Clooney gets The Fall of Bob on Showtime
To some people, George Clooney’s affable good nature and sincerity comes off as smug over-confidence. I fall into the former rather than the latter category.
I think George is ambitious and grateful to be working in the business. I think he remembers the years of struggling to become a star — those years on The Facts of Life and Riptide and E/R (the Elliott Gould sitcom, not the Emmy award-winning NBC medical drama).
Failures like Leatherheads have to keep him humble. Anyway, his efforts to expand as an actor and director and producer strike me as someone who is wisely not resting on his laurels. That said, today it was reported that Clooney’s production company, Smoke House, is behind a new pilot for Showtime called The Fall of Bob.
The title character of this half-hour comedy, Bob, is all about suicide. Actually, it’s about what’s happening while he’s attempting to commit suicide. Bob jumps off a building and as he’s plummeting to the ground, his life flashes before his eyes. In flashbacks, Bob narrates the stories of those flashback episodes. Presumably, those scenes will give us some idea why Bob has jumped in the first place.
Danny Zuker is the creator of this dark comedy. For obvious reasons, it’ll be shot in a single-comedy format, the current trend in Hollywood. Zuker’s been involved in all kinds of comedy, including Roseanne, Grace Under Fire, Coupling, and most recently, Pamela Anderson’s Fox series, Stacked.
Fear Itself: Spooked
This is what is fun about anthology shows, and why I can never understand why they never do better in the ratings. As much as people bitch about and resist taking a chance on long-form new serialized programs like the ’05-’06 trinity of Invasion, Surface and Threshold, you would think they would embrace a series where each episode truly stands alone. With a show like this, your investment into it won’t be impacted in any way if the network pulls the plug after only thirteen episodes, or even just four.
And yet, anthology shows tend to struggle even more than heavily serialized fare. In fact, Fear Itself got its ass handed to it by Swingtown in the head-to-head premieres last week. The big question is, with the “not-so-good” nature of the premiere, how many people came back to see this much improved second episode, and how many will stick around for Daniel Knaupf’s outstanding episode next week? While last week was a poorly written and acted “monster of the week” boobfest, this time we got a well constructed good old-fashioned haunting.
I liked the set-up to get us into this haunting. Eric Roberts played a police officer stripped of his badge for essentially killing a suspect to get more information out of him. Then we cut to years later and now he’s a private investigator, spending his time taking pictures of cheating spouses and extorting his clients when he gets the chance to. With the background established, he was hired to watch a house overnight so that he might catch a cheating husband, and the client (Cynthia Watros) even suggested he go to the abandoned house across the street to set up as he wouldn’t be bothered there.
And just like that, we got the character into the haunted house. From there, I really enjoyed the twist of the house he was set up in, giving him visions of events occurring in the house he was watching; visions for him alone, as his partner (Larry Gilliard Jr.) who was set up down the street in a van never experienced any of it. The effects on the spectral manifestations were spot on, and the tension was very well handled. About the only thing I would have appreciated more was a true sense of danger for Roberts’ character.
All in all, though, the hauntings seemed to be more about addressing the sins of his youth as channeled through his adult behavior. Of course we were going to tap back into the incident that got him removed from the force, but even more compelling for me was the ultimate sin committed as a result of a childhood accident. In a way, his emotional and psychological issues emanate almost completely as a result of what his father forced him to do.
Good horror pulls us into the psyche of our victim and a good haunting is as much psychological as it is just violence and gore (see last week’s “The Sacrifice” for just such a lack of depth). “Spooked” gave us disturbing images, from Roberts’ father jamming bullets into his gums to the ever-changing images on the wall, and a complex back story connecting all of the disparate elements by the end. But it was the personal connection to those images by both Roberts and Watros that made them all the more compelling.
Again, the only thing that could have made it more “scary” would be if the specters came across as true threats to Roberts. As it was, they appeared to simply be there to show him things he didn’t want to remember, freak him out a bit and think about what kind of a person he was. The real and physical dangers came only from the encounters between real people within the episode.
