The Return of Alexa Chung!

Hooray! for the first time in, like, well…forever…NBC’s Golden Globe Pre-Show was actually worth watching. And it had nothing to do with a strangely-overdressed Natalie Morales or that stupid-old WGA scab, Carson Daly. Nope, this time, they had a real fashionista on the red carpet, someone who knew their shit and had a rocking sense of humor to boot. And guess who that fair lass was?

That’s right, my girl, Alexa Chung, has returned to American television, amigos! I don’t even know why they needed those other two layabouts, because when it came to hip, fresh, and fun red carpet interviews, Alexa Chung ruled the roost.

So, if anyone at NBC is listening, please, for the love of God, ditch the three-host approach and give Alexa full-reign over the red carpet next year. She’ll kill it!

Long live the new queen of all media, Alexa Chung!

Where have you gone, Alexa Chung?

OK, I’m gonna give Alexa Chung the benefit of the doubt on this one. The first season of her MTV talk show “It’s on with Alexa Chung” was fun, funky and sometimes just plain weird, but we loved every kooky second of it. Seriously, I loved Miss Chung so much that I actually named my new cell phone after her. Yep, I name my cell phones…

So, you can imagine how excited Greta and I were to see the promos for the new and supposedly-improved “It’s on with Alexa Chung” that began airing a few weeks back. Like Miss Chung herself, the commercials were cool and super hip and promised to bring us: “More celebs. More music. Less BS.” with season two. Wow, a new and improved Alexa Chung? Sounds awesome, right? Wrong!

After watching the show — which began airing in its new 3:30PM time slot last Monday — for a whole week now, all I can say is…WTF MTV? Every single thing that was cool or unique about the show is gone, seemingly forever. No more cool comedians stopping by to dish about pop culture, no more funky-fresh loft-like set, goofy guest intros and strange game play…shit, they even dumped the twitter and facebook pics from fans that used to bookend the commercial breaks. Lame!

I’m not kidding, amigos…it’s like MTV sucked everything that was fun and original out of the show and replaced it with a crazy-fake “live TV show” vibe. The groovy credits from the first season disappeared a while ago, but now the show starts with Alexa being “counted in” by her producers backstage before walking out onto the bland-ass set to greet her audience. If that’s supposed to be edgy, the honchos at MTV have apparently never watched “The View”.

I mean, come on, even the most sheltered tween out there has seen live TV before, so, it is not exciting or even remotely cool to see someone walk past a bunch of grips and shit backstage to make her entrance. It’s just lame…and, considering how great the show used to be, kinda sad.

And not only is the new format completely ridiculous — Alexa and her guests remain mic-ed when they cut to commercial so we can hear them chatting…ooo, edgy! — but Chung seems to hate it as much as we do. Seriously, there were times last week when even she looked totally bored.

I just don’t get it. MTV might think they’re fixing a broken show with this incredibly wrong-headed reboot, but what they’re really doing is trying to turn Alexa Chung into Carson Daly, and that is just plain stupid. “TRL” had an awesome run but it got old and it’s dead for a reason…let Alexa Chung do her thing or cancel her show and start over with someone else. It’s that simple.

That said, I’m giving Miss Chung and her producers one more week to turn this shit around…after that, I guess Greta and I will have to start watching something truly groundbreaking like the “The Bonnie Hunt Show” or something…

NBC’s “Biggest Loser” hits the road…

OK, normally, I am not the kind of person to gloat when bad things happen to jerky people (even if they totally deserve it!) but when I heard that NBC Universal’s much-maligned entertainment co-chairman, Ben Silverman was fired today, I gotta admit, I kinda cheered!

That’s right, amigos, the man who brought you such immortal classics as “My Own Worst Enemy”, “Kings”, “Crusoe”, “Kath & Kim”, the crazy-expensive (not to mention totally unnecessary!) remakes of “Bionic Woman” and “Knight Rider”, and Survival Sunday cheesefests like “Meteor” and “The Storm”, has finally been shown the door. Hooray!

In his defense, Silverman was a well-regarded producer of such hit shows as “Ugly Betty”, “The Office”, and “30 Days” before taking the reigns at NBC, so, when the network brass hired him to lead NBC out of the crapper in 2007, he seemed like an inspired pick.

But it was soon clear to everyone involved that Silverman was not the “rock star executive” he promised to be. Not only were many of his big ideas just plain lame — hello, “Rosie Live!” anyone? — but by making crass product placement a way of life at the network, greenlighting expensive duds left and right, and calling writers “the nerdiest, ugliest, meanest kids in the high school” during the dark days of the WGA strike, Silverman really was his “Own Worst Enemy”.

My old NBC strike squad actually made up Silverman-specific chants during the strike…of course, I’ve forgotten most of them, but, trust me, they made our Carson Daly chants look friendly!

In fact, at one point, there was talk of staging a Ben Silverman prom in honor of his statement about us “ugly writers” trying to “cancel the prom” when we threatened to bring down NBC’s telecast of that year’s Golden Globes. And though we never held the actual prom, we did get the Globes downgraded to a “news event”, and, as you can see, we crafted some pretty cool paraphernalia in preparation for it…so, suck it Silverman!

But prom or no prom, the good news today is that the cheesy-ass king of all things crappy at NBC is finally gone. Yay! Now, if we could just do something about those annoying “Jay Leno at 10PM” commercials…yikes…