TVSquad

Curb Your Enthusiasm reruns are coming to basic cable. First they will be shown on the TV Guide Channel next year (doesn't everybody get that channel? I thought it was just a guide to what's on television. They have shows?) and then TV Land in 2013. Any event that brings Larry David's sense of humor to the masses can only be a good thing (Who had the idea for the humor in awkward situations first, Larry or Ricky Gervais?).

Mind you, the show's language is somewhat racy for basic cable. There will be some bleeping here and there. At least there's no prevalent nudity in any episode that I recall. There is some adult subject matter, but nothing basic cable hasn't seen before. Hey, if The Sopranos can make it to basic cable then Larry David should have no problem.

Given Susie Essman's vocabulary on the series, she may have every third word bleeped. That could possibly make her lines even funnier.

So Conan O'Brien takes over The Tonight Show tonight, and I was wondering, what are you going to watch tonight? Conan? Letterman? Nightline? Something else?

I'm going to assume (if I may be so bold) that a lot of people are going to be watching Conan tonight. Not just old fans of Late Night or even fans of The Tonight Show. I bet there will be a lot of David Letterman fans watching and maybe even people who don't regularly watch late night television. Tonight is an institution and a lot of TV fans are going to be interested in seeing what exactly Conan is going to do on his first night.

I'm going to predict here and now that he'll thank Jay Leno (unlike Leno, who didn't thank Johnny Carson on his first show). So what are you going to watch?

You missed all of the Saturday Night Live Weekend Update specials that aired over the last three Thursdays, huh? And, you refuse to watch them online over your 128KB phone line connection. And, you didn't want to watch the clips on one of the many web-based video channels and blogs (including this one) because you are one of "those" people who need to see the show in its entirety. So, you're pissed and ready to take out the first person who asks 'Hey, did you watch the SNL special?'.

Fret not, psychotic one! You'll have one more chance to see all of the SNL specials at one time this very evening. Starting at 9:30, NBC will be airing all three episodes at once. This will give you the chance to see Tina Fey as Sarah Palin, Will Ferrell making an appearance as the current President Bush and Andy Samberg throwing up all over himself . If you can stay awake past your local news you'll get to see a brand-new episode of SNL at its normal time with host Jon Hamm (Mad Men) and musical guest Coldplay.

Now you have your second chance. If you miss the SNL specials now and you forget to record them on your DVR then you have no one to blame but yourself. No pressure.

I know you've all been wondering if the Jonas Brothers squash the machine that is Zac Efron. Well, they can ... kind of. Camp Rock averaged 8.9 million viewers on Friday night. That's more viewers than High School Musical, which had 7.8 million for its debut. However, 8.9 million pales in comparison to last summer's 17.2 million (ZOMG!) viewers for High School Musical 2. And it proves that the Efron is unstoppable and more bankable. In fact, High School Musical 2 is the most watched non-sports program on cable.

Joal Ryan of E! Online points out that Camp Rock could still beat High School Musical overall, "The Jonas Brothers are far bigger stars than Efron or any of his costars were in January 2006, when the first HSM premiered." He goes to say that the real test of Camp Rock will be if it has the ability to rule the ratings in the inevitable many, many reruns.

I may not celebrate Thanksgiving today (as Robin from How I Met Your Mother would say, "The real Thanksgiving was in October!") but that doesn't mean I cannot take part of TV Squad thankful post series.

Television is a big part of my life. I've grown with it. I spend hours with it every day. So it's about time, I give thanks for having television in my life!

TBS is adding The Office into its repertoire of nightly comedy reruns starting this fall. There aren't a whole lot of details yet, like whether the net is going to be running all three seasons, and how many episodes will air each week.

TBS prides itself on its evening comedy line-ups and I have to admit that I often get sucked in to watching some of my favorite episodes of Family Guy, Seinfeld and Friends. I can definitely see myself doing that with reruns of The Office, too. The net also plays reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond, King of Queens, and Sex and the City. Even though I don't particularly like those last three shows, it's nice to see The Office joining their ranks as classic comedies.

Fox-owned stations will also get to start playing The Office reruns during local access starting fall of 2009.

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant must be thrilled. Syndication can make some big money for them.

**UPDATE: TBS also bought My Name is Earl. Reruns start in fall 2009.

Fewer viewers are tuning in to watch reruns of prime time shows, partly because of new technologies like personal video recorders and television networks placing full episodes online. A few years ago, a repeat broadcast of a prime time drama could draw about 80% of the audience as a new episode. Today, it brings in just about 60% of the audience.

Remember when NBC had a slogan for their repeats, "If you've never seen it, it's new to you!" I thought it was actually pretty much true, if a sneaky way to sell reruns.

Now they're going one step further. Next week the network is going to show two repeats of The Office. But instead of just airing them as they aired before, they're going to be recut into an hour-long episode, mixed up a little bit and with deleted scenes added to put in a whole new subplot that you didn't see in the first airings of the episodes. They're dubbing them "Newpeats."

As regular TV viewers, we can easily list our favorite shows of all time. And we can name the shows on the air right now that we love and never miss. My list of the latter would include The Office, Heroes, Studio 60, The Late Show With David Letterman, Ugly Betty, and Jericho. And this season, I added another show to the list. One I had never really watched before.

