Like school on Saturday

Two new ABC sitcoms tonight, two different columns to deal with them. First is "Knights of Prosperity," where seeing the Mick-less second episode confirmed for me how important he was to the pilot, and maybe how thin the joke is overall:

Mick Jagger is the funniest new sitcom star of the season -- but unfortunately, he isn't starring in a sitcom for very long.

Jagger plays himself as the celebrity target of a group of bumbling idiot thieves in "The Knights of Prosperity." That awful title is actually the show's third or fourth. It began as "Let's Rob Jeff Goldblum," then changed to "Let's Rob..." after Goldblum signed to do another show, and was perhaps briefly referred to as "Let's Rob Mick Jagger." Now, finally, we come to "The Knights of Prosperity," which is so bad that the characters complain about it as the name of their criminal organization. The problem is, their leader already had T-shirts printed up, so Knights it is.

To read the full thing, click here. Still, whatever long-term probblems "Knights" has, it's infinitely preferable to "In Case of Emergency," a show so terrible I spent half the review wondering if I'd been too hard on "The Class."

BCS Takes Our Advice

From the recent Last and Ten Ways to Make the BCS More Exciting:

Britney Spears designs cheerleaders uniforms, especially the undergarments. It turns out that they actually took our advice.



And for those of you who missed the final sequence of the Boise State game.

Not dirty enough

This morning's column reviews FX's "Dirt," which I did not like:

We have such a dysfunctional relationship with our celebrities and the coverage of them. We mock Britney and K-Fed, but we know more details about their relationship than we do about some of our closest friends. We complain that our society is too focused on the superficial, yet we make a hot seller out of the latest Nicole Richie anorexia story. In this age of obsessing about celebrities -- and wondering when our turn in the spotlight is going to come -- a great TV show could be made about our national addiction to the rich and famous.

"Dirt" is not that show.

Produced by and starring a badly miscast Courteney Cox as a tabloid magazine editor, it's the first outright catastrophe of FX's post-"The Shield" era. The cable channel has specialized in building absorbing series around characters who, on paper, should be despicable. So either a tabloid editor is too far down the evolutionary ladder, or the execution is a failure. While presiding over "Stars... They're Just Like Us" isn't a ticket to spiritual fulfillment, I don't know that it's any worse than being a dirty, homicidal cop or a womanizing plastic surgeon, so I'm going with bad execution.

To read the full thing, click here.