Three months ago, nearing the end of a long, rather satisfying television season, I decided not to watch the final two episodes of Veronica Mars, and instead save them for the doldrums of summer when quality television is as sparse as a Lindsay Lohan sober day (I know, I know, I promised no more cheap shots like this, but it was so easy I couldn’t help myself. It’s not easy going cold turkey on Lohan bashing. Is there a patch I can buy for this?). I knew the show was being canceled and just couldn’t reconcile losing it so quickly. May sweeps is a bullish time for a high-end TV watcher such as myself and Veronica Mars deserved my full and complete attention, not just a clock-watching commercial double bloop due to a focus distracted by my musings on what I was going to find when the Lost season finale went through the looking glass (the FUTURE… spoiler!). My desire to keep the show alive and my respect for the quality of the show meant that I would have to wait, possibly a few months, to properly say farewell to one of my favorite shows of the last decade.
This weekend I finally sat down and said goodbye to Veronica Mars. I won’t bore you with the details of my experience; if you saw the finale you know both what happened and how good it was. And if you didn’t, then you suck and it’s your fault Jim Belushi is gainfully employed by the American Broadcasting Company. No, the point of this post is not to glad-hand Rob Thomas, Kristen Bell and the rest of the makers of Veronica Mars. This post is about saying goodbye to TV shows. Making peace with what is and what is not in our hands. And understanding that sometimes, despite the best of intentions, the good ones are not always meant to be.
I wasn’t originally planning on watching the VM finale this weekend. I was busy going to Napa, hitting the Manhattan Beach AVP Tournament, writing a script for a producer and seeing my best friend off to his last year at law school. I had a full load of non-entertainment related things to do. What changed were the three Netflix discs I received this week. I’m doing a summer of TV recapping, and at the moment I’m catching up on Wonderfalls, another female-centric hour-long that was beloved by critics, adored by a small, rabid fanbase, and canceled before it’s time. And while I went through my crazy schedule, I found an occasional forty-five minutes to glance over from my computer at the wacky shenanigans of a long since canceled FOX drama.
I watched the first four episodes, enjoying the odd comic timing of series lead Caroline Dhavernas, the welcome appearance of William Sadler and the Matthew Fox clone they got to play Caroline’s love interest. But the thing I got the most out of the first disc was this: the show isn’t very good. The pace is stilted, the storylines are oft putting and the protagonist isn’t very likeable. In short, the show kinda blew. So much so that I didn’t even bother with the second disc (something I’ve never done) and instead jumped right to disc three and the last two episodes of the show (as a completist I wanted to see how it all ended). And after the final credits rolled I sat and pondered just what the fuss was all about.
The cancellation of Wonderfalls, like Veronica Mars, Arrested Development and a myriad of other shows, was taken rather poorly by its fanbase. A website, savewonderfalls.com, was launched in an attempt to revive the poorly rated drama from certain doom. Obviously, that did not shake out on the positive end. Now, I’m all for trumping quality television. And I support radical action. But I can’t wrap my head around going above and beyond for a show that wasn’t all that good. I can respect that the show had its supporters, heck every show has at least one loyal viewer, but with the way the television industry is constructed, specifically in the way shows are made and put on the air, I can not cotton to the idea of saving a show that is not worth saving and has no hopes for being saved.
The two great things about television are that it is democratic and unforgiving. A show is made, marketed and aired. Home viewers decide to watch it, and then decide if they like it. If they do, they watch it again the next week. If they don’t, they don’t watch it ever again. It’s a beautifully simple and merciless process. Unlike film, where even if no one goes to see a movie in theaters, you can always watch it on DVD, television shows have no real outlet when for exhibition if they fail. Pilots that don’t make it to series can pop up on You Tube (like the Aquaman pilot with Ving “Deadly Dog” Rhames), but a show that goes to series and tanks (especially ones that never finish production on their first thirteen) disappears into the mist. The odds of a series, especially an off-beat one (by off-beat I mean not CSI), are exceedingly slim. It would be easier to get a greenlight for Daddy Day Camp 2, then to get a show on the air about a teen private detective that solves crimes in her high school. Now, knowing that to be true, I submit that it’s futile and patently irresponsible to attempt to keep a show on the air that the majority of the viewing audience does not want to see.
