Conan O’Brien Launches TeamCoco.com and is coming to a town near you

With this morning’s announcement of Conan O’Brien’s 30-city tour, the former late-night comedian is fully embracing his online fan base, “Team Coco.”

The official poster for the tour re-uses the image made famous on the Internet of a heroic Mr. O’Brien, orange hair aflame, in front of an American flag. The image was produced by Mike Mitchell, an artist in Los Angeles, as a show of support for Mr. O’Brien when NBC tried in January to move “The Tonight Show” to 12:05 a.m. Within days the image and its message, “I’m With Coco,” was a viral sensation, inspiring dozens of pro-Conan groups on Facebook. Several of Mr. O’Brien’s employees even made the image their Facebook profile photo.

Now they have formally adopted the image as their own. Days after Mr. O’Brien signed off of “The Tonight Show” on Jan. 22, one of the comedian’s producers contacted Mr. Mitchell and said that they wanted the “Coco” illustration to be the emblem of a nationwide tour they were planning.

“They wanted it to be the main image,” Mr. Mitchell recalled in an e-mail message Thursday. “They are all such fans of the ‘I’m with Coco’ poster and what it means to everyone.”

Mr. Mitchell met with Mr. O’Brien’s executive producer, Jeff Ross, about a month ago, to talk through a licensing deal.

“Apparently Conan wanted to get me on board for it – obviously I was honored,” Mr. Mitchell said. He said he retains the rights to the widely distributed image; Mr. O’Brien’s team will use it for the tour and for some merchandise sales.

Mr. O’Brien has set up an online presence on Twitter and at TeamCoco.com. His representatives do not own ConanOBrien.com, so TeamCoco could become his primary Web site. The site currently promotes the tour, and says it is “Copyright © 2010 Team Coco Inc.”

Asked about compensation for the image, Mr. Mitchell said “a fair deal was made for both parties.”

Mr. Mitchell said Mr. O’Brien called to thank him for creating the image. He recalled Mr. O’Brien joking that “I love anything with my face on it, and CONAN in huge bold letters.”

Rapper Ludacris runs his own show

Ludacris removes his shades as he awaits his lunch at the restaurant in the posh Mandarin Oriental Hotel. He concedes he is a little tired with a concert at the nearby Verizon Center just a few hours away, but he really doesn't have time for rest. The Atlanta rapper also known as Chris Bridges is a busy man.

The Grammy-winning, platinum-selling artist has his hands full promoting his star-studded new album, Battle of the Sexes, out today, while also touring with the Black Eyed Peas and collaborating on current hits by Justin Bieber (Baby), Raheem DeVaughn (Bulletproof) and Taio Cruz (Break Your Heart). On the side, he's juggling a slew of charity and business ventures, including his Disturbing Tha Peace record label and a popular Atlanta restaurant. Parenthood and a thriving acting career also vie for his attention.

"I know I'm working hard, but it's hard for me to think about all I'm doing because I'm constantly on the move," says Ludacris, 32. "How do I do it? I take it one minute at a time. I've got a great team of people around me, I designate my time intelligently, and I'm a great multitasker."

He's also passionate about applying creative tweaks to his latest projects. On Battle, he enlists several female artists to engage him in lyrical conversations on gender. That novel concept initially was hatched for a duet with former DTP labelmate Shawnna, but it was broadened to include a range of female and male artists.

"Hip-hop is such a male-dominated industry," says Ludacris, who has been criticized for less-than-flattering references to women in his lyrics. "There's a female voice that's sometimes kind of missing."

His collaborators welcomed the opportunity to fire back.

"Guys and girls have been having this battle of the sexes from the beginning of time," says newcomer Nicki Manaj, who rhymes on the song My Chick Bad. "So when you put that to the music, it's fun."

Says Eve, who has heard on a remix of the same song: "This is a great concept. I wish I'd thought of it."

Another track, Hey Ho with Lil' Kim, addresses the double standards of promiscuity. Can't Live With You, featuring his cousin Monica, deals with a couple in an edgy though loving relationship, and B.O.T.S. Radio finds him and Shawnna giving callers advice on love.

He doesn't have a counterpart on the current club banger How Low, which went No. 1 on USA TODAY's urban airplay chart and has sold 1.2 million downloads, but it has inspired numerous remixes featuring Ciara and Pitbull, Rick Ross and Twista, and Flo Rida. "Everybody is sending me verses, which is flattering," he says. "We have so many versions of that song it's ridiculous."

Chuck Creekmur of music news site AllHipHop.com says Battle is continued evidence of Ludacris' musical growth after six hit albums and 14 top-10 R&B singles. He has sold more than 14 million albums in the USA.

"He's a real artist who commits to a concept and seeing it through," Creekmur says. "A lot of artists string together a bunch of songs and call it an album."

Ludacris, who got his start in the late 1990s at an Atlanta radio station as DJ Chris Lova Lova, was known as a brash party animal when he made his debut in 2000 with Back for the First Time. But in recent years, he has varied his themes to keep his music fresh. The still playful but more mature The Red Light District came out in 2004 and was followed by the somewhat darker Release Therapy two years later.

