He Won't Be Right Back. But Thanks, Mike.

"It used to be that you couldn't touch some girls with a ten-foot pole. Well, I was the guy with the twelve-foot pole." Mike Douglas

The model Oprah used when starting out in her own talk show. The guy who co-hosted with John and Yoko for one extraordinary week. The program that first introduced the world to a two year old child named Tiger Woods -- who showed Bob Hope his golf swing; The show that aired from Philly for most of its life. The show that brought Malcom X and Jerry Rubin into America's living rooms. The show that featured over 30 000 guests, over 6000 shows, over 21 years.

All the while, Mike Douglas was an affable, genuine host. A decent guy. His niceness, I guess, really did belong to another age. I remember him so clearly as a child. I remember wondering "how is it possible that my Grandmother prefers Merv Griffin?"

Mike Douglas was a class act. May he Rest in Peace.

Three Moons Over Milford and the Flexibility of Ideas

So, call it my erstwhile hangover from years working at Canada's sci-fi channel, Space, but I knew from the moment I read about Three Moons Over Milford, I was going to have to check it out at least once.

Here's the very definition of a high concept, plausible sci-fi idea: As the series starts, people are acting strangely. They coyly reveal the reason why during the course of the teaser. Seems that sometime just before the start of the show, an asteroid slammed into the moon, breaking it into three large pieces. Scientists believe that one of the pieces (at least) is unstable, and will eventually plunge to earth, causing nuclear winter and the end of all life as we know it, above the cockroach level.

Here's the conceit: that could happen in twenty years. Or next Tuesday.

Which sets up the premise: what do you do when you think the end of the world is imminent?

This is such a potent zeitgeist concept for our times, I just have to shake my head and curse the fact that I didn't come up with it first. I imagine a lot of writers are doing that. It's such a good metaphor for the uncertain times we live in, that it's the kind of sturdy concept that could show up just about anywhere.

So what the hell is it doing on ABC Family?

Well, let's break it down. Three Moons Over Milford, as it's currently constituted, revolves mainly around one family. Papa Bear made a lot of money in a company, and responds to the news of possibly-imminent judgement day by abandoning his family and going off to "find himself." He leaves his wife, Laura, and two kids, Alex and Lydia, to go climb mountains.

There's a kindly, decent lawyer in the town of Milford named Mack McIntyre whose mother tries to sell her house to send him on a cruise around the world. He doesn't want to go.

The setup in the pilot demonstrates all the different ways people deal with the new reality of possibly impending doom. Dad flakes out. There's an unscrupulous real estate agent that tries to take advantage of people. The police chief is now young and green as hell -- why? Because everyone more experienced quit. Sixteen year old Alex wants to drive right away, and maybe have an affair with an older woman, because why the hell not? Daughter Lydia tries to knit the moon back together with her friends using some Wiccan ceremony, and burns down the school in the process.

By the end of the pilot, we've seen a bit of Milford (good people, quirky town, under stress) and the Davis family. Mom is going to deal with the loss of the family fortune by going to work in Mac's law office. Nice, clean setup.

What struck me about the execution is that it was a lot edgier than I thought it would be. The nasty characters are allowed to be nasty. The mechanics of the plot set up a situation where it's the son's birthday, and the daughter is supposed to address the town meeting to apologize for burning down the school. She says to her mother that she'd rather commit suicide. And mom's response? "Good. More cake for us."

That's pretty funny. Also not what you'd expect for a "family" show.

Yet there is something ineffably family about Three Moons. Obviously, a lot of the stories are going to focus around the two kids. The town is very reminscent of Stars Hollow, which is obviously no accident, since reruns of Gilmore Girls is apparently ABC Family's backbone.

Elizabeth McGovern gets to do her best Lauren Graham . Her character's name is Laura, wink wink, just in case you didn't get it...(although there's been some strange surgery in the years since She's Having a Baby. Brr.)

I enjoyed the pilot. It was well done. And I will probably never watch the show again. Why? Because I don't watch Gilmore Girls, either. The show doesn't really appeal to me. And in the end, really, neither does Three Moons Over Milford.

But that's A-Ok...and I still think they've done a great job, and I'm still envious of the flexibility of their concept, and how much fun they can have with it.