Poor ratings are the only valid reason for canceling a television show. And as much as I might like a show, I cannot complain of its cancellation if I’m the only person watching it. Television is a business, and a poorly rated show is bad for business. Take a show that that is original, daring, well written, fiercely acted and brimming with potential. The only problem is that not enough people are tuning in to warrant its continued expensive existence; it airs 7 or 13 or 22 episodes and is canceled. Instead of decrying the network for its evil slaughter of a quality piece of entertainment, we should be grateful we even got to see it at all. Four episodes of Wonderfalls, fifty-three of Arrested Development, sixty-four of Veronica Mars, whatever number for whatever show that you loved and lost, you should be happy the show entered your life at all. Does it suck that it was canceled? Absolutely. But it’s simply the way the medium works. It’s fair, it’s just and it’s nonmoving.
Television shows are given every chance to succeed. When embraced by the viewing public they can be worth billions of dollars to the networks. They can bring in viewers for other shows. They can make stars out of nobodies. They can become iconic. Every pilot given a series order is given so because the network believed it had a shot to become iconic (yes, even crap like According to Jim). The shows may get marketed poorly (like Hidden Palms), or put in a shitty timeslot (like the J.J, Abrams dramedy Six Degrees), or get tampered with to the point where they had no shot at being successful (take the recent Traveler, for example), but in the end it is always the viewers that determine if a show stays on the air.
A poorly rated show can survive its first season on critical reception alone (see: Felicity, Arrested Development, Veronica Mars, Everwood, etc). A poorly rated show can survive its second season on minimal ratings gains and a lack of competitive pilots in its genre. But no show, no matter how good, can survive past a third season without good ratings. Period. After forty episodes, if a show has not clicked with viewers, it will never click. There have been shows that took a while to get hot. Cheers was 82nd in the ratings in its first year, only to be a top ten show by season three. But viewers don’t wait three full seasons to decide to start watching a television show. It just doesn’t happen.
This is why I cannot complain about the cancellation of Veronica Mars, Arrested Development, Wonderfalls, Sports Night, Firefly, Freaks and Geeks, et al. They were all given ample chances to succeed, and none of them did. CW prexy Dawn Ostroff worked every angle to bring Veronica Mars back for a fourth season, but the math never warranted it. They paired the show up with the network smash Gilmore Girls, and VM couldn’t retain enough of the audience. They paired the show up with advertisers to stem the production costs, but that didn’t take. Posters were put in schools and in malls. Guest stars were brought in (Harry Hamlin, Patty Duke, Kevin Smith, Joss Whedon). Nothing worked. The CW even asked series creator Rob Thomas to alter the serial format of the show and do stand alone mysteries in an attempt to bring in new viewers. The shows were bad and the new viewers never showed. The show was lucky it was on the air for as long as it was, and it’s a testament to its quality it made it past the first season at all, let alone the second. And the same goes for Arrested Development. Fox desperately wanted that show to be a hit. It would have given them artistic credibility and their first real chance at a Best Comedy Emmy. But it didn’t take. America as a whole just did not care for the Bluth family.
And we’re just gonna have to live with it.
