TVSquad

When I came upon Drew Carey at CBS's TCA party over the summer, he was tapping away on his iPhone. He was sending a tweet to one of the responders on one of his two Twitter feeds, and was generally having a ball. So I figured he was in a good mood to talk about the show he's most known for these days, The Price Is Right.

It was a season of change for Drew and the show; the prizes got more creative, Drew changed his look, and the show in general did a lot to break out of the mold of the Bob Barker years.

Of course, those changes didn't go unnoticed, as some of the show's more "devoted" fans took to sites like Golden-Road.net to disparage Drew and say the show was going downhill. There was even a minor controversy this past season, as a contestant made a suspiciously on-the-mark Showcase bid, and Drew's reaction to it was less than enthusiastic (for good reason, as he mentions in the interview).

You might think that after finally breaking through at the Daytime Emmys and winning the golden statuette in the category Outstanding Host(s), the folks at ABC's The View would be resting on their laurels. Not so. The View is shaking up their production effective immediately.

According to Bill Geddie, executive producer, they're going to try and make The View more interactive, which is code for using email and web cams and other newfangled Internet sort of things to reach out to the viewers.

As several of you have noticed, we had a decrease in the number of posts recently at TV Squad, and we apologize for any concern or confusion that resulted. Part of that slowdown stemmed from some behind-the-scenes issues, which have now been resolved. And part of it came about because Keith and I wanted to take some time to talk about the direction of the blog with our writers and with our hosts at AOL.

During those discussions, we thought about what people like the most about us: the comprehensive episode reviews and the funny, thoughtful commentary about the shows we love. Over time, the site has become very heavy on the former and light on the latter, and we decided that we need to get things back in balance.

Well, the constant changes in cast and directors so far has been comedic, that's for sure. The project is now on its third director after Bend it Like Beckham helmer Gurinder Chadha walked away, possibly leaving the project in the hands of Betty Thomas, who previously directed the bigscreen adaptation of The Brady Bunch.

Many big names were attached to the project, including John Travolta, Jennifer Garner, Meg Ryan, Luke Wilson, Jennifer Lopez and Shirley MacLaine. Travolta, set to play oil tycoon J.R. Ewing, is the only one who still remains.

Good gravy, that was bad.

After being rather impressed with Army Wives, I thought the next original offering from Lifetime, Side Order of Life, would offer something just as engaging and worthwhile, but instead I was given a full hour of cookie-cutter characters, lame dialogue and a plot I've already seen in about eight million other TV shows, movies and books.

Boy, MTV never lets a reality show die, do they? They've decided to bring Road Rules, which ran from 1995 to 2004, back to their lineup, but not without a few changes first.

First of all, this version will stick an all-star cast from previous installments in the RV and send them on a cross-country trip. But the big change is going to be that the show will shoot in real-time, instead of months in advance, and viewers will be able to vote out a cast member every week via online vote. The two "weakest" cast members will be voted on by the cast each week and they will face off on MTV's Overload broadband channel. Then viewers will vote for the one that gets eliminated, along with who will be their replacement in the RV (that's the confusing element to the story... I guess they need to replace the eliminated person or else the show would end pretty quickly).

The "real-time" element should be interesting. To be honest, I'm about 10 years too old for this show, which I stopped watching almost that long ago. But it'll be fun for the young'uns and the reality nuts out there.

[via Pop Candy]