So many starting-out writers I meet -- even writers that are mid-career, like me -- seem to misunderstand terms like "Character Driven Show" "High Concept" or "Procedural" that it's worth noting in the case of this show, just what these things really mean. Three Moons provides a perfect example. (And it's not just writers, either. Lots of Producers and Network People I meet seem equally confabulated.)

Why is Three Moons a high-concept show? Because the concept is the thing that initially sells it. You don't need to know anything else. It could also, with the same concept, be a bunch of very different shows:

-The Sci-Fi Channel Version: a group of international scientists are brought together as the world goes quirky around them to try to solve the problems of the three moons.

-The Lifetime Version: Three women try to keep their different families together while dealing with the men in their lives who've all gone crazy from moon-fear. (In this iteration, the moons stand in for midlife crisis craziness.)

-The Cartoon Network/Comedy Central/FX version -- Ida know. But let's say it's in New York, and everyone decides, "fuck it, there's no rules." And anarchy ensues.

-The CW Version -- Same as above, but starring Felicity. A lot more hugging and crying. And a new Dashboard Confessional song in every episode.

-The FOX Version -- More violence, more fucking (implied), and prettier people.

Note, that in all the versions above, the basic premise stays the same: the threat of imminent (but uncertain) destruction causes people to abandon their usual roles and react differently.

See, it just so happens that they sold the ABC Family version, which dictates the quirky town setting (a la Gilmore Girls) and the focus on two kids. But you could still get several different shows out of it. Is your concept really the precious thing here? If you change the characters, does the show really change? I mean fundamentally. Does it wreck it, or can it really go another way?

See, a lot of people I talk to are so completely attached to the precise execution of their idea that they don't see that changing some details could actually make it better. To tell you the truth, of all my flippant "versions" above, I kind of think that maybe the ABC Family version is probably the best one. They tailored their show to their broadcaster and it paid off with something that's actually kind of different. Awesome. Even if it's not for me.

Now, it also takes you about ten seconds to explain the basic concept of Three Moons. You can fill in the characters and details later. That's high concept.

If you don't know the show without knowing the Characters and why they're doing what they're doing, then you have a character driven show. You actually need to know the character dynamic to understand the show. Think back to that one sheet for the first season of The Sopranos. Tony is in the middle. All the mobsters are standing behind him to his right. Carmela, AJ, Meadow, and Tony's Mom are standing behind him to his left. And the tagline says, "If One Family Doesn't Kill Him, The Other Will."

See, you don't really need to know who the Davis family is to understand or get Three Moons Over Milford. But you have to understand the family dynamic, and the therapy angle, to get what is different about The Sopranos. That's why it's character driven. You change any of those elements too much, and the show doesn't survive.

Is your concept really like that? Great. Now. What makes it different from other shows? What makes YOUR character driven show different from someone else's character driven show?

Or have you come up with the next great procedural? CSI's characters don't matter (not at first -- not when you're making the sale -- it's what they DO that matters -- and the fact that a mystery is set up at the start and solved by the end, an the audience is solving it along with the team.)

Obviously, hybrid-ing these different concepts can come up with fresh pitches and elements, but you do always have to keep a handle on why you're asking people to watch, and what you're promising them. I think that people who watch Three Moons Over Milford on ABC Family are being promised a certain kind of show, and based on the pilot, they're going to get that kind of show.

What are you promising your audience?

You gotta know -- because you have to be able to explain it to your broadcaster, and your producer, and your collaborators...and finally, to your audience.

And here's the funny thing: if you're pitching a broadcaster and you find that, hmm...your show really CAN'T survive the changes, then you really do have to walk away.

Because it's only too common to go into development and then have your vision chipped away at. You have to have clear vision going in, because only then are you going to recognize when your concept is irretrievably broken. Trust me. You'll see it before they do. But if you keep going past that point just to preserve the relationship with the network, well -- the show will inevitably fail and you will be the one that pays the price.

The flipside of that? If you don't know EXACTLY what kind of show you have, and what you're promising off the top, you're going to get lost very quickly.

And then where are you? Can't you smell the sulphur.

Yes, kittens. That's right.

You're in Development Hell.

Try the veal.

Blah blah blah 9/11 Shampoo Bottle Blah

CRAWFORD, United States (AFP) - US President George W. Bush seized on a foiled London airline bomb plot to hammer unnamed critics he accused of having all but forgotten the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Weighed down by the unpopular war in Iraq, Bush and his aides have tried to shift the national political debate from that conflict to the broader and more popular global war on terrorism ahead of November 7 congressional elections.