"He could have easily fallen victim to some of the traps other artists fall into by trying to stay the same," Creekmur says. "He's grown from kind of cartoonish rapper to a grown-up hip-hop artist. He's very lyrical, but some people forget that because of some of his more pop songs."

Building respect

That's a misconception Ludacris set out to change with 2008's Theater of the Mind, which went gold but was his first album to fall short of selling 1 million copies. It coincidentally came out at a time when he was getting notices as an actor. He calls the cinematically themed opus his favorite album to date.

"With that album, I set out to be respected as a lyricist," Ludacris says. "I feel like I accomplished that because even though I had sold a lot of records, people didn't start calling me a lyricist until after Theater of the Mind came out. I just love to re-invent and challenge myself to do things that I haven't done."

He applies that drive to all his projects. He was already a connoisseur of fine spirits when he was approached two years ago by the venerable French/Norwegian winery Birkedal Hartmann about bringing a new Cognac brand, Conjure, to the USA in a 50/50 venture. He didn't want to simply lend his name to the product's marketing, so he learned everything he could about the company and the process, then went to Europe to see it firsthand.

"We wanted somebody who would be really involved," says Kim Birkedal Hartmann, fourth-generation owner of the Cognac, France-based company established in 1887. "We just didn't want any endorsement deal. It was fascinating to see how interested he was. He wanted to know everything, and our master blender helped him select and blend the Cognacs he wanted."

Ludacris proudly declares that the custom-made liquor "tastes like luxury."

Forging such partnerships is one of the rapper's fortes. He got into business with San Francisco chef Chris Yeo, whose Straits restaurants serve spicy Singaporean cuisine, three years ago after meeting him at a charitable dinner. Straits Atlanta, which opened in April 2008, is now one of the city's more popular upscale restaurants. This year, he signed on with MTV to host and executive produce the Sprite Step Off, a documentary-style series that aired in February and followed step teams from three fraternities and three sororities competing for $100,000 in scholarships.

"I just treat people the way I want to be treated, and I respect my elders," he says. "Relationships are extremely important. Whether it's making records or in business, if we combine our efforts, intelligence and resources, there is no limit to the things we can do."

But time does limit the things he can do, and he has put his film career on hold until he finishes his tour in mid-April. He says his next role may be in the fifth installment of The Fast and The Furious franchise (he was in the first sequel, 2 Fast 2 Furious), which is still in development. His acting résumé includes Max Payne, RocknRolla, Fred Claus and Gamer and TV's Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and he won a Screen Actors Guild outstanding cast award for Crash and was nominated for another with Hustle & Flow. He says he has been careful not to accept stereotypically thuggish "rapper" roles and even thought of turning down Hustle & Flow until producer John Singleton convinced him that the down-and-out rapper he portrayed differed greatly from his own personality.

"As it turned out, I'm glad that I did do it," he says. "But I definitely want to continue to take roles that people would not expect me to take."

Parenthood in the picture

His face lights up when asked about his role as a parent. He calls his daughter, Karma, 8, "my best friend."

"She rolls with me," he says. "Whenever I'm at the restaurant, she's there trying to help out the servers and she gets paid for that. And whenever I'm acting, she'll come on set and root me on. I'll bring her to some of my shows — the clean ones I do at festivals where there are other kids. She's my road dog and she loves it."

He says he won't be slowing down in the foreseeable future. He already has decided on Ludaversal— a play on Universal Records, DTP's parent company — as the title for his next album, which he says could arrive by year's end. In the meantime, he's ready for any other opportunities that come his way.

"It's just the rush that I get from working toward a goal and really loving what I do," he says. "I love it so much it's almost a crime, because not everybody is so blessed. I will keep going until I can't do any more."

'Lost Boys' actor Corey Haim dead in Burbank at 38

Corey Haim, a 1980s teen heartthrob for his roles in Lucas and The Lost Boys whose career was blighted by drug abuse, has died. He was 38.

Haim died early Wednesday at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, Los Angeles County coroner's Lt. Cheryl MacWillie said.

"As he got out of bed, he felt a little weak and went down to the floor on his knees," Assistant Chief Coroner Ed Winter said. His mother called paramedics.

An autopsy will determine Haim's cause of death. There was no evidence of foul play, police Sgt. Michael Kammert said.

Haim, who gained attention for his roles in "Lucas" and "The Lost Boys," had flulike symptoms before he died and was getting over-the-counter and prescription medications, police Sgt. William Mann said.

"He could have succumbed to whatever (illness) he had or it could have been drugs," Mann said. "He has had a drug problem in the past."

Haim was taken by ambulance to the hospital from an apartment in Los Angeles near Burbank. The enormous complex is known as Oakwood and is popular with young actors, Kammert said.

Haim acknowledged his struggle with drug abuse to The Sun in 2004.

"I was working on Lost Boys when I smoked my first joint," he told the British tabloid.

"I did cocaine for about a year and a half, then it led to crack," he said.

Haim said he went into rehabilitation and was put on prescription drugs. He took both stimulants and sedatives such as Valium.

