TVSquad

Part of me is surprised that this deal took this long to happen. But when you watch the recent crop of new shows on the Chortle Network (with the exception of Tosh.0), it really shouldn't surprise anyone.

Comedy Central has ordered a half-hour scripted pilot based on the Onion's Sports Network. The OSN is part of the popular satirical magazine's online TV news network that launched a little under a year ago.

This isn't the first time the network has tried to do a satirical sports show. Comedy Central also shot a pilot for a Daily Show-esque sports show called Sports Central that died in the pilot stage. This incarnation sounds much more promising since it will spoof not only sports figures and stories, but also the tone and style of sports media. Sweet sassy molassey, this is gonna rock!

It's becoming harder and harder to tell the difference between shows like The Daily Show and The Situation Room or The Colbert Report and The O'Reilly Factor. Oh sure, i can tell the shows apart. I just can't decide which is funnier. Sometimes I wonder why Sean Hannity hasn't won the Thurber Prize.

No one has exploited the news' foibles and follies better than The Onion. Their newspaper parody crippled news junkies with laughter and probably the newspaper industry, as well, which is a bigger shame for newspaper people since The Onion is free. Their mockery of the 24-hour cable news network was just as brilliant and parallel.

But the line between news and news humor has now gone from aluminum gray to a dark and smokey charcoal. They have actually hired former CNN anchor Bobbie Battista.

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.

I don't like Dane Cook's brand of comedy, but hey, I don't have to like everything. There are plenty of other comedians more suited to my palate on the comedy salad bar, so while I personally feel his "material" is all delivery and no punchline, it doesn't mean other people can't enjoy him with croutons.

CC Insider points to a funny satirical piece from The Onion about Cook's new HBO special, Burgasm, in which the young comedian riffs on Burger King's Texas Double Whopper for a full hour. In the article, Cook explains his plans for the special:

The Onion's A.V. Club is inviting readers to ask Sarah Silverman for sex advice. Post your question to the site, and the best questions will be forwarded to Ms. Silverman. Her answers will be included in an upcoming feature on the The Sarah Silverman Program, set for its Comedy Central debut on February 1st. Several clips from the show were recently posted online. It looks something like the non-stand-up portions of Jesus is Magic with lots of Mr. Show alums and Sarah's sister Laura in supporting roles.

I personally recommend that you seek Sarah's sex advice. She and boyfriend Jimmy Kimmel were recently featured in Esquire's "What I've Learned" issue, and they had plenty of useful relationship tips to share. For instance, pretend your parents are someone else's. This makes you more tolerant of their eccentricities. That's great advice, and when you're done gleaning all the knowledge you can from Sarah, you can send a letter to Amy Sedaris care of The Believer for further enlightenment.

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.

I haven't watched any of the Bravo reality show Project Runway this season. I watched the first season, but then I just lost interest in the show (getting rid of as many reality shows that I watch has become very important to me). The Onion's AV Club says that the judges on the show are "on crack," because three of the remaining seven designers should have been off the show many weeks ago.

The designers they name are Angela, Vincent, and Jeffrey.

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?