And I swear, my fellow countrymen, if you let these craven opportunists shift the discussion away from their utter and complete failure to rationalize, plan for, or meet this threat for the third straight election cycle, then the terrorists really will have won.

As a foreign-living expat, I have to sit this November out. But you don't.

You know what? I can't even write about this stuff anymore. I don't know where Rogers gets the patience.

Oh, and just in cased you three or four fat assed Bush autocrats missed it, here's yet another way our government is making things worse.

You really think you're in control?

I was all set to spend some time being collapsed last night, but of course it was not to be. I had tickets to go see Gnarls Barkley at Toronto's Koolhaus club.

For the two-and-a-half people who've somehow managed to miss it, Barkley is the mashup band of Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse. They give a wildly entertaining stage show where they dress up in various costumes. Last night, they came out dressed as fry cooks, with the women dressed as waitresses, and Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse wearing Chef's Hats. They stepped up and did the shtick they do at every show: "Gnarls Barkley can't be here tonight. We're the Sam Cook(e)s."

Then they ripped through their set. (They also opened with, appropriately enough, "Hungry Like the Wolf," which was pretty funny.

The band was so tight, the music so infectious (really, is there a better summer song out now than "Crazy?" I think not) that you couldn't help but be in a good mood. Which is good, because Daddy's pretty stressed right now. So though my feet and my ass are tired from the shaking, the soul is doing okay. Which is good, because there's plenty of grinding ahead.

Things I have to write about soon, when I get the chance:

-Three Moons Over Milford. Why, all of a sudden, is ABC Family the place for high-concept Sci-Fi? And what, exactly, did Elizabeth McGovern do to herself surgically?

-Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip. Oh yeah. I saw it. Oh yeah. I dug it. Oh yeah.

-Why Brotherhood is the next Sopranos, bitches.

Holy Sheep! Three More and We Have a Table Read!

Apple previewed Leopard, their next operating system iteration, this morning. In it there's a new voice, Alex. Click here and scroll down and you can hear how Alex does in natural-sounding speech. (You'll need Quicktime.)

Seriously good, huh? I mean, intonation, breath sounds...great stuff.

I would already gladly use this to hear voiceover read back, and we're almost at the point where that "read back the script" thing might actually be useful.

Way cool.

Reprint: Book Review: A Great Feast of Light

I noticed that John Doyle's book is newly in paperback, so I guess now's as good a time as any to repost my review of it, (originally posted 11/2005)


It could be that I'm just becoming an old fogey. I recognize that. But lately, when I look out at a television landscape of TIVO's and extended cable, of satellites and timeshifting and VOD, 343 channels of Gilligan's Island starting on the hour -- I can't help but think that something's been lost.

It's not just that Bruce Springsteen's once-scorching "57 Channels and Nothing On" seems crazy-quaint. (Dude, it's your own fault! Why didn't you TIVO?) It's that the explosion of choice and program-management techniques (what we used to call "taping,") has fundamentally altered what made television so revolutionary in the first place.

John Doyle's "A Great Feast of Light: Growing Up Irish in the Television Age" is a memoir and a love letter. It's a book that rights the wrongs of a thousand McLuhan descendents who like to natter about how TV ruined everything. It's the story of a young boy growing up in a cloistered, maddening, provincial country, and how a magic window into a wider world changed everything, forever. Doyle manages to be both wistful and clear-eyed, speaking of his childhood in the small Irish town of Nenagh. Television came late to Ireland...RTE went on the air in 1961. In describing the people of his little town, Doyle paints a scene ripe for a shocking, cathode-ray corrective:

"...their stories were always the same, going around and around until everybody knew the punch line. They were always about farmers and shopkeepers and how the world was fixed with everybody in their allotted place. On television, events changed things. The truth came out and justice was done. I knew that teachers and adults weren't as instantly entranced by television as small children were. And I knew why, without anyone explaining it to me. Grown up people were stuck in their ways and their old stories. They knew everybody they were ever going to meet.

But that would change too. Television would break through all the layers of habit and conformity. The smallness of their old world would become clear as day."

The book contains amusing reminiscences of programs as varied as Bat Masterston and Get Smart, The Avengers and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. But the focus is squarely on how these new worlds, new ideas and ways of looking at the world seeped into a society that was still in thrall to the Catholic church; filled with "thick" brothers and cruel nuns, and a generally backward way of thinking.