Television shows come and go. They are transitory by nature. You enjoy them while they are there, mourn them for a time when they are gone, and then find a new show to love. This season alone I lost three of my top shelf favorite shows (Veronica Mars, The Loop & The OC), and saw the abrupt cancellation of no less than seven shows I enjoyed (Studio 60, The Class, Six Degrees, The Winner, Raines, Kidnapped, Andy Barker P.I.). Last year I lost The West Wing, AD and That 70’s Show. And this coming year I’m gonna have to say goodbye to Scrubs. Such is life as a TV watcher. You let the good ones go. You let them go because they were too good for their own good. Perhaps if Arrested Development had been dumber, Veronica Mars less complex, Wonderfalls less irritating, Firefly less overtly geeky, they would all be gearing up for their fall premiere. But if that had been the case, we would not have loved them in the first place. It was those exact qualities (brains, complexity, wit, defiance) that made them worthy of our time.
This all leads to my thoughts on the successful campaign to bring back CBS’s nuclear fall out thriller Jericho. I watched the premiere, laughed at the notion of Skeet Ulrich carrying a network drama and promptly judged the show as mediocre. I never watched it again, but apparently many people in the fall did. It was a modest hit with the potential to break out. However, CBS pulled it from the schedule for four months, a big no-no for serialized shows (just ask Lost), and on its return the audience shrunk faster than the second weekend box office for The Matrix Revolutions. CBS promptly canceled the show, and that’s when the nuts started arriving. Fans of Jericho swarmed CBS offices with bags of nuts, an in-joke from the show, in an attempt to prove that Jericho was worth saving. After a few metric tons of nuts showed up CBS gave in and renewed the series for an eight episode second season. This was a mistake.
Jericho’s ratings will not improve. The show is too insular for it to be a breakout hit, and the mythology of the show is on the verge of becoming too dense for new viewers to wade through. Plus, hello, Skeet Ulrich is the series lead. If Jericho was as good as these crazy nut senders would lead you to believe, than the drop-off from fall to spring would not have been so severe. Lost was still a hit after taking three months off, last season. 24 and American Idol continue to do well despite having a nearly seven month layoff between seasons. Good shows that people like do well regardless of the timeslot or disparity between new episodes. Take Moonlighting, a show that never aired more than 16 episodes in a nine month season, yet won a slew of Emmy’s, made a star out of Bruce Willis and aired for five years.
CBS flinched at the overwhelming viewer response because they haven’t had a show worthy of such an act in decades. Nobody is freaking out if NCIS gets canceled, know what I mean? Aside from How I Met Your Mother, Jericho is the only young skewing show on their network, and young viewers are quite easily made mental (just ask the Fox Network); heck the campaign probably started because people were so shocked that CBS was airing such a hip show and didn’t want that to end. Similar campaigns worked for Veronica Mars and Gilmore Girls in seasons past because their network didn’t have a good enough replacement, and because their target demographic was the exact same people leading the charge. Campaigns for Wonderfalls and Firefly didn’t work because FOX had replacement junk at its beck and call. They go through shows like Mandy Patinkin goes through TV series’. Jericho will fail on its return and CBS will never again bring back a struggling show with a tenuous plot concept. The Nuts-heads have effectively ruined the chances for any future big three drama that is even minutely difficult. Way to push your chips in for the star of Chill Factor, dicks.
Let these shows go, kids. No less than 60 shows are set to debut in the next four months, and that doesn’t even include cable. Pushing Daises, Bionic Woman, Private Practice, Chuck, Journeyman, Viva Laughlin, Moonlight, Reaper, K-Ville, The Sarah Conner Chronicles; these shows need our help now. Forget the Jericho’s and The Nine’s and the Andy Barker’s and the What About Brian’s. They had their shot and they blew it. Nobody wanted them around. It’s time to give the new kids a chance. Because maybe one of them will turn out to be the next Arrested Development or Veronica Mars. Maybe your favorite television show of all time hasn’t even aired yet. Isn’t that more worth your attention? Let’s not bemoan the loss of shows that had multiple chances to succeed, and instead enjoy the new batch of pilots and put all our efforts into keeping the good ones from failing.
