{"id":72,"date":"1999-12-22T12:52:22","date_gmt":"1999-12-22T17:52:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/?p=72"},"modified":"2008-06-28T12:53:27","modified_gmt":"2008-06-28T17:53:27","slug":"weak-shows-dont-make-sweeps-cut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/1999\/12\/weak-shows-dont-make-sweeps-cut\/","title":{"rendered":"Weak Shows Don&#8217;t Make Sweeps Cut"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s another jewell that Melinda Metz found, and sent in!<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>From: Hotcoco.com<br \/>\nPublished Thursday, November 4, 1999<\/p>\n<p>AS SEEN ON TV: CHUCK BARNEY<\/p>\n<p>Weak shows don&#8217;t make sweeps cut<br \/>\nNEWS AND NOTES from Planet TV:<\/p>\n<p>Television&#8217;s November sweeps begins tonight, touching off a period in which the networks stuff their schedules with major programs designed to inflate ratings and advertising rates.<\/p>\n<p>In the coming days, look for your TV set to be infested with plenty of special guest stars, overhyped movies and miniseries and other kinds of programming shenanigans.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, bid a temporary good-bye to several underperforming regular series. The networks don&#8217;t want them dragging down their ratings, so they&#8217;ll get benched during sweeps.<\/p>\n<p>Among the bottomfeeders not making the cut this time around are &#8220;Suddenly Susan&#8221; (NBC), &#8220;Family Guy&#8221; (Fox), &#8220;Wasteland&#8221; and &#8220;It&#8217;s like you know &#8230;&#8221; (both ABC).<\/p>\n<p>I won&#8217;t shed a tear for any of them. But I will mourn the absence of &#8220;Action&#8221; (Fox) and &#8220;Sports Night&#8221; (ABC), two shows that deserve bigger audiences.<\/p>\n<p>In Hollywood, the copycats run rampant. It was only a matter of time before another glitzy prime-time game show in the vein of &#8220;Who Wants to be a Millionaire&#8221; appeared on the tube.<br \/>\nTonight, the Fox folks are debuting &#8220;Greed&#8221; (8 p.m., channels 2 and 40), a game show from Dick Clark Productions that ups the ante to an eye-popping $2 million.<\/p>\n<p>Hosted by Chuck Woolery, &#8220;Greed&#8221; sounds like the perfect program for our selfish times. It starts with a team of five, but after an initial round, players get the chance to go after each others&#8217; share of the cash.<\/p>\n<p>A press release from Fox says &#8220;tune in to see if teamwork or greed will prevail,&#8221; but something tells me we aren&#8217;t going to see a lot of teamwork.<\/p>\n<p>Guys like NBA bad boy Latrell Sprewell should love it.<\/p>\n<p>It took awhile, but we finally have a winner in our first-ever cancellation pool. He&#8217;s Stephen Davis of Pleasant Hill, and he won when CBS mercifully pulled the plug on its lame sitcom &#8220;Work With Me.&#8221;<br \/>\nDavis, who said he &#8220;reads a lot about TV and tries to keep track of the Nielsen ratings,&#8221; became one of four finalists, along with Rob Matheson, Karen Wilkinson and Sonia Mansfield, when they correctly guessed that NBC&#8217;s &#8220;The Mike O&#8217;Malley Show&#8221; would be the first new series to get axed.<\/p>\n<p>Thanks to all the readers who competed in the pool. We hope to build it into abigger &#8212; and more rewarding &#8212; contest next year.<\/p>\n<p>WB&#8217;s new drama &#8220;Roswell&#8221; has attracted lots of viewers interested in its blend of sci-fi intrigue and teen romance, but Karen Fink of Livermore has another reason for watching. She&#8217;s a 1967 graduate of Roswell High.<br \/>\n&#8220;There was nothing to do in the desert, so we used to go to the shallow river and chase fish with a stick,&#8221; she told me. &#8220;We also used to drag Main, which is now called &#8216;cruising&#8217; and is outlawed in most California cities.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Fink says she &#8220;loves UFO stories&#8221; and shows like &#8220;The X-Files&#8221;, even though she&#8217;s convinced the infamous Roswell flying saucer was just a weather balloon. Her first date was in a downtown theater that now houses Roswell&#8217;s UFO museum.<\/p>\n<p>So where does Fink work? At Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I know what you&#8217;re thinking,&#8221; she said, &#8220;but it&#8217;s just a coincidence!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Congratulations should go to KRON (Channel 4), which recently had its late-night newscast picked as one of the best in the nation by a respected study conducted through the Project for Excellence in Journalism.<br \/>\nYou have to wonder if a little asterisk should be affixed to the findings for a couple of reasons: 1. The Bay Area&#8217;s top-rated newscast &#8212; KTVU (Channel 2) &#8212; wasn&#8217;t part of the study; and 2. KRON news director Dan Rosenheim was a member of the board that decided what criteria the study should follow. Hmmmmmm.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking of KRON, I continue to get a lot of inquiries into the whereabouts of Suzanne Shaw. As previously reported, the anchor is on a sabbatical and is scheduled to return in early January. Shaw&#8217;s relatives can stop calling.<\/p>\n<p>Just kidding. I miss her, too. When she&#8217;s around, KRON&#8217;s newscasts are even better.<\/p>\n<p>Chuck Barney can be reached at 925-952-2685 or cbarney@cctimes.cm.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s another jewell that Melinda Metz found, and sent in! From: Hotcoco.com Published Thursday, November 4, 1999 AS SEEN ON<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-72","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-roswell"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crashdown.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=72"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}