For the Irish Americans tugging at their collars now, this is no Angela's Ashes, a parade of miseries and petty cruelties moving from horror to horror. The Doyles sound a lot more like my people -- a little more middle class, perhaps. But with a father working for Irish Life and a mother who didn't seem to cotton onto those who promoted small mindedness, Doyle paints a quiet childhood where television did exactly what all its haters feared: gradually seeped in and molded the thinking of a young boy.

The Doyles moved around Ireland quite a bit. I was pleased to read the chapters about tracing a childhood through County Roscommon and Leitrim, since that's where my Mom's people are from. This section also gives rise to the book's most moving passages: contrasting the peace of a country childhood with the horrors that lurked just beyond the mist. As young John Doyle walks the fields of Carrick, we're reminded that this area was once ground zero of the famine that decimated Ireland.

It's a strange turn for a memoir about television, but it does set the stage -- because if you know your Irish history, you know what's coming.

I've often talked to my parents about what it was really like to see Vietnam on the TV every night. I've spent hours in a little cubicle at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York, watching back news programs of the time. I've seen the moment where Walter Cronkite turned against the war. As an adult, I, like everyone, sat back and watched in quiet awe as satellites relayed live pictures of bombs raining on Baghdad. Twice.

But I don't think that compares to being a young Irish boy trying to sort through an old war that suddenly re-ignites on your doorstep, brought to you in glorious color on the TV. As Ireland descends into the bitter thrall of sectarian violence, Doyle clings to the images that make sense to him: the anti-authoritarian, anarchic revolution that was Monty Python's Flying Circus, the pull of soccer -- even the much milder social critiques of shows like The Liver Birds and Upstairs, Downstairs.

All in all, the memoir paints a coming-of-age that was reflected, pushed, and prodded by television at every step of the way. It's an engaging portrait of an Ireland that's simply not there anymore, an Ireland consigned to the dustbin, in part, by the tide of change ushered in by the tolling of the Angelus Bells on RTE, that night in 1961.

I'm not sure that people much younger than me (I'm 37) think of television that way anymore, or if they ever did. Television was that thing that was always there. There were always more than four channels. You never had to 'get home in time to watch something.' There are so many different types of entertainment vying for your attention now that the social effect of television is muted; and discussions of the power of the medium are far more likely to be driven by reactionary forces, for whom nothing is scarier than a hint of breast or a bad word.

I don't remember the start of television, of course. But I do remember the time of four or five channels and no VCR. And I remember the winter of 1977.

In January, 1977, we were living in Orlando, Florida. Our TV was a beat up old SONY, black and white, maybe 20 inches.

Six months later, when we moved to Canada, my Dad bought a big cabinet model color TV, and I was shocked and enthralled. Enthralled to watch shows like The Brady Bunch and Gilligan's Island in color for the first time -- they seemed like new shows! Shocked when I caught a rerun of Gilligan's Island in black & white. I thought the TV was broken. My Dad had to explain to me that the show used to be filmed in black & white, before they switched to color.

I loved living in Orlando. The two years I spent there still seem a little magical to me. We lived in a development called Bay Hill. (now the site of the Bay Hill Classic. If you care about golf, I'm sure that means something. Not to me, alas.) Ours was still a new development, and our street dead-ended in an orange grove. We were also across the lake from Walt Disney World. Every night of the summer, we'd walk down the road to where the orange trees started, pick one off the tree, and watch the fireworks over the Magic Kingdom.

Then there was this one time when, like wildfire, a rumor went through the neighborhood. We rode our bikes up to the Golf Club, and sure enough, dining there, surrounded by kids and other admirers, was Evil Knievel. He signed our autographs and indulged us with stories, and when it was time to leave, he simply got up and walked out, and we all hushed to see if it was true-- did he clank when he walked, from all the metal pins in his many broken bones?

I set that scene to give the proper context to this story:

We had a big backyard. Lots of flowerbeds, lots of plants and trees. My father was the General Manager of the Pepsi bottling plant in Orlando, and through that job, he met Mr. B. Mr. B was a large, kind black man with enormous hands and a booming laugh. Mr. B was the go-to man in the plant. He knew when people needed things. I first met him when he came to pick up the baby stuff -- the cribs that my sisters didn't need anymore. He loaded them into the truck and carted them off to whoever needed them. I was fascinated by this: how did he know? My father was pretty straightforward on the matter. "The people in the plant don't have a lot of money," he'd say. "He takes care of them." "Is that his job?" I wondered. "Nope," my Dad said. "That's just what he does."

