What Was Naughty or Nice in 2006 Entertainment?

It's time to make a year-in-review list and check it twice, to find out who's been naughty and nice in the world of entertainment.

Naughty

Borat: I laughed a lot, I admit. But I cringed a lot more. He's making a whole lot of money off innocent people he's duped, including dirt-poor villagers in Romania. I can laugh guilt-free at the boors and racists, but many of those he encountered were open-minded and gracious to him, and were rewarded with ridicule. The woman who taught him how to use a toilet at the dinner party should be sainted. And then she should give him a swirlie.

The Emmys: It's too strong to say that TV's preeminent awards are slipping into irrelevance, but each head-scratching year that rewards mediocrity and snubs the actual best shows and performers on television brings them closer to being a broadcast of just another bunch of pretty people in pretty clothes.

FOX: Despite being the home of quality shows like House and 24, they more than regressed back to their days of trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator, only they misjudged how low is too low. The sleazy, cynical premise of the OJ Simpson special, If I Did It - and not the public outcry - should have been their first clue that the project should never have gotten off the ground.

CBC: Canada's public broadcaster makes shows I want to see, like Intelligence and The Rick Mercer Report, and some I really, really don't, like Rumours, and doesn't do a very good job of letting me know about the existence of any of them, even though I run a website that tries to help promote them.

And they scheduled Intelligence against House, which also happens to be a top five show here in Canada. And Executive Vice-President Richard Stursberg set the network up for failure by publicly stating the ridiculous target of a million viewers per show, which none of their regular series have managed to achieve.

TV's regulatory bodies: The alphabet soup of the FCC in the US and the CRTC in Canada have a mandate to protect the public interest in the use of our airwaves. What does that mean? For the FCC, protecting us from so-called smut at the urging of organized complainants who don't represent the majority of viewers, and with a system of regulations that make little sense. For the CRTC, it seems to mean protecting the Canadian broadcasters from the inconvenience of doing too much more than providing us with shows we can already get on our American channels and burying our own cultural product.

Nice

Article Author: Diane Kristine Wild

Diane runs the TV, Eh? website, a compilation of news about Canadian television. Follow her on Twitter @deekayw for more random thoughts.

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