I will miss Veronica Mars for some time. But in the end, maybe it’s just for the best. When the Ben Stiller Show was canceled Ben Stiller and Janeane Garofalo became movie stars, and head writer Judd Apatow became Judd Apatow. Bryan Fuller failed on Wonderfalls but is getting a second chance with the infinitely better (and more precious) Pushing Daises. The failure of Sports Night led to The West Wing. Bill Lawrence bombed on Spin City and came back to give us Scrubs. Will Arnett, Jason Bateman and Michael Cera are all top-lining movies now. And I look forward to seeing what will become of Kristen Bell and Rob Thomas. I predict they’re going to be giving us quality entertainment for many years to come. Their show may be dead, but the mark left by the show on the industry will linger for years to come.
And that’s the real lesson for why good shows get canceled before their time. So that the makers can go on to make better shows. Speaking off, if you’ll excuse me I need to go catch the new David Duchovny tittyball show on Showtime, created by Tom Kapinos, a guy who used to produce a little show called Dawson’s Creek. From the ashes of poorly written teen angst cancellation, to the phoenix-like rebirth of soft-core Duchovny cable porn. TV, it’s a beautiful thing.
The Verdict: Renewal is a waste, bring on the newbies.
Bangarang!
However, and it’s a significant however, the journey is worth it. And I just don’t understand why The CW doesn’t recognize that.
The ratings of the show seem to be the only real mark against renewal. I can understand the notion that a network should never settle for mediocre numbers, but when the entire network slate is one giant mediocre Nielson rating, landing in the 110th as opposed to 117th spot on the chart is splitting hairs. Veronica Mars airs Tuesdays at 9pm, opposite the Dancing With The Stars results show (already a built-in audience), House (with American Idol’s ginormous lead-in), The Unit (taking away the entire male 31-49 demo), and the bastard Law & Order spinoff, Criminal Intent. That’s four huge shows with marketing support dwarfing that of The CW, on networks that are more widely watched and even more widely available than The CW. At what point were the expectations of this show so high that they were expected to topple anything the Big 4 put out? 
Most cult / small shows need a few seasons to get going. Take Cheers, Seinfeld or Buffy as examples. All were ratings-poor in the first few seasons, but took off by their 3rd and 4th seasons. Shows that are more difficult to watch or are non-traditional need support and longevity to sell their premise. A teen private eye is not an easy sell in a time when the other personification of teen life on television is My Super Sweet Sixteen. Moreover, noir is not a particularly popular genre. Lost is just as labyrinthine, but it’s base genre is epic sci-fi, which has traditionally sold very well on TV (think The X-Files, which I’d like to point out, also took four seasons before it became a phenomenon).
If the show can show some improvement it would do wonders for its chances of survival. It just needs a little help. It’s an underseen diamond in the rough; a television show that works hard to be great and asks a lot of its viewers. It never panders and it never dumbs itself down. It doesn’t introduce cute babies or have gimmicky weddings. It’s not stale and crusty like half the CBS dramatic line-up and it’s not trashy like the majority of the FOX line-up. Veronica Mars is a quality show in an era of lesser standards. And if The CW can’t understand that, then I’ll live with it. But I won’t have any reason to watch their network, either (I’ve gotten over my Kristin Kreuk crush, too).
THINGS I SAW IN 2006 THAT WERE REALLY, REALLY GOOD
Not every movie is supposed to make you think, some just want to entertain you. And in the case of Jackass Number Two, that’s alright with me. I didn’t laugh more in any other film this year. Gross, disgusting, vulgar, violent and awesome. I make no excuses for loving this flick, or for rating it as high as I did. When a movie so thoroughly entertains you that it takes a couple minutes to come up with something funnier or more subversively brilliant, you put it in your Top Ten, period.
