Brigitte here with TV Squad Daily. I'll be covering the TV stories I find interesting each day, Monday through Friday, in this video blog.

Today on TV Squad Daily:

• The petition to keep Paris Hilton out of jail isn't likely to do anything but make money from t-shirt and underwear sales.
  
• Tom Sizemore is in trouble for drugs, again.
  
• Lakisha will most likely say goodbye tonight on American Idol, and will Phil Stacey be shipped off to Iraq before the Idol tour?
  

The video's embedded below, or you can download the file directly (Quicktime required). You can also subscribe to this podcast via our feed.

For the past several months, cameras have been secretly recording the behind-the-scenes goings-on at The Jerry Springer Show for a new VH1 reality series. Tentatively-titled The Springer Hustle, the show focuses on the producers who bring all that messed-up humanity to the screen.

This raises all kinds of questions for me. Did you know that Jerry Springer still had a TV show? I thought he was busy running for office or something. More importantly, can you make a reality show about a show that pretends to examine reality and uses "real" people but is largely staged much in the way, say, professional wrestling is staged? And, since we all know that reality programming is also hyper-edited, written and sometimes staged, will my head explode when I try to decode what's real, what's fake, who's pre-op, who's post-op and who's my baby's daddy? I'm already confused.

Fortunately, this isn't VH1's only new offering. You can also expect to see Andrew Dice Clay and Tom Sizemore vehicles. So much to look forward to in 2007.