The potential in the story is such that it could have been made a lot more intense and exciting by increasing the threat factor from the hauntings themselves and doing more with Gilliard’s character. As it was, his role was essentially to sit in the van and say to Roberts, “Nope, I don’t see anything.” I get that it was Roberts who was the target of the hauntings, but to pull his partner and friend into the danger, even if he remained skeptical to the whole thing, would have increased the tension and the stakes tremendously for the already embattled Roberts.
In the end, though, we got a typically satisfying horror short story conclusion. Lessons were learned, in some cases, but as is often the case, these lessons are learned too little too late and we must pay for the mistakes we’ve made in life. And as we pay for those mistakes, we in turn corrupt the next generation of innocents, so the cycle can continue. Maybe I’m over-analyzing things, but I’ve read a lot of horror stories and novels, and seen a lot of horror shows and movies and I just found this to be a wholly satisfying experience of the genre.
Kathy Ireland Biography
Kathy Ireland was born March 8th, 1963, in Santa Barbara, California. Her adolescence foreshadowed her future busy career as a wife, mother, businesswoman, humanitarian, actress, and model.
A shy teenager, Kathy kept busy with a slew of after-school jobs, including a newspaper courier (she was named Courier of the Year three years in a row), a waitress, a hostess, and a department store saleswoman. Her good nature was evident early on in her career, with her work at a convalescent home.
At the age of 17, Kathy was discovered by an Elite Modeling scout (the beginning of practically every model’s career). By the time she had finished high school, with original hopes of working in education, marine biology, or journalism, she was jet-setting to Europe for photo shoots.
Her modeling career reached its peak after she snagged the highly coveted 1984 cover of Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Edition, which only marked the beginning of her relationship with the popular “swimsuit” magazine.
Kathy could be seen on the cover of Sports Illustrated three more times, and has since appeared in the magazine a record-setting thirteen times, including the magazine’s 25th Anniversary Special. Her incredible physique graced the covers of many more magazines throughout her career, including Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Mademoiselle, Shape, Seventeen, and Harper’s Bazaar.
If men couldn’t get enough of Kathy after all her magazine appearances, they could get a daily dose of Kathy in her own annual Swimsuit Calendar (which is one of the highest selling calendars in the world).
In the midst of her illustrious modeling career, Kathy was appearing on the silver screen, the boob tube and on stage. Among her list of film credits reads Mr. Destiny, Necessary Roughness, Robert Altman’s The Player (as herself), Loaded Weapon 1, Amore!, and Backfire!
As for television roles, she appeared in Danger Island, Perry Mason: The Case of the Wicked Wives, Melrose Place, Miami Hustle, and Suddenly Susan. She also starred in the play Three Tall Women
And her career doesn’t end with modeling and acting either. Kathy is the designer of her own line of clothing, the “Kathy Ireland Brand”, promoting style and quality at reasonable prices. Her line has expanded into a women’s swimwear collection, exercise apparel, maternity line, home collections, and even watches, shoes, and handbags.
In her goal to promote fitness, health and well-being, Kathy became a certified fitness instructor in 1994, and has since released her best-selling fitness videos, which include: Kathy Ireland’s Total Fitness, Kathy Ireland’s Body Specifics, and Great Buns in 12 Minutes. Partly fulfilling her journalistic interests, Kathy is a contributing editor to Fitness Magazine.
Kathy has practically had the career of several women combined, with the long list of non-profit organizations she is involved with. She is the Entertainment Industry Foundation’s Ambassador for the National Women’s Cancer Research Alliance, the Honorary Chairperson for the March of Dimes WalkAmerica program, and the National Chairperson of Family Services and Parenting for Athletes and Entertainers for Kids.
She is also active in the Special Olympics, Feed the Children, Casa Julia de Burgos in Puerto Rico (for battered women and children), the Santa Barbara Rescue Mission, Project Inform in San Francisco (disseminates HIV/AIDS treatment information nationwide), among many other charities and important causes.