After eight seasons as a judge on the nation’s most watched show, FOX’s “American Idol,” Paula Abdul is not returning for Season 9. After it was announced last week that Kara DioGuardi, a rookie this past season, would be returning next season, Abdul’s sudden departure is not a huge surprise considering that many thought it was awkward at times having four judges. And as you might suspect, the bottom line was her contract. Abdul was making $4 million per year and was seeking in the neighborhood of $12 million, but she was only offered a 30% increase, or about $1.2 million.
FOX issued this statement today: “Paula Abdul has been an important part of the ‘American Idol’ family over the last eight seasons and we are saddened that she has decided not to return to the show. While Paula will not be continuing with us, she’s a tremendous talent and we wish her the best.”
Let’s face it, Paula’s antics were both entertaining and disturbing at times, and she sometimes rambled on for far too long when giving contestants feedback. And while ultimately this is probably good for the show, let’s face it… Paula was part of the fabric of the show and in some weird way, we’re all going to miss her.
As things literally heat up with tensions mounting in FOX’s “Hell’s Kitchen,” some contestants, as they do each season, show us early on why they don’t belong. It’s almost like we are waiting for all the chefs who have no chance get eliminated so we can get to the good stuff. Anyway, as they recapped the previous week, Lovely and Tennille were spared because of chef Joseph’s disrespect for Gordon Ramsay. And Lovely made the comment that Ramsay “loves Lovely.” Uh, I don’t think so. And Tennille was still pissed that Suzanne made the comment, “If you sink our ship, I’ll be pissed,” during dinner service. Tennille told Suzanne that she could kiss her ass. Nice. But there was tension on the blue team as well, with Van and Kevin talking trash about Andy and how Andy was bringing their team down.
Then came the initial challenge, which was to make sausages. They had to do this in teams of two, and Ramsay made sure to pair Van with Andy and Tennille with Suzanne. Then before they started, the sexual references were flying….Ramsay asked Tennille if she liked sausage, to which she replied, “no chef, I don’t.” Van also made some comment about “pumping it slowly” and Ramsay told them all that “size matters,” which it did in this case, but still, did we need all the references?
I knew less about “Occupation” than any of the four series that were being spotlighted during the course of BBC America’s time at the TCA tour, but I certainly recognized the actor who was in attendance to promote the show. James Nesbitt’s been working steadily since he turned up at the 2007 TCA tour to sing us a song or two and tell us about “Jekyll,” having played both a tabloid journalist (“Midnight Man”) and Pontius Pilate (“The Passion”), but this time he’s part of the ensemble of “Occupation,” a series which takes a look into the lives of three soldiers who all return to Iraq for the wrong reasons: one for love, one for money, and one for duty.
We do see at least one American within the context of “Occupation,” but for the most part, we’re offered the British perspective of the war in Iraq. It’s a side of the story that we haven’t really gotten to see before, but creator Peter Bowker (“Viva Blackpool”) believes that the themes of his series are fairly universal.
“I think it’s about love, about what it is to be a man, and it’s about doing the right things for the wrong reasons and the wrong things for the right reasons,” said Bowker.
He is not, however, going to hazard a guess as to how Americans will respond to the series. “I think fairly typical things happen in any wars that are engaged in,” he said, “and I think that in this particular war, although it took awhile longer in Basra for the local population to become alienated from the Brits, I think it did happen. I think maybe the surprise will be that it’s not a war drama in that the whole thing isn’t set actually in the war. One of the starting points for this for me was ‘The Deer Hunter’ and noticing in ‘The Deer Hunter’ how little screen time, relatively speaking, is spent in Vietnam. As a writer, ultimately, for me what happens afterward is a far more interesting dramatic field than actually what happens during wartime.”
In order to acclimate himself to the material of “Occupation” as much as possible, Bowker worked with the charity Combat Stress, which counsels traumatized ex-servicemen.
“What the counselors said there was that the mind-set of soldiers who were seeking help was very similar to the mind-set of soldiers coming back from Northern Ireland, in that it didn’t seem entirely clear what the aims of the war were, and going in to ostensibly help a civilian population, which then became hostile…and with good reason, in lots of cases,” said Bowker. “That seemed to be the mind-set. The thing they said that was most significant was the speed with which ex-servicemen were seeking help from the Iraq war. They had never seen that before. They thought of a new intensity, but they said that was partly because young soldiers were no longer seeking solace in alcohol, they were seeking solace in drugs…and we do touch on that in the piece.”
If you’ve never been a situation such as this, then it may strike you as a bit unlikely that a soldier would make a concerted effort to return to the country where he once fought a war. Nesbitt has a theory about that.
“In the arena of war there is, sort of bizarrely, a sense of security for soldiers, because they’re more comfortable in their uniforms, I think, than they are in their civis,” he said. “I think the rhythm that war gives them with the camaraderie, which we discovered, was so important to them – that they can confide in each other, that they are completely together – is in stark contrast to them coming away from that situation losing the uniform, going back into a family life where they feel terribly displaced because of what they’ve seen and what they’ve gone through. They can’t really share that with their partners and their families. I was struck very much by how they’ve lost the rhythm of how to behave physically and emotionally at home. In our piece quite early on, you see when my character comes home he just doesn’t know how to be with his family. They don’t know who turns the kettle on. They don’t know how to react. It was something about the human element of the impact of war that it has on the families that struck me as something that I think is and will hopefully be universal.”
Last night’s finale of “The Next Food Network Star” featured two contestants in Melissa D’Arabian and Jeffrey Saad who were, frankly, both worthy of winning. So the challenge that they both faced in taping their own pilot would pretty much be the determining factor.
Being that this final episode was taped before a live audience, there was a lot of time to fill. So they began with shots of both contestants with their families back home–Jeffrey in Los Angeles selling real estate and hanging and cooking at home with his wife and two kids, who I believe they said were 13 and 9 years old. Melissa, meanwhile, is from Keller, Texas, and they showed her with her husband and four kids, all girls, between the ages of 1.5 and 4….are you kidding me? No wonder Melissa is so frantic all the time…they showed a shot of her driving a minivan with the four car seats. Yikes.
This Sunday marks the conclusion of Season 5 of “The Next Food Network Star,” pitting Jeffrey Saad against Melissa D’Arabian. It’s hard to believe we’ve reached this point already, but I always say that after the 4th of July, the summer flies by faster than we want it to. Anyway, I’m pulling for Melissa and I think she’s got the goods to be a network star for a long time. Jeffrey, though, is no slouch by any means, and seems like he’s got incredible cooking chops himself. Below is a video preview of the finale, which airs this Sunday, August 2, at 9pm/8pm central.