Scrubs.

Yeah, I think I had seen an episode before, but I never really watched the show. I think other shows I liked were on at the same time, I didn't want to get caught up in another medical drama, and I think that episode I saw wasn't one of the better ones and it didn't make me want to tune into the show again. But then a funny thing happened. Last year I started watching the show late at night, after the Friends reruns on a local station, and I completely fell in love with the show. And it's not just that I "like" the show now, it has actually become one of my favorite shows of all-time. I watch the episodes and I think "how the hell did I miss this show all these years? What was I thinking?"

Do you have a show like that?

When former President Gerald Ford passed away late Tuesday night, both NBC and ABC broke into regular programming to report the news. CBS, however did not; instead they decided just to put a crawl at the bottom of the screen. If you were watching CBS at the time, when a Letterman rerun was running in the east and an NCIS rerun was running in the west, you might have wondered why they didn't break in to report something that was so important.

Others were wondering, too, and David Bauder of the AP got some reaction to it. CBS really didn't give a reason other than just state that they will fly Katie Couric in from an overseas vacation to anchor funeral coverage, and that they reported the news as soon as they saw it. In the article, Bauder cites a 2004 incident where a CBS News producer was fired for breaking into CSI:NY to report the death of Yassir Arafat rather than do the agreed-to crawl. Whether or not that was a factor in this decision is unclear. But the logical reaction would be that a former President would merit a break-in, don't you think?

[via Mediabistro]

Beginning January 10th, A&E will begin broadcasting a cleaned-up version of The Sopranos. No violence. No nudity. No swearing. How likely is it that the PG-13 version of The Sopranos will suck? According to A&E's vice president of program planning Tom Moody, "The Sopranos is so well written and so well acted, it doesn't rely on language, violence or nudity to carry story arcs. It overcomes any of those tiny obstacles." Ah, yes, "tiny obstacles" - like how the characters speak to each other, how their actions convey meaning, etc. Not a prob.

Fortunately, HBO thought ahead. Alternative shots and scenes with tamer dialogue were filmed alongside what originally ended up on the air. Less than one minute and no full scenes will be edited out of the seventy-seven episodes destined for syndication, or so they say. If Sex and the City can be cut down to a thirty minute basic cable-friendly show with no dirty talk, than anything may be possible. Do what you will to The Sopranos - just don't get any fancy ideas about syndicating Deadwood.

Starting November 27 and airing through December 1, you'll be able to catch reruns of VH1's Pop Up Video on VH1 Classic, one of the last remaining "music" networks that actually show videos on a semi-regular basis. If you're a pop culture and trivia nut like me, you probably loved Pop Up Video, a series that would showcase videos both new and old, complete with facts about the song, artist or video itself that would pop onto the screen throughout the video. The series was a font of useless knowledge and loads of fun until it ventured away from videos and began to give the same pop-up treatment to commercials and other non-musical things. I can't speak for everyone, but I'm not all that interested in knowing the inner workings of an OxyClean commercial.

The Pop Up Video repeats will air every night at 8:00 and 8:30 pm. If you've been meaning to bone up on your knowledge of Journey and Tina Turner, this is your chance.

I just got off the phone with Dino Stamatopoulos, creator of Moral Orel (look for the interview soon), and since I just finished talking with someone for over an hour about animation and comedy I thought I would indulge myself with a kind of "fantasy post" I've been wanting to do for a long time.

Below you will find a schedule that shows how I would program Adult Swim if it were its own twenty-four hour network. I guess the time zone would be CST, since I live in Minnesota, but don't worry about that, it's just for fun.

When a favorite show of mine enters syndication, the same thing always happens: I watch the reruns every time they air, even if the same episode airs twice in the same week, and basically overindulge.

This is what's happening now with Scrubs. Not only is it on for an hour every day at 7 on Comedy Central, but my local Fox affiliate is showing a full hour of the show as well... at midnight. And since both sets of reruns are on different tracks -- CC is running the episodes in order from the pilot, while the syndicated reruns are from seasons one and four -- there is little overlap (though I'll watch even if there is overlap). So you know what that means, kids: Uncle Joel stays up until 1 AM just to see reruns of a show he could easily buy on DVD and watch whenever he wants. Thank God I don't have an office to go to, else I'd be toast just about every morning.

In this world of downloads and full-season DVDs that still draws us to reruns? Are there reruns that you still catch every day, even though you may have the DVDs sitting right there on your shelf? Let me know in the comments.

I had to throw that "kinda" in there because really good news would be that the show is coming back for a second season, but that ain't happening. However, starting on Sunday, September 3, Adult Swim is putting the original thirteen episodes back in rotation. One episode will air, in order, every Sunday at 1:30 am. That's Sunday evening, by the way, so I guess technically it would be Monday morning. I didn't get into the show until a friend of mine pointed it out to me, and I must say I enjoyed it quite a bit. I was rather sad to see it didn't quite gain the audience it needed to stick around, but I guess that's how this crazy TV game is played sometimes. A pity.