"I started on the downers which were a hell of a lot better than the uppers because I was a nervous wreck," he said. "But one led to two, two led to four, four led to eight, until at the end it was about 85 a day."

In 2007, he told ABC's Nightline that drugs hurt his career.

"I feel like with myself I ruined myself to the point where I wasn't functional enough to work for anybody, even myself. I wasn't working," he said.

The Toronto-born actor got his start in television commercials at 10 and earned a good reputation for his work in such films as 1985's Murphy's Romance and his portrayal of Liza Minelli's dying son in the 1985 television film A Time to Live.

His career peaked and he became a teen heartthrob with his roles in the 1986 movie Lucas, and The Lost Boys, in which he battled vampires.

In later years, he made a few TV appearances and had several direct-to-video movies. He also had a handful of recent movies that have not yet been released.

But in 1997 he filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, listing debts for medical expenses and more than $200,000 in state and federal taxes.

His assets included a few thousand dollars in cash, clothing and royalty rights.

In recent years, he appeared in the A&E reality TV show The Two Coreys with his friend Corey Feldman. It was canceled in 2008 after two seasons. Feldman later said Haim's drug abuse strained their working and personal relationships.

Lindsay Lohan Sues E-Trade Claiming Baby Ad Is a Parody of Her - VIDEO

The Super Bowl may be long over, but Brand Battle 2010 continues to rage on, as yet another commercial is bit by the controversy bug — this time one of those adorable spots from E-Trade featuring a talking baby named “Lindsay.”
 
According to the New York Post, actress Lindsay Lohan is suing the investment site on the grounds that the man-eating, substance-abusing baby in the commercial is based on her.

Lohan’s lawyer, Stephanie Ovadia, is asking that the commercial be taken off the air and every copy of the offending spot be rounded up (which could now be more difficult given today’s coverage). The actress is also asking for $100 million.

According to Ovadia: “Many celebrities are known by one name only, and E-Trade is using that knowledge to profit… They used the name Lindsay…They’re using her name as a parody of her life. Why didn’t they use the name Susan? This is a subliminal message. Everybody’s talking about it and saying it’s Lindsay Lohan.”

Ovadia also says Lohan was mistreated because E-Trade didn’t get her approval nor offer her compensation for allegedly being referred to in the ad. Now, the lawyer says her client is owed $50 million in exemplary damages, as well as $50 million in compensatory damages.

Although Ovadia says that the spot — which debuted during the Super Bowl and aired during the Winter Olympics — helped garner E-Trade mucho money, it wasn’t one of the most popular ads to premiere. It didn’t rank tops with either online viewers or couch potatoes (although the talking baby series has racked up a lot of success in the past).

Still, today it joins a cadre of commercials that cleaned up on hits due to controversy — including the Tim Tebow spot, GoDaddy’s rejected “Lola” ad and men’s-only dating site ManCrunch’s similarly punted ad.

One could argue that by suing E-Trade, Lohan is calling even more attention to the ad in question. As of right now, the ad has nearly 2.5 million views on YouTube. It remains to be seen — most likely tomorrow — what effect this lawsuit has on further increasing visibility. But judging from the fact that it’s been cropping up all over the web since the litigious news hit, you can bet Lohan’s legal ire will ensure the vid’s virality for at least the remainder of this week.

Check out the vid below and let us know in the comments whether or not Lohan has a case.

Reality TV: How It's Changed Television — and Us

The first thing you notice on MTV's Jersey Shore is the nicknames. Well, that and the hair, and the thongs, and the leathery tans, and the tattoos, and the hair gel, and the hot-tub sex, and the bar brawls, and the lustily embraced Italian-American stereotypes. But then: those nicknames. There's Nicole (Snooki) Polizzi. Mike (The Situation) Sorrentino. And most spectacularly, Jenni (Jwoww) Farley. For future copy editors of academic histories of mass media, that's two syllables, hyphen optional, and three w's, not in a row.

Like the tetragrammatic name of God, the moniker Jwoww has encoded in it everything you need to understand the world we live in today. The idea that an unknown 23-year-old from Long Island would come equipped with a tabloid-ready exclamatory nickname, like J. Lo or P. Diddy, might, in a more self-effacing era, have seemed presumptuous. Now it's just commonsense branding. If you might be on a reality show, you may as well have a name that pops and precedes you like a well-positioned set of silicone implants. (Oh, also: you should get the implants too.) 

For the cast of Jersey Shore — gearing up to shoot Season 2 in the next few months — camera-readiness is second nature. These are the children of reality TV. In February 1992 — literally a generation ago — The Real World introduced MTV's viewers to living in public. Ten years ago, Survivor — now in its 20th season — mainstreamed the idea for older viewers. The Jersey Shore–ites have never known a world in which hooking up drunk in a house paid for by a Viacom network was not an option. This year in the coveted post–Super Bowl time slot, CBS showcased not a new drama or sitcom but its reality series Undercover Boss. (The premiere attracted 38.6 million viewers, the most for a post–Super Bowl show since Survivor: The Australian Outback in 2001.) In March, Jerry Seinfeld returns to NBC — as producer of the reality show The Marriage Ref. 

