By now you’ve most likely seen the racy Gossip Girl ad campaign displayed to the right. Conservative watchdogs barked like mad when the campaign first appeared in magazines and on bus stops nationwide. How dare the show allude to the fact that kids have sex! Like, WTF? And use an obnoxious code language only understandable by those under 18 (and who are totes lazy idiots)! ROTFLMAO, for real!
Teens, on the other hand, loved them. This is their world: high sexual drama and hyper-creative language creation. The ads perfectly encapsulates everything that makes the show attractive to young viewers: pretty people with pretty problems texting each other on pretty cell phones.
The controversial (and grammatically challenged) ads are already proving valuable. The show has already been picked up for another season. Gossip Girl is so insanely popular amongst the cyber set that The CW has stopped letting people view episodes online in an attempt to force them to watch the live shows. Faux-GG’s are popping up everywhere (we might be a stolen WiFi connection away from the return of Hard Harry); hell, Gawker practically owes their Google Page Rank to the massive number of random NYC’ers fanatically texting in celebrity encounters. Obviously, this trend is not going away.
Since Hollywood is nothing if not derivative, it’s only a matter of time before other primetime shows begin cannibalizing the Gossip Girl-created abbrevation marketing technique. In fact, I can picture those ads right now…
Other TV Shows Trying the Abbreviation Marketing Campaign:
Key:
- SSDD = Same Shit, Different Day
- GAL = Get A Life
- BED = Big Evil Grin
- 404 = Error
- WTF = What The Fuck
- ^5 = High Five!
- TGIF = Thank God It’s Friday
- TOY = Thinking Of You
- WGARA = Who Gives A Rat’s Ass
Bangarang!
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 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.
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 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.
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.
Since those glorious bastards at 
So you probably noticed the new head bar. You like? I thought it was time to give the site a facelift; one that would help initiate new readers into what TheJay.com really is: mainly making fun of celebrities. While the sunset pic was nice, it doesn’t exactly scream “Reese Witherspoon has a squirrel chin!” which is what I want this site to convey. 
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.
ABC 
Biggest Shocker of the Season: Did they just kick off Chris Daughtry? You mean I get more McPhee? Suh-WEET! Peace out, bald guy! Go have fun fronting Creed.
