T Dog’s Six Pack: The Emmys, "Hot In Cleveland", LeBron, and more

Three up, three down: The best and worst in media during the past week:


What’s Hot.

The Final Answer: Pay up, Mickey Mouse. A grand jury ruled in favor of Celador after The Walt Disney Co. skimmed the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire producer out of millions of dollars, thanks to “Hollywood Accounting.”  The jury awarded Celador $269 million, which Disney is appealing. A huge setback for big media conglomerates – and good news for the rest of us.


Hot In Cleveland. This surprise hit from TV Land of all places has been picked up for 20 more episodes, set to return in January. The program has averaged a cumulative 4.7 million viewers this season – more than Comedy Central’s much-ballyhooed return of Futurama and TBS’ new laugh-free comedy Are We There Yet? With Betty White, who needs LeBron?


World Cup Fever. ABC and Univision scored more goals than the teams did with the soccer tournament. Sunday’s Cup Final in which Spain defeated the Netherlands 1-0 drew 15. 5 million viewers to ABC and another 8.8 million on Spanish-language Univision, giving the match close to 24 million viewers overall. And now, Americans can go back and ignore soccer to the next four years.


What’s Not.

The LeBron Debacle. Who’s to blame here? ESPN? LeBron James? Jim Gray? Cavs owner Dan Gilbert’s remarks? Jesse Jackson’s even dumber remarks? How about each one of these dumbasses involved? That’s better than going on an one thousand-word rant on this subject (which I did with WGN Radio and ESPN two weeks ago.)

And for the record, yours truly is not a LeFraud James fan.

Emmy nominations. Okay, how does Glee – a program with a bunch of musical numbers strung together by a very thin plot – get 19 Emmy nominations? And this show nominated in the Outstanding Comedy category while The Big Bang Theory isn’t?. Meanwhile, Ed O’Neill is the only cast member of Modern Family not nominated?  And neither edition of Survivor gets nominated for Outstanding Reality Series, but the cheesy Dancing With the Stars does? And only four minorities nominated for  the Emmys? So much for diversity. At least the inane Minute To Win It and Marriage Ref weren’t nominated – or are they next year’s nominees? The Emmy Awards are becoming more and more irrelevant with each passing year. Yours truly will not be watching this year, and possibly ever.

Jeremy Green. Remember those Holiday Inn Express commercials where you were instantly smart for staying in one? Well… Tirico Suave tweets:

“Jeremy Green busted with kiddie porn AND cocaine. Good thing he was at a Holiday Inn Express or he might have done something REALLY dumb”

The now-former host of ESPN’s Football Today Podcast and son of former NFL coach Dennis Green becomes the first person in history to go to a Holiday Inn Express and comes out looking like an idiot. But don’t worry his future career endeavors – he now qualifies to co-host with fellow convict Jim Laski on WGN Radio when he gets out of jail.

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