Reality is more than a TV genre now. It's the burgeoning career field that led Richard Heene to perpetrate the Balloon Boy hoax, and Tareq and Michaele Salahi to crash a White House dinner, Bravo TV cameras in tow. It's the content mill for the cable-tabloid-blog machine, employing human punch lines like Rod Blagojevich, the disgraced governor turned contestant on Celebrity Apprentice. It's everywhere. When Scott Brown won an upset Senate victory in Massachusetts, he was joined onstage by his daughter Ayla, an American Idol semifinalist from Season 5.

In 1992, reality TV was a novelty. In 2000, it was a fad. In 2010, it's a way of life.

The Evolution of a Genre
The summer of the first Survivor season, I wrote a cover story about it for this magazine. The concerns that the show's popularity raised seem so quaint now: a professor worried its success would lead to "Let's try a public execution. Let's try a snuff film." We're still waiting for those. But Survivor is still on — considered, together with the likes of Idol and The Amazing Race, to be relatively tame, even family-oriented entertainment. 

At the time, there were a handful of reality shows on TV. Since then, we've seen 20 Survivors, 16 Amazing Races and 14 The Bachelors. We've seen Chains of Love, Rock of Love, Flavor of Love and Conveyor Belt of Love. American Candidate, American Gladiators and American Inventor. Anna Nicole, Kathy Griffin and Britney & Kevin. Design Star, Rock Star, Nashville Star and Dancing with the Stars. Joe Millionaire, Average Joe and The Joe Schmo Show. Shark Tank and Whale Wars, The Mole and The Swan. Fear Factor, The It Factor and The Benefactor. (Coming in 2011: Simon Cowell's The X Factor!)

You can break down reality TV roughly into two major subgenres. The first — the big competition-event show — descends from Survivor and includes most of reality's big hits: Idol, The Bachelor, The Amazing Race, The Biggest Loser, Project Runway. These shows mainstreamed reality TV for bigger, broader (and older) audiences by applying it to familiar genres: game shows, singing competitions, cook-offs, dating shows.

The other type of reality show descends from The Real World's naked voyeurism. Some of these shows are about celebrities, former celebrities or pseudo celebrities. Some are about therapy, about work or about parenting. And many are just about life. Bravo's Real Housewives series is still spreading across the country like Cheesecake Factory franchises. (The Salahis snuggled up to the President as candidates for The Real Housewives of D.C.) When Jon and Kate Gosselin drew 10 million viewers to watch their marriage end on TLC, reality TV proved it wasn't going into middle age quietly.

From Personality to Persona

Big as reality TV is, it's also just a facet of a larger shift in popular culture: changing attitudes toward privacy and self-expression. If you grew up with reality TV and the Internet, your default setting is publicity, not privacy. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, recently argued that sharing has become the "social norm."

Zuckerberg was defending a controversial change in Facebook's privacy settings to make the company's trove of user information more valuable. Still, he has hundreds of millions of users and their college beer-bong photos proving his point every day. Facebook's competitor Twitter is a worldwide agora of valuable information and TMI. You can make your tweets private if you want, but why would you? 

Thus comes what you might call the realitization of reality: the evolution of once private, or at least obscure, acts into performance. The diary becomes the blog. The home-movie collection becomes the YouTube channel. The résumé becomes the public search-result page.

And the personality becomes the persona. Every time you sign up for a new social-networking service, you make decisions about, literally, who you want to be. You package yourself — choose an avatar, pick a name, state your status — not unlike a storyteller creating a character or a publicist positioning a client. You can be professional on LinkedIn, flippant on Facebook and epigrammatic on Twitter. What's more, each of these representations can be very different and yet entirely authentic. Like a reality producer in a video bay, you edit yourself to fit the context.

In the workplace, for more than a decade, job-insecure Americans have been told to cultivate "the brand called you." Decide what your strengths are. Focus on your core competencies. Be aware of the bullet points of your identity. The message of both business and leisure today is, Distinguish between the actual and the for-public-consumption self. 

Put all these factors together, and reality TV's endless stream of candidates seems inevitable. Every winter, American Idol's audition rounds attract a deluge of self-created characters, who have the formula for getting on national TV down to a science. "I'm the crazy accordion lady/ This is my song," yowls a blue-haired young woman cradling a squeeze-box. The advanced descendants of the costumed screwballs who tried to get Monty Hall's attention on Let's Make a Deal, today's reality performance artists put on virtual costumes — the Bitch, the Horndog, the Drama Queen — to get noticed. In reality TV, privacy and even likability are commodities that can be traded for something more valuable.

Which is? Reality TV is now a valid career choice. The New York Times estimated that at any given time, there are 1,000 people on air as reality TV stars. (That may not seem like a huge number, but compared with, let's say, full-time TV critics, it's quite a healthy field.) For a few talented individuals — say, Idol's Kelly Clarkson or the cooks of Top Chef — this has made possible actual real-life opportunity. Jennifer Hudson lost on Idol but won an Oscar as an actress. Elisabeth Hasselbeck went from eating bugs on Survivor to chewing out Joy Behar on The View. 