Jack being Jack, Damon being awesomely squirrelly, Leo rocking the crazed “guy at the end of his rope” thing he does so well, Mark Wahlberg spitting some mad Boston game, and Alec Baldwin kicking ass harder than anyone else since his own turn in Glengarry Glen Ross; I loved this movie. Perfectly paced and plotted, superbly cast, acted, shot and edited. The only misstep of the entire picture is the final shot, which I felt was just a bit too on the nose. But that is forgiven, as the flick is so supremely watchable. And it may be the most quotable movie of the year. Anything that came out of Wahlberg or Baldwin’s mouth was pure gold. Here are my two favorite pieces of dialogue from the film:
Gritty, demanding, propulsive and powerful, this Alfonso Cuaron-directed film is the best sci-fi flick of 2006. I was impressed with how confident the film was about the world it created. Set in a dystopian, infertile 2027, the world looks quite like it does today, only with minor futuristic flourishes (which is how it should be. I hate when futuristic movies have us so technologically advanced that the world is unrecognizable. It would take 80 years and many trillions of dollars to erase the poverty line and tech up the lower class, so filmmakers, let’s get off the grift). The forward momentum of the movie is exhilarating. You just can’t look back, the film won’t let you. It has a mission and you are either on board or you’re not. Clive Owen and Julianne Moore are their usual perfection and Michael Caine gives a wonderful performance as a pothead, ex-political cartoonist. I liked other films more than Children of Men this year, but I can’t deny this film’s raw power. Most of all, the film has arguably the most emotional scene in any film all year. When Owen is bringing the baby down the hospital stairs, well let’s just say it got a little dusty in the theater.
I generally loathe all things British. Can’t stand British comedy (especially Monty Python), never got into Guy Ritchie, I want to sock James Blunt in the larynx, and I’d choose Rachel McAdams over Rachel Weisz any day of the week and twice on Sundays. All that is too say my chances of liking a film about the British Royal Family were remote to say the least. And yet, ten minutes into the masterful “The Queen” I turned to my theater companion and said “this is fantastic”. Helen Mirren gives hands-down the best performance of the year. She is pitch-perfect and heartbreaking as Queen Elizabeth II. The journey her character takes to try and understand the changing emotions of her people is as emotional and rewarding a narrative arc as I saw all year. 
Dirt – I can understand Courtney Cox not wanting to ever do another “nice girl” part in her career. If I had to smile in every scene for 237 episodes of Friends, I’d want to play a raving bitch, too. What I can’t understand is basing your new show around a schizophrenic paparazzi with no range beyond “twitchy”. Don’t be fooled by the promos, Dirt is not about Monica Gellar gone bad. It’s about a crazy, unattractive, drugged-out photographer and his inability to cope with his beloved cat’s death. I wish I were kidding. The rest of the show is a send-up of the cutthroat Hollywood rat race that Entourage does better, graphic cable TV sex that Nip / Tuck makes hotter, and racy language I’d rather see coming out of Vic Mackey on The Shield. Killing Shannyn Sossamon in the pilot was a stroke of brilliance, but having nothing else to offer is a mark of supreme short-sightedness. Dirt may have something else up its sleeve, but I’m not interested in waiting around for the big reveal.
January 2007 Crazebrity Power Rankings* 
Well, I did not see this coming. But maybe it’s just me. The other day I was walking down the street when suddenly I had a panic attack because the whole sky started turning black. Where was the sun going? Then later that night I couldn’t understand why I was so tired at the end of a day. And then my stomach starting hurting, but I’m not sure why I was hungry, after all, I ate once already that day. Why do these things always happen to me? Why do celebrity marriages always end in tragedy? I’m so confused, and scared.
This whole union was, for lack of a better word, inevitable. I would venture that not a soul that follows pop culture would have suspecting these kids would be the next Newman and Woodward. Or even the next Tori Spelling and that first guy she married and then divorced to be with the guy she’s with now who knocked her up and convinced her to bail on Lifetime movies to run a bed and breakfast in NoCal, even though Lifetime residuals were the only thing keeping her from selling her stuff on eBay, and oops, too late (I think his name is Tom, or something). The Spears-Federline dissolution was so inevitable, I had refused to write about it. I’ll make jokes about Reese Witherspoon having talent before I spend brain power and typing time on the thought that this match made in trailer-trash Hostess Heaven would last beyond the release of her next album (which, by the way, is due out early next year). I just didn’t want to waste my time.
