TVSquad

At first I thought Jeremy Piven's story about how he got so sick from mercury poisoning he couldn't finish his Broadway stint doing Speed The Plow (an arbitrator ruled in Piven's favor last week) would be interesting and funny, but then it just went on. And on. And on. And on.

At one point, Piven talks about viewers changing channels, and he's probably right.

Even fish-based television shows aren't exempt from the reality show controversy parade.

The Discovery Channel's increasingly popular show The Deadliest Catch is getting some fire for some creative editing they did on the season premiere. They showed a dangerous storm (not sure if it was "perfect," but it was bad) in the Bering Sea, and the fight the crew had to keep the boat afloat and stay alive. Now comes word that the storm footage was from October, the flooding of the boat happened in September, and extra footage was shot to tie the scenes together to make it look like everything happened around the same time.

The Hollywood Reporter did some detective work and found the production outline for the episode, and things just don't add up. They've placed video of the episode on their web site. For the record, producers of the show say the outline was only an early draft and they don't do reenactments (though they also say that footage from different days is sometimes used).

[via Mediabistro]

In the 1980s, everyone was talking about the farm crisis. You heard about it on the news, celebrities came out to voice their support for farmers, and sometimes the topic would even make it into the scripts of some TV shows. It was the "Cause of the Week" so to speak.

Those of us who actually lived on a farm, however, had a perspective no one else had, no matter how many news specials they watched or magazine articles they read. It's one thing to know what's happening; it's another thing to experience it first hand.

(S02E12) This is an early review.

Bob Balaban plays Tom's father in this episode, and I must say he was the perfect choice. He and Tim Heidecker, who plays Tom, have the same kind of soft-spoken, halted delivery, and it seems perfectly natural they would be father and son, even if Walt doesn't seem to care much for Tom.

The episode opens at the airport with Tom waiting for his father's flight to arrive. We assume he's visiting his son, but actually it's just an eleven minute layover (which is, funny enough, also the length of the episode). Tom doesn't let his father's lack of time keep him from making a minute by minute itinerary, which includes a father/son embrace (tentative). Tom's father sells fish coolers called "Coldinizers" and he doesn't want to miss his flight, else he lose all his sales on the Eastern seaboard. Tom insists they have time to do everything on the list, however.