And for others, it has enabled a life of lucrative famousness for famousness. Members of the cast of The Hills, for instance, reportedly earn up to $90,000 an episode; the Real Housewives, about $30,000. Hills star Heidi Montag has released an album, launched a clothing line, even, God help us, co-written a book. Co-star Audrina Patridge at one point received $10,000 to party at a nightclub for two hours. Reality star Kim Kardashian reportedly nets $10,000 for each product she endorses on Twitter. How much money did you make in the last 30 seconds?

Will Offend for Fame
Of course, you don't reach that level of success without working for it. Kardashian, for instance, didn't get her show until a sex tape of her and an R&B singer became public. Which is another lesson of reality TV: outrageousness pays.

And the more reality TV there is, the more outrageous you have to be to break out. Nadya Suleman, or Octomom, parlayed a horrifyingly dangerous multiple birth into a reality special, ending up — like her apparent model, Angelina Jolie — on the cover of Star magazine, showing off "My New Bikini Body! How I Did It!" Richard Heene convinced the world that his 6-year-old son was hurtling toward his death in a balloon. But as the veteran of ABC's Wife Swap knew, the show he was pitching — eccentric storm-chasing scientist and his wacky family — wouldn't even raise an eyebrow on a cable schedule.

But what message is it all sending? The viralization of people like American Idol's General Larry (Pants on the Ground) Platt and William Hung before him has led to the charge that reality TV invites us to laugh at little people for sport. The fame of Jersey Shore's tanning-bed casualties and others brings the critique that reality TV celebrates violence, sluttiness (male and female) and other bad behavior.

These charges are so contradictory as to cancel each other out. How, exactly, can reality TV mock its participants and celebrate them at the same time? In fact, the audience's relation to reality shows is more complicated. People don't watch Jersey Shore because they consider the Situation a role model. It's entertaining because the show is basically satire, a pumped-up spoof of bigger-is-better American culture. (Quoth Jwoww: "I see a bunch of, like, gorilla juice heads, tall, completely jacked, steroid, like multiple growth hormone — that's, like, the type I'm attracted to.") 

One of the biggest proponents of the idea that reality TV appeals to the worst in us is ... reality TV. Case in point, Susan Boyle. When she showed up, unpolished and dowdy, and blew the doors off Britain's Got Talent in her singing audition, it was hailed as a sign that we were finally getting sick of the ugly, snarky culture of reality TV. Did you see her wipe the smirk off Simon Cowell's face? The judges were ready to laugh at her, but she showed them that looks aren't everything! Well, yes, except that Boyle's entire "subversion" of reality TV was set up, framed and milked by a reality show.

Reality shows showcase plenty of bad behavior, but they also presume a heavy moralism on the part of the audience. Survivor is known for its self-rationalizing, situational ethics. Anything you do to win can be justified as playing the game. But part of the reason fans become involved in the show is that they get invested in the good guys and bad guys. 

Look at the title of Survivor's 10th-anniversary season, starting this month: "Heroes vs. Villains" — that is, those who played decently vs. those who "just played the game." Plenty of fans were entertained by Richard Hatch, who lied his way to the first-season title (often while buck naked). But a million dollars and one tax-evasion conviction later, do they admire him?

The main dangers of reality TV aren't to the viewers but to the participants and those around them. The Heenes were lucky the Balloon Boy hoax was just embarrassing and not deadly. But the sleaziest, and saddest, aspect of their whole story was the implication that their kids were being raised to think it was all a normal thing that people do to help the family business. As Falcon Heene blurted to his dad on Larry King Live, "You guys said that we did this for the show."

DJ Adam Goldstein, a.k.a. DJ AM, died last year of an overdose resulting from a drug relapse — while making a reality show about drug abuse for MTV that brought him close to his old temptations. NBC's The Biggest Loser casts ever heftier contestants and subjects them to ever-more-stressful challenges, to the point where it seems a competitive-eating reality show would be healthier. Sometimes it's the producers, not the viewers, who could use the reminder that it's not O.K. to do whatever it takes to win the (ratings) game. 

Why Reality TV Is Us
But there's more to reality TV than fame-crazy lunatics, 'roid-raging meatheads and silicone drama queens wearing little more than craftily deployed censors' pixelation. A decade after Survivor, reality TV has become too vast and diverse a genre to be defined by any one set of especially lousy shows. And for all of everyone's worries 10 years ago, reality TV hasn't crowded "quality shows" off the air. The past 10 years of scripted shows — The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, The Office, Mad Men — are the strongest TV has ever had. (One genre that reality may be crowding out is soap operas. As the World Turns is ending, as did Guiding Light, their appeal supplanted by the immersive serial dramas of Jon & Kate, among others.)

In the best cases, reality and scripted television have reached a kind of symbiosis. It's not just that reality shows have learned to structure themselves like sitcoms and dramas. Many of the best TV shows of the '00s lift heavily from reality TV or would have been impossible without it.

Lost, for instance, began as an attempt to create a drama version of Survivor. Several of TV's best comedies — the American and British versions of The Office, Parks and Recreation, Arrested Development and Modern Family — have borrowed directly from reality TV's format of vérité filmmaking and "confessional" interviews with the characters.