Let’s do an exercise together. Imagine you’re looking at a big board, and on that board are the primetime lineups of all five major television networks. You can see all their shows, from Monday to Sunday. Scan over the names, making sure to take a moment to refresh yourself with the history of each. Done? OK, now, tell me if you can name just one hour long drama that’s past its fourth year of existence right now, and that doesn’t involve a CSI, NCIS, L&O or Keifer Sutherland. Take your time, I’ll wait. Still thinking? Alright stop, I’m going to save you the time. There’s only three of them, and they’re all on The CW: 7th Heaven, Gilmore Girls and Smallville. One stole a timeslot from a far superior show (Everwood), one needs to be put down like a sick goat (suck on that, Lorelai!) and the other is only still on 
And they stayed on long enough to build their worlds and attract an audience. Shows premiering today get two episodes tops before the networks pull the plug. This last spring, you couldn’t trip over a tranny on Santa Monica Blvd. without seeing Heather Graham’s smiling face blonding back at you. I didn’t even see her show and I love me some Rollergirl. Why didn’t I watch it? Cause ABC canceled it after one airing. One! Pilots suck in general. By design they’re not meant to be the best episode of the series. So how can you judge a show based on its rookie twenty-two minutes? I’m tired of getting hyped up all summer only to tune in and have my time wasted when Wonderfalls, The Inside, Karen Sisco, Surface, Threshold, Jack and Bobby, Skin, Night Stalker, Miss Match, Miracles, Lyon’s Den, Line of Fire, Life As We Know It, John Doe, Boomtown, etc get yanked almost immediately.
I’m going to watch everything. Every single new show. I’m going to try them all once. If it doesn’t make me throw up a little in my mouth, it gets a second chance. If it never gets better I won’t watch past the third episode (peace out Justice, Happy Hour, Vanished and Til Death). But I will watch everything. And by watching everything I’ll truly know what’s worth spending my time on. The goal is to catch all 26 new shows and do a sweep of all 55 returning shows and then eventually whittle it down by quality until I’m only watching 10 on a weekly basis. Ten would seem like a lot, but I have presets built in – I’m required to watch Lost, Grey’s, House, Veronica Mars, How I Met Your Mother and in the Spring, Scrubs – so I’m really only looking to five slots. By loyalty to Aaron Sorkin I will follow Studio 60 (even though it hasn’t yet risen above the level of average). Now I’m down to four slots. I’m combining My Name Is Earl and The Office into one big mega-sitcom, so now I’m only down to three slots. Three new shows out of seventy-five choices. My TiVo is gonna get a run for its money.
Some first impressions you never forget. The first time you saw Rocky facing up Apollo Creed. The first time you saw Christopher Walken dance. The first time you saw Angelina Jolie’s perfect untainted, un-Billy Bob-ed bumblebee lips in Hackers. Those first impressions help to shape our judgments of celebrities. Some first impressions are good (i.e Hugh Jackman kicking ass in the bar fight in X-Men and signaling there was a new badass in town) and some are not so good (It’s hard to take two-time Academy Award winning actress Hilary Swank seriously when the first time I saw her she was being romanced on 90210 by the be-mulleted Ian Ziering). But once you have that first impression, it’s very difficult to change it. 
You see, Mark Wahlberg has a giant mouth. It’s huge. I’m watching Boogie Nights wondering what the big deal is about his schlong, when I just saw him swallow the entire left side of Julianne Moore’s head. The damn thing freaks me out. So whenever I’m watching a Marky Mark movie, be it Three Kings or The Italian Job, I’m enjoying myself and his performance, but I’m always silently waiting for him to open his hugenormous maw and take a T-Rex size chomp out of the guy blocking his close-up.
