Bethenny Frankel Is a Go
In her ongoing efforts to enrage Jill Zarin, former Real Housewives of New York City cast member turned solo Bravo star Bethenny Frankel is getting her own syndicated daytime talk show. Well, OK, she technically already had a talk show, doing a six-week tryout on various Fox affiliates around the country, but now she's got a for-real, national program. The tryout went well enough that Fox decided to syndicate it nationally, starting either this winter or next fall. This is good turnaround news for Frankel, as she initially had trouble selling the show to broadcasters. But that's all in the past now, and things are looking rosy. Meanwhile Zarin is busy making weird sizzle reels and selling faux-Spanx (called Skweez). And Frankel's chief Housewives nemesis, Kelly Bensimon, was last seen flying over the New Mexican mesa, a trail of gummi bears following behind her like a comet's tail. [Deadline]
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Last night's relatively non-revolutionary Emmys broadcast saw a slight uptick in viewership from last year's show, rising 6% in total viewers to 13.2 million. But in the all-important demographics ratings, the show was down 10% to a 3.8. That's in the all-important 18-49ers demo, who of course are the only people in America who buy things, and thus the only people in America worth selling things to. Unless you're, like, MTV, or something, and then you probably want to sell to people as young as 11 and only as old as like 22. But the Emmys will never be on MTV, so it's 18-49 for them. The show's still-high ratings can probably be attributed to the fact that most people accidentally tuned in and mistakenly thought they were watching a weird episode of Modern Family. [Entertainment Weekly]
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Speaking of the Emmys, the cast and crew of ABC's The Bachelor are angry that their own network didn't put the show in last night's "Year in Reality" clip reel. Yeah, for some reason ABC forgot to inclue its own popular reality show in the dumb reality thing, and people are upset. Host Chris Harrison tweeted that the omission was both an "epic fail" (ugh, stop it with that, everyone) and a "huge slap." A Bachelor producer echoed the sentiment, saying, "This was a slap in the face to all #Bachelornation." Yes! A HUGE slap in the face! How dare ABC not include its wife-selling show in its Emmy Awards clip reel of things that happened in crappy reality TV in the past year! What a slap! What a slight! Everyone, literally everyone, was expecting to see The Bachelor and The Bachelorette in that hotly anticipated clip reel, and when they didn't, well, it felt like a cold, hard, mean slap. How dare you, ABC. Just you wait until the next rose ceremony. You'll pay. Ohh, you'll pay. Also, there has never been a more chillingly accurate, if accidental, description of this country than "#Bachelornation." [The Hollywood Reporter]
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Uh oh. All is not well in the English countryside. The third season of Downton Abbey is currently airing on ITV in the UK, and the ratings are down from last season. Nothing drastic, really, but still, a million fewer people watched last night's second episode than watched the equivalent episode last season. A million is not a small number, especially in Great Britain. It might be that a lackluster X Factor lead-in is to blame, or it could be that people are just slowly starting to tire of all those stuffy shenanigans. It happens with all shows, really. Not necessarily in the third season, things should still mostly be bouncing along steadily by then if not maybe even growing, but things work differently over there. Most British series are only ten minutes long, after all. It's just a different format. "Oh I loved Guvnor's Inquest. But the American version, Mayor Hunt, should have been only nine minutes like the British version instead of eight 22-episode seasons. It just allows for better storytelling." "Yeah, I agree. Take The School Marm. Great Channel 4 series, and was only twenty-six seconds long. But the Americans of course had to do Ms. Teacher and stretch it out for fifteen years. It's just stupid." That's how that conversation always goes. [Deadline]
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Justin Bieber has won a court victory against a company that made a mobile app game called Joustin' Beaver. The company was fighting legal threats from Bieber's camp by claiming it was within its First Amendment rights to parody Bieber with the game, but the judge said there was no jurisdiction over Bieber in Florida, where the lawsuit was filed, because the kid lives in California and is a Canadian citizen. So, oh well. Maybe this will at least give the company some time to reconsider that name. Because it does not sound like what it is, which is a game about a little beaver with a purple sweatshirt who has to dodge "Phot-Hogs." It sounds like... Well, obviously it sounds like medieval-themed pornography. More suited to Game of Thrones parody than anything related to #Biebernation. (Meaning Canada.) [The Hollywood Reporter]
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Oh Hugh Jackman, you're so vein! This is a new picture of the Broadway beltin' triple threat as Wolverine in the upcoming X-Men Origins: Wolverine sequel and all we can say is "veins." All we can see is veins. Just so many veins. Look at all those veins. [Entertainment Weekly]
And here is a trailer for Amy Heckerling's Vamps, a vampires in modern New York City comedy that has an interesting cast — Alicia Silverstone, Krysten Ritter, Justin Kirk, Matthew from Downton Abbey, Wallace Shawn, Sigourney Weaver — but that looks very cheap and, well, not so good. But who knows! Maybe it will be a pleasant surprise. Heckerling's last little-seen effort, I Could Never Be Your Woman, which featured the likable duo of Michelle Pfeiffer and Paul Rudd (plus Saoirse Ronan and Stacy Dash), was pretty awful, but maybe that was just a fluke. We're hoping. Clueless was a long time ago, but it's still a masterpiece. So we're hoping.