Maybe the best example yet of the reality-fiction alliance is Fox's high school choir spoof Glee, which, in essence, is American Idol in teen-dramedy form. It is a literal re-creation of the pop appeal of Idol (just like Idol's, Glee's songs fly to the top of iTunes on a weekly basis). And it's also a critique of the American Idol culture that made it possible. In the words of Rachel (Lea Michele), "Nowadays, being anonymous is worse than being poor."

The best reality shows can be much more engrossing, complex and diverse than your average TV cop show. Last year The Amazing Race included the team of bisexual screenwriter Mike White and his gay minister father Mel White, giving a more nuanced, less stereotypical portrayal of both sexual orientation and faith than most big-network dramas would.

The past decade has seen experiments like documentary maker Morgan Spurlock's 30 Days for FX, a brilliant trading-places switcheroo. (For instance, an anti-immigration militant spent a month living the life of an illegal alien.) Wife Swap is an intriguing show about American subcultures (homeschoolers, political activists, etc.) and the natural tendency of parents to secretly judge one another. TLC's 19 Kids and Counting, about the fecund Duggars, may be an extreme-parenting freak show, but it's also a series about the life of a deeply religious family, a rare subject for TV dramas today. 

Even MTV, home of Jersey Shore, has the high-minded 16 and Pregnant (which often features working-class families, who scarcely exist in network drama nowadays); The Buried Life, about four friends who travel the world helping people accomplish things they want to do before they die; and My Life as Liz, a sort of reality My So-Called Life about a high school outcast in small-town Texas.

Are any of these MTV shows as big or as widely hyped as Jersey Shore (which got nearly 5 million viewers for its season finale)? No. But that is on you and me, not on reality TV. And even in the cheesiest reality shows, there is an aspirational quality, a democratic quality, a quality that's — yeah, I'll say it — American. "American" in the sense that what is true of countries is true of TV genres: their worst traits are inseparable from their best ones.

In the basic criticism of reality TV — that it makes people famous for nothing rather than rewarding hard work — is a Puritan streak that is as old as Plymouth Rock: Seek thou not the Folly of Celebrity, but apply thyself with Humility to thy Industry! Well, that's one strain of American values. But there are other American ideas that reality TV taps into: That everybody should have a shot. That sometimes being real is better than being polite. That no matter where you started out, you can hit it big, get lucky and reinvent yourself. In her own way, Jwoww is as American a character as the nobody Jay Gatsby heading east and changing his name. 

And most important, that you can find something interesting in the lives of people other than celebrities, lawyers and doctors. In CBS's new Undercover Boss, executives go incognito to work in entry-level jobs in their companies. In the premiere, Larry O'Donnell, president and COO of Waste Management, picks up litter and cleans toilets. He learns that a woman driving a garbage route has to pee in a coffee can to keep on schedule; trash sorters are docked two minutes' pay for every minute they're late from their half-hour lunch. He's horrified; he's humbled; he vows to help his workers out.

There's plenty to criticize in Undercover Boss. The show is moving but it's also manipulative and infuriating. Yes, O'Donnell hands out raises and rewards to the nice people we've met. It makes him (and us) feel good. But company-wide — economy-wide — there's no reason to believe things will get better for the overstressed workers who didn't get on TV. 

But here's the thing: you, watching the show, have the tools to come to that conclusion. You've held a job. You know how companies work. And one thing reality TV has trained people to do is to be savvy about its editing. That's how people watch reality TV: you can doubt it, interrogate it, talk back to it, believe it, or not.

And either way, what you're left with is a prime-time TV show about topical concerns, at a time when people would like to see some humility in our CEOs; a show, like Discovery's Dirty Jobs, about toilet cleaners and garbage pickers and other people that "quality TV" rarely takes notice of; a show, at heart, about how absolutely crazy-hard ordinary people work.

You also — in the worn-out but cheerful employees — see a testimony to the incredible camera-readiness of the American public. How did O'Donnell manage to work unsuspected among his employees? He told them he was "Randy," a host making a reality show, natch, about entry-level jobs.

And what could be more natural than that? What could be more normal, in an age of ubiquitous media, than to take a stranger for a ride on your garbage truck and complain about your supervisors to the cameras? TV calls, and you must answer. It is as if, as a society, we had been singing in front of a mirror for generations, only to discover that now the mirror can actually see us. And if we are really lucky, it might just offer us a show.

Tiger Woods apologizes and denies rumours of domestic abuse [VIDEO]

 

Tiger Woods hugs his mother Kultida after his apology for "irresponsible" behavior, made at his first public statement since revelations of his affairs surfaced in late 2009.

 

Tiger Woods publicly apologized on This morning for his infidelity to his wife, Elin, saying he was “deeply sorry for my irresponsible and selfish behaviour.”

“I was unfaithful, I had affairs, I cheated. What I did was not acceptable and I am the only person to blame,” Woods said at his first public appearance since admitting he cheated on his wife and announcing in December he was taking an indefinite break from golf.

“I brought this shame on myself.”

He said he intended to return to professional golf one day, but “I just don't know when that day will be.”