Talk about first impressions. I’ll always remember her from the pilot episode of Lost where she’s running from the Black Smoke Monster, hides under a tree and starts counting slowly to five. It’s a close-up of her face, with her mouth taking up nearly the entire bottom half of the screen. You needed a wide-screen TV just to stop ABC from having to Pan & Scan. And seriously, why was she so afraid of the monster? She should have just gone out, opened her mouth and growled. Black Smoke Monsters are just like any other fictional animal, you show them dominance and they’ll back down. Either that, or be Mr. Eko. He doesn’t need a big mouth to take down the Black Smoke Monster, he just needs his sweet bible staff, molasses-slow delivery and non-symmetrical facial hair.
I really think Christopher Nolan got it wrong in casting Heath Ledger as The Joker in the next Batman flick. Sure it seems logical to have a one-time gay cowboy / blonde-ringlet sporting jouster / teen heart throb play the most famously sadistic villain in all of comics’ history. But wouldn’t it be more logical to cast someone who actually looks like a cartoon character? I mean, good lord, did Teri Hatcher always look like that, or did she fall into a vat of acid and couldn’t afford a better plastic surgeon? Her smile is literally ear to ear. I’m frankly scared of watching Desperate Housewives now. Who knows when she’ll open her mouth to talk and Eva Longoria will just fall in and disappear. It’ll be like the scene in Hook when the stuffed crocodile eats Dustin Hoffman. “Eva’s gone.” And then all the Wisteria Lane townspeople rejoice.
You know you have a big mouth when a movie bases its entire marketing campaign around it. Rosario Dawson’s mouth is almost legendary now, what with her half-kissing / half saliva face coating of Clive Owen in Sin City. Not to mention nearly decapitating wee little Colin Farrell in Alexander. Their sex scene was one part erotic, one part torture, and two parts snuff film. No wonder Colin turned to booze and pills. Anything to make him forget the time he spent in Rosario’s mouth. And let’s not even go into her work in Clerks 2. Watching her kiss the lipless Brian O’Halleran was more traumatic then the Jason Mewes tuck scene. She should stick to gnashing on A-list stars and espousing on the joys of dry humping like she did in Kids. That’s how I like to remember her.
Seriously, go back and watch Fear. We were a half-inch smaller Reese Witherspoon squirrel chin from losing the future Elle Woods to the gaping maw of Marky Mark. He just should not be doing kissing scenes with petite actresses. What if he misjudges his approach and ends of chewing on their ear, Tyson-style? He needs to stick with the puffy lippers, as we can’t afford to lose anymore thin lipped beauties. Kissing Charlize Theron in The Italian Job was the safest thing he’s ever done. Her puffy lips created a makeshift damn, thereby containing the Marky Mark Maw. Just think of who he could take out: Christina Ricci, Keira Knightley, Lucy Lui, Anna Faris. We need to stop the starlet swallowing while there’s still time. 
I know she’s a singer, but remember, not only was she on You Can’t Do That On Television (where I first was introduced to her), but she also played God. If I’m including Jesus on this list, I gotta include the big man (or woman, as it were). Alanis’s mouth is big beyond belief. Whenever I see her perform live the microphone looks like it was made to scale. When she opened her mouth and screamed to blow up Ben Affleck in Dogma, the ensuing carnage wasn’t even surprising. It just confirmed my fear of what she and all the other big-mouthed stars are capable of, should we ever truly piss them off. Ever wonder why Alanis-fiancée Ryan Reynolds got so buff so quickly? He was making sure that when the made love she’d have a harder time trying to swallow him. His muscles are a just a mere mouth deterrent. These are the measures one must undertake to survive in a world where at any moment the Morissette Mouth could end us all. I would say pray to God, but that won’t work, because Alanis is God!