I figured Mr. B was a pretty important guy, knowing what everyone needed like that. Mr. B worked the bottling line as a supervisor, and when my dad took me to work, and I saw him, I'd always run up and say hello. He'd smile, and sneak me some Dr. Pepper off the line. It tasted horrible cold -- I never did get the taste for it -- but hot off the line it was delicious.

There was a woman who used to help out my Mom with my little sisters. Mrs. L. She'd babysit sometimes, sew, and mind my sisters so my Mom could run out to the supermarket. Mrs. L was a kind southern woman who loved singing along to the country music on the radio.

One day, when Mrs. L was there, Mr. B and some of his guys were doing some yardwork for us. Mr.B came to the front door looking for water for the crew. Mrs. L said she'd get it, but Mr. B had to come to the back door.

I had NO IDEA what the hell was going on. Why did he have to go to the back door, when he was standing right there at the front door, in the 95 degree heat? It seemed stupid, so I asked my Dad about it later.

I think my Mom had a conversation with Mrs. L the next day. I didn't hear any of it. I was sent to my room to play.

A few months later was January 1977. We didn't know yet that we were going to be moving to Canada. Maybe my parents did, but I didn't. But the really exciting thing is that my parents let me stay up late with them, to watch something on TV. My parents had let me stay up to watch TV late before. One time, a neighbor of ours was on To Tell The Truth. And if there was a baseball game or a space launch from Cape Kennedy, sometimes I'd get to watch that. But this was different. There was a program, airing every night for seven nights... I'd never heard of that happening before.

It was called Roots.

After I watched it, I started to put together a lot of what I'd seen -- with Mr. B, Mrs. L -- even the strange looks I'd get sometimes from some of the white workers in the plant when Dad would take me to work, and I'd run up to say "Hi" to Mr. B.

Everyone watched Roots, it seems. We talked about it in school. And the next time Mr. B and Mrs. L were both working at our house, I noticed that she had trouble looking Mr. B in the eye. Later that month, Mr. B came by with his pickup truck, and picked up a whole bunch of baby clothes and toys Mrs. L had collected. He thanked her for them, and said he knew just who they would go to. And she nodded and turned around very fast and walked back into the house. She didn't know what to do with her hands...that's what I noticed. Her hands kept fluttering by her sides. I knew what was making her feel that way. And I wondered if she ever thought of the day that she asked Mr. B to go to the back door -- that simple, incomprehensible action that I now understood completely, thanks to Roots.

I was glad she didn't know what to do with her hands.

Anyhow. How's that for a digression?

Point is that Doyle's book re-energizes me and reminds me why I loved television in the first place -- why this is the medium where I want to tell stories. Maybe the landscape is different, and maybe television will never affect people quite that way again.

But then again, every time I'm in a new place, I remember to flip on the TV at least once. You learn things that way. Things you'd never learn anywhere else.

Was it Sunnier Before?

I fully accept that this might be a heretical view. And the caveat is that I've only seen two episodes of the new season...but...

...is it just me, or was It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia funnier without Danny Devito?

I think Devito's funny, it's just...I don't think the anarchic spirit where they'd go for any joke last season is quite the same. Now they have to service his character. I find the show a little unbalanced now.

I'm hoping that's transitory, as this show has given me more solid laughs than most shows I've seen in the last year or two.

Omnibus of Exhaustion: On Muppets, the Street, the Book Club and the Medium

I'm plum tuckered. I spent last week cranking out three production drafts for Across the River To Motor City. That's when you take the writer's draft and ready it for production by cutting pages down, cutting all unnecesary locations and characters, and just generally trying to sharpen the document down to its most concise and shootable. I have three more to go, before smaller rewrites to address further production, actor concerns, etc, kick in. So amidst a bunch of other stuff, I've been trying my best to take it easy this August long weekend.