Woods, one of the great golfers of all time and a huge draw for sponsors, said that he had undergone 45 days of therapy and had “a long way to go.”

He said he would be returning to the treatment centre – which he did not identify – starting on Saturday.

The 34-year-old American was speaking to reporters at the headquarters of the U.S. PGA Tour in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida.

He defended his wife and denied media speculation that there had been physical violence between the couple. The speculation arose after a bizarre minor car accident outside his Florida home Nov. 27, when he ran his SUV over a fire hydrant and into a tree.

“Elin never hit me that night, or any other night. There has never been an episode of domestic violence (in our family),” Woods said.

Woods spoke to a small group of “friends, colleagues and close associates” in the Sunset Room on the second floor of the TPC Sawgrass, home of the PGA Tour. Just one video camera broadcast the event and there were no questions.

His statement came during the Match Play Championship, sponsored by Accenture, the first company to drop Woods as a pitchman.

Ernie Els was among players who were upset to learn that Woods had chosen the week of a World Golf Championship for a public appearance that was sure to take attention away from the tournament. “It’s selfish,” Els told Golfweek magazine.

Finchem told reporters in Marana, Ariz., earlier this week that he didn’t think Woods’ appearance would undermine Accenture, and that Woods’s handlers “have their own reasons for their schedule.’’

In the letter, he said the tour discussed the timing with Accenture and “they understand that the PGA Tour was not involved in determining the timing of the statement.” Finchem also noted that Woods’s comments would be over well before television coverage of the third round from Dove Mountain.

The PGA Tour made available its sprawling, Mediterranean-styled clubhouse for the announcement, and was helping set up adjacent ballrooms at the nearby Sawgrass Marriott for media, where they watched Woods on closed-circuit TV. Finchem said in the letter that Woods’s management asked for the facilities, and “we agreed as we would for any member of the PGA Tour.’’

No other PGA Tour player could command this kind of attention, though.

Woods is one of the most recognized athletes in the world. Television ratings double when he is in contention, which has happened a lot on his way to winning 71 times on the PGA Tour and 14 majors, four short of the record held by Jack Nicklaus.

No other athlete had such a spectacular fall. Accenture and AT&T have ended their endorsement contracts with him, and Woods has become the butt of jokes on everything from late shows to Disney performances.

In the hours leading up to his appearance, it already was shaping up as a major event.

Along with familiar faces, Woods’s management team invited limited media.

“This is not a press conference,” Mark Steinberg, Woods’ agent, said on Wednesday.

Three wire services — the AP, Reuters and Bloomberg — were invited. The Golf Writers Association of America was offered a pool of three reporters, negotiated for six reporters, then its board of directors voted overwhelmingly not to participate.

“I cannot stress how strongly our board felt that this should be open to all media and also for the opportunity to question Woods,” said Vartan Kupelian, president of the 950-member group. ``The position, simply put, is all or none. This is a major story of international scope. To limit the ability of journalists to attend, listen, see and question Woods goes against the grain of everything we believe.’’

Woods had not been heard in the 78 days since a magazine released a voicemail he allegedly left one of the women to whom he has been romantically linked, warning that Woods’s wife might be calling.

 

Leno anticipates return to 11:30, lauds O'Brien

 

Jay Leno turned serious on his show Monday to discuss the late-night chaos at NBC, explaining events from his standpoint and telling viewers he considered Conan O'Brien a "great guy."

In remarks after his monologue Monday, Leno said he'd tried to avoid doing a show in prime time but was convinced by NBC that it could work.

It didn't, with NBC pulling the plug on "The Jay Leno Show" after four months and devising a plan to put Leno back on at 11:30 p.m. and push O'Brien and "Tonight" to midnight. With O'Brien's rejection of the plan, NBC is now trying to negotiate his exit and return Leno to the late-night spot.

Leno said it looks like he might be back at 11:30 and that the situation could be resolved by Tuesday.

Here is a transcript of what Leno said:

I thought maybe I should address this. At least give you my view of what has been going on here at NBC. Oh, let's start in 2004. 2004 I'm sitting in my office, an NBC executive comes in and says to me, listen, Conan O'Brien has gotten offers from other networks. We don't want him to go, so we're going to give him 'The Tonight Show.' I said, 'well, I've been number one for 12 years.' They said, 'we know that, but we don't think you can sustain that.' I said, 'okay. How about until I fall to number two, then you fire me?' 'No, we made this decision.' I said, 'that's fine.' Don't blame Conan O'Brien. Nice guy, good family guy, great guy. He and I have talked and not a problem since then. That's what managers and people do, they try to get something for their clients. I said, 'I'll retire just to avoid what happened the last time.' Okay.

Conan O'Brien's Ratings Soar Amid Leno Flap

Conan O'Brien's battle with his network certainly hasn't hurt his ratings.

With his jabs at NBC network executives apparently resonating in a country filled with the unemployed, viewership has soared.

O'Brien's ratings have been rising through the week, which was an extraordinary one in late-night television and saw O'Brien and David Letterman hurling barbed remarks at Jay Leno, and Leno firing back.

