Tuesday, May 17, 2022

A little of this and a little of that

 To paraphrase the late entertainer Jerry Colonna, network programmers are the craziest people.

With season 2 already underway, Dwayne Johnson's fictionalized life story, if ya will, Young Rock, will shift to Fridays in November. Opposite Smackdown on Fox. Online "analysts" are already signaling doom & gloom for Young Rock and George Lopez's new show, Lopez vs. Lopez, ignorant of the fact that WWE's top two shows are stagnating with only a periodic pop in the ratings. We'll talk about that later. The late start for season 3 is to allow the show to have a little time to "breathe" between seasons.

When the fall season starts in September, the 8-9 pm (ET) slot will be filled by season 2 of the Capital One College Bowl, hosted and executive produced by telegenically challenged Peyton Manning, with brother Cooper as his sidekick. Let's just hope he's improved his technique since last season. Let's face it. He didn't study any classic tapes with Robert Earle or Allen Ludden, not to mention Pat Sajak, before taking the job last year.
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Tonight Show host, College of St. Rose alumnus, and busiest dude in late night Jimmy Fallon is in charge of a fresh reboot of Password, which has been a recurring segment on Tonight since Fallon took over a few years back. The franchise hadn't been on NBC until then since Super Password signed off in 1989. No start date has been announced as yet.
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Houston Astros pitcher Jake "Eggs" Odorizzi was carried off the field on a stretcher Monday at Fenway with a leg injury. 


Photo courtesy Yahoo!/MLB.

Boston ultimately won the game, 6-4. No timetable for Odorizzi's return.
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Arizona Senator Wendy Rogers, unsurprisingly, tried to claim the mass shooting in Buffalo on Saturday was a false flag. Can someone wake this woman up from her coma? Repugnants like her are proof that, in the words of Thelma Harper (Vicki Lawrence) many moons ago, some of these people have "spinters in the windmills of (their) mind(s)". I told you someone would play this idiot card.
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When ye scribe was growing up, and getting into pro wrestling, the folks didn't exactly dig the idea of my spending a couple of hours every weekend scoping the theatrics of the mat. Back in those days, though, tag teams were just as much a part of the weekly programming as the world heavyweight champions.

Unfortunately for today's audience, WWE CEO/Chairman Vince McMahon, who will be 77 in August, doesn't think there's any value in tag teams anymore. To him, it's just a second or third tier level, and he called a few tag matches in his best (?) days as an announcer.

So it was news Monday when the current women's tag champs, Naomi (Trinity Fatu) and Sasha Banks (Mercedes Varnado, The Mandalorian) left the Scope in Norfolk, Virginia, upset over the booking for what was to be last night's main event. What was originally a 6-pack, one fall #1 contender's match for the Raw women's title, held by Bianca Belair, turned into a singles match between Asuka and Becky Lynch, won by Asuka. The other women scheduled for the match, Doudrop (fka Piper Niven) and Nikki ASH (nee Nikki Cross), were dropped out with no reason. Banks & Naomi wanted to start a program with the newly formed team of Nikki & Doudrop, but McMahon had other ideas. Keep in mind that Naomi is married to Jimmy Uso, who currently holds the Smackdown tag titles with brother Jey, and has been on the main roster for a decade.

What I was able to glean was that you have two veteran wrestlers with more on the ball creatively than McMahon and his senior advisers, Bruce Prichard and John Laurinaitis combined, but McMahon's creative mindset is about 20 years behind the times. His son-in-law, Paul "Triple H" Levesque, is back at work in the main office, rather than at NXT in Florida, and should be positioned to take over if/when the creatively bankrupt McMahon finally decides, even if it isn't his call, to retire, something he should've done years ago, but won't do, because the WWE is the only business venture he has succeeded with. The television ratings fluctuate because of creative stagnation and a blatant refusal to acknowledge there are problems across the board. The women's division, as a whole, has been spun backward about 10 years, thanks in no small part to the return of Laurinaitis as a talent executive.

Translated, it's way past time Triple H & Stephanie had the old man checked for mental issues, because he's not the creative genius he thinks he is, and hasn't in too long.

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