But a bunch of articles I've been reading all seem to lead me in a similar direction. First of all there's one from the New York Times this weekend. The Children's Television Workshop is doing something for the 37th season of Sesame Street that they haven't been able to do -- introduce a lead female muppet who sticks. The new candidate is called Abby Cadabby -- she's meant to be a kind of girly-girl muppet. It is interesting to me that in the entire run of Sesame Street, none of the female muppets ever achieved iconic status. Don't get me started on Elmo, now. I was the first Sesame Street generation, and thoughts of Elmo and of the fact that adults can now see Mr. Snuffleupagus just make me feel dead and cold inside.

LIZ NEALON, executive vice president and creative director of Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization behind “Sesame Street,” wasn’t sure exactly what she wanted in a new Muppet for the show’s 37th season, which starts on Aug. 14. But she did have one major goal: She wanted the creative team, at long last, to come up with a female Muppet star. The show did already have a number of female characters, including Zoe, a rambunctious, orange, furry friend of Elmo’s, and Rosita, an emerald-blue, bilingual Muppet with a sweet, friendly soul.


“We have our wacky, and we have our gentle,” Ms. Nealon said in a recent interview. “But we wanted a lead female character. If you think about ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ some girls relate to Rhoda, who’s our Zoe, and some girls really relate to Mary, who’s a girly girl. And we didn’t have that girl. We made a definite decision to sit down with the writers to figure out what this character might be.”

For anyone who spends time trying to wrestle characters to ground, it's nice to see that the Sesame Street folks have their own meticulous process to go through. Article is here.

That article was still in my head as I went back through the Globe and Mail yesterday and looked over Kate Taylor's piece on the male-female fiction divide.

“Women read more, they read more novels, they read earlier and they read later. Sixty-five to 70 per cent of the [Canadian] book market is women,” observes Brad Martin, president of Random House of Canada, adding that the American and European markets are probably similar. “How many men do you know who are in a book group?”

No surprise, then, that when the federal Department of Canadian Heritage surveyed Canadian reading habits last year, it found a distinct gender gap. Women accounted for 60 per cent of the daily readers and 70 per cent of the heavy readers who had read 50 or more books in the last 12 months. Women also outnumbered men two to one as regular readers of both classic and contemporary novels.

The divide is not new: The department's previous survey, in 1991, had found similar results, while academics can trace the characterization of novel reading as a genteel — or frivolous — female pursuit as far back as the 18th and 19th centuries. However, the gender gap is both particularly pronounced and much debated these days, partly because publishers have exploited it so successfully with their marketing strategies, and partly because teachers and parents are so concerned that boys lag behind girls in their literacy skills.

I find this article interesting because of my own experience, and also the implication Taylor comes to later in the piece.

Once upon a time, I had a fairly constant reading regimen: I'd read one work of fiction, followed by a work of non-fiction. I'd sometimes stagger them so I was reading both at once. But the busier my career got, the more fiction became kind of a siren call. If I'm into a novel, it's too easy for me to just disappear and do nothing else. I've had to burn the midnight oil a couple of times for no other reason than I spent seven hours reading when I should have been working. When you don't have someone standing over your shoulder in the office, you can do that kind of thing. So, gradually, I tapered off my fiction reading. I can read non-fiction for a few pages at a time, not voraciously, like fiction. So except for rare treats or special occasions, fiction to me is like videogames; love'em, but seriously, I can't afford to lose that much time to them. Which, I recognize, is somewhat sad.

Where Taylor gets in her article is that because the fiction gap is so pronounced, marketing to it has become pronounced, and that's making the problem worse. Women read fiction, so fiction that's catered to women drives the market. This does change the kind of stuff that gets talked about and written -- because besides habits, reactions are so very much different. I think I wrote before that when the whole James Frey/Oprah thing blew up, it was the women I knew who read the book who felt betrayed. The men shrugged it off.

The same thing that Taylor talks about in fiction is also happening in TV, of course. The female audience is becoming more pronounced as the male audience shrinks. And consequently, except for things like the zombie-driven Fat Guy w. Skinny Wife comedy shows, it's getting harder and harder to actually get male characters who act like male characters on the air.

Having watched it a few times now, I think the best thing that Lucky Louie has going for it is that it actually deals head on with how men and women think differently, and doesn't take a stand on one side being right and the other wrong.

We're both crazy -- Men and Women. That's funny. And hilarious. And true from the moment we hit the playground.

But it strikes me as so weird that they've never been able to sell a female muppet on Sesame Street.