"Tonight" ratings Friday were 50 percent higher than they've been this season, and O'Brien beat CBS' Letterman, according to a preliminary Nielsen Co. estimate based on large markets. In the 18-to-49-year-old demographic that NBC relies on to set advertising prices, O'Brien even beat Leno's prime-time show.

Settlement talks continued Saturday on a deal that would let O'Brien leave NBC and restore Leno to the 11:35 p.m. time slot he occupied for 17 years through last spring.

O'Brien's team sees the ratings as vindication. His manager, Gavin Polone, on Saturday compared it to when Leno, trailing Letterman in the ratings in the mid-1990s, drew attention for the memorable appearance of Hugh Grant after his arrest. Leno passed Letterman in popularity and never looked back.

"People who never watched Conan before are saying, `I'll try it,'" Polone said. "Now they're saying, `this is good, I'll stick with it.'"

It's doubtful they'll get the chance. O'Brien sounded halfway out the door on Friday's show, an exit prompted by his refusal to move his show to 12:05 a.m. at NBC's request. "By the time you see this, I'll be halfway to Rio in an NBC traffic helicopter," he said in his monologue.

He aired a skit where he was assaulted by gunfire after pulling his car into the studio parking lot. He also is showing "greatest hits" of his seven-month tenure.

But he pulled back from jokes about Leno. On Friday, Jeff Gaspin, chairman of NBC Universal Television Entertainment, had said the crossfire between hosts "has definitely crossed the line.

"Jay is the consummate professional and one of the hardest-working people in television," Gaspin said. "It's a shame that he's being pulled into this."

Meanwhile, Polone denied a New York Post item Saturday, quoting an anonymous source, that said O'Brien's staff members are "furious" with O'Brien for negotiating an exit payment reportedly approaching $30 million while they are losing their jobs. Polone noted that O'Brien paid staff members himself during the Hollywood writers' strike, and was negotiating severance packages for his employees, many of whom moved from the New York area last year when O'Brien started on "Tonight."

Polone is also angry at NBC Sports Chairman Dick Ebersol, who told The New York Times this week that O'Brien was "an astounding failure" who had stubbornly resisted advice to broaden his show's appeal. O'Brien's people blame the show's ratings problems on the poor ratings of NBC's late local news and Leno's show before that.

Leno averaged 5.2 million viewers per night on his last season at the "Tonight" show, Nielsen said. O'Brien is averaging 2.5 million this season.

Hollywood's Top-Earning Couples

Conan Say's "Thanks, But No Thanks" To NBC

Conan O'Brien has just issued a statement in which he says, among other things, that he is not willing to go along with NBC's scheme to push "The Tonight Show" back to 12:05 AM. The network had hoped O'Brien would sign off on that plan, which would make way for Jay Leno's move back to late-night, in a half-hour show that would air at 11:35, after the local news.

So what now?

Well, now, it's really up to NBC. O'Brien's statement lays out in some detail his reasons for not agreeing to the plan, which include:

(1) his frustration that he wasn't supported at 11:35 with either adequate time to build his audience or adequate support from the prime-time schedule (in this, he is placing blame for the situation at least in part on Leno's show at 10)

(2) the fact that he doesn't think you move a franchise as old as The Tonight Show a half-hour later just because you have a short-term scheduling problem

(3) he's not crazy about bumping Jimmy Fallon from 12:35 to 1:05, either.

One of the most telling lines is this one: "It was my mistaken belief that, like my predecessor, I would have the benefit of some time and, just as important, some degree of ratings support from the prime-time schedule."

In other words, "I haven't been treated fairly."

He goes on to say that he has "no other offer" from other networks at this point, and says he still hopes to be able to work it out with NBC. (Not that it seems very likely.)

But still: The ball is in NBC's court now. Without having seen Conan's contract, it's very hard to know precisely what all the considerations are going to be. But if he's not going to go along by mutual agreement so that NBC can keep everybody, then the suits are going to have to explicitly choose between him and Leno -- with most of us assuming, based on the fact that they've even come up with this plan in the first place, that they will choose Leno.

By announcing that he's rejecting this deal, O'Brien obviously makes himself available for other discussions. Fox executives here at the TCA press tour were careful to say yesterday that they weren't having serious talks with O'Brien until he'd decided what to do about NBC's proposal.

But as noted, O'Brien is also putting NBC squarely in the hot seat: They're going to have to make this call, and then be responsible for it. If they're going to boot him and give the show back to Leno, then they're going to have to do it straightforwardly. Right now, he has a job, and he's taking the position that he's still showing up for work. If that's going to change, it's going to be against his will, not with his consent; he's not going to step aside to make it smoother for the network.

Much of Conan's statement is an appeal to fairness. As he sees it, NBC is basically asking him to fall on his sword in order to fix a problem that he didn't create. And he's declining.

One guy this is bad news for? Jay Leno. If Leno had hoped that he could return to 11:35 in peace, that's not going to happen. If he goes back to his old spot, it's going to be because Conan was forced out, and Conan isn't going to go along with the story being told any other way.

Not exactly the way a talk-show host wants to be welcomed back to America's living rooms.