TV Eye

Clockwise from top left: Stephen Colbert, Katie Couric, Geena Davis, and David Blaine

I hate this time of year. It's that irritating gap between the end of conventional broadcast TV seasons and the launch of summer cable series. Irritating, because it's too early to get review screeners for some, and the screeners I do have are for B-grade shows that launch in June. The timing is off. So is my level of engagement. Like Carrie Bradshaw in last Sunday's Sex and the City rerun, I find myself scraping my brain for some half-baked ideas. At least Carrie's fallow period was saved by her irritated editor (who she assumed wanted to fire her). He didn't offer a pink slip but news that a publisher wanted to collect her columns in a book. Ah, TV! Where a columnist for a small New York weekly can afford to live in a spacious apartment in uptown Manhattan, buy expensive shoes, and life's setbacks are solved within a 22-minute period. I waited for my phone to ring, for that book editor to come a-knocking at my door. Nothing. Back to work. Crap.

So, not only does this time of year irritate me, other things irritate me more than usual. Like the young man standing behind me at the grocery store. When he saw a photo of Josh Holloway on a magazine at the check-out, he loudly declared to his companion that Lost was the worst thing on TV.

Puh-leeze! The worst? He obviously hasn't seen The Ghost Whisperer, Hope & Faith, According to Jim, Heist, Pepper Dennis, or What About Brian.

I watch TV so you don't have to, buddy.

Other things that irritate me:

David Blaine. His street-performance specials, which typically air without fanfare, are entertaining. But his bloated, overwrought, death-defying extravaganzas? Make him stop.

The hoo-ha about Katie Couric as the first solo female news anchor (starting this fall on the CBS Evening News). I find Couric enormously likable, but she's not the first female news anchor. Elizabeth Vargas has been doing the job at ABC since co-anchor Bob Woodruff got injured in Iraq, and Maria Elena Salinas has been doing it on Univision for, oh, 15 years? And while I find myself curious about how Couric will do, the larger fact of the matter is I'm not convinced that appointing a woman anchor is enough to make broadcast evening news matter.

The cancellation of Commander in Chief. I've been asked: Aren't you upset? Shouldn't there be an uproar? Isn't it curious that when a woman and a Latino are cast as President of the United States (The West Wing), those shows get cancelled?

No, no, and no.

First, let's not forget President David Palmer played by Dennis Haysbert on 24. He got assassinated, but that was after his term was over. Second, the end of The West Wing was announced well in advance. (For those of us old enough to care, Martin Sheen is half Latino.) Third, while I lament that Commander in Chief got canned, it comes as no surprise. Production drama behind the scenes caused a hiatus, which is always a precarious move, particularly in this TV climate. But the bottom line is, I think it's important to see new ideas expressed in the imaginative sphere. You have to imagine it, make it part of the consciousness, before it can become reality. The good news about this TV climate is that while Commander in Chief did not go full term, something similar is surely in the development pipeline. Maybe it will air and fare better.

And finally: all the chatter about Stephen Colbert's performance at the White House Correspondents' dinner last week. Did he go too far? Should he be slapped or saluted? You may have seen a sliver of his performance on the cable news networks, but not for long. The one I watched gave a greater amount of time to a skit with Bush and a Bush look-alike, in a bit that was not as funny as Colbert's – and that's not saying much. The truth is, I don't think Colbert is that funny. The only reason Colbert wasn't escorted off stage (like Chinese journalist Wenyi Wang a few weeks back, for yelling at the Chinese President Hu Jintao) is because he offered his criticisms of Bush and the assembled press in snarkism: the greener, less refined, distant cousin to sarcasm and satire. Lampooning with snarkism is not particularly brave, nor does it appear to create much action beyond chatter between the technoratti on media blogs, as opposed to say, a call to leave (and possibly lose) a job by participating in a nationwide march. Am I wrong?

I await your snarky response.