Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s highly anticipated speech at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night nearly matched the record-setting numbers of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.

Palin pulled in 37.2 million viewers across broadcast and cable networks, according to Nielsen Media Research.

That’s 55% higher than Day 3 of the DNC, when her Democratic counterpart, Joe Biden, and President Clinton took the stage (24 million).

It’s also up a sharp 99% from the Republican convention’s third day in 2004 (18.7 million). In fact, it came close to upsetting Obama’s historic address on Thursday — the most-watched convention speech in history (38.4 million viewers).

Palin’s viewership is up 73% from Tuesday’s RNC tally, when 21.5 million tuned in to see President Bush and independent Sen. Joe Lieberman endorse nominee John McCain.

Box Office Weekly #129 (MP3 - 15 MB - 21 min)

In today’s show, Weekend Box Office Figures, TV Ratings and these stories: In a world without Don LaFontaine, will people see movies?… You don’t need couples counseling, you need a hard drive upgrade… and in this week’s commentary, meet the new fall season. All this and summer is clearly over at the movies, today on Box Office Weekly.

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BOX OFFICE FIGURES (Courtesy BoxOfficeMojo.com)

TV RATINGS (Courtesy A.C. Nielsen Company)

STORIES WE’RE FOLLOWING: FIRST PAUL FREES, NOW THIS

HOPING FOR A BACKDOOR PILOT

THERE ARE MORE IMPORTANT THINGS TO FIGHT ABOUT

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(At the end of the show I reference a musical number from THE AMERICAN ASTRONAUT - for people who are fans of the the black-and-white-sci-fi-western-musical genre, you can see the number here)

For some reason, the phrases “welcoming bosom” and “big four” reminds me of a scene from TOTAL RECALL. But wait, I’m not going to fire up the DVD player! Let’s see what the networks have in store, shall we?

First, a look at the shows that need no introduction: Knight Rider and 90210.  Knight Rider is from NBC, and the driver is named Mike Traceur instead of Michael Knight. However, the lead character, a talking car, is still named KITT. Co Produced by Doug Liman, who brought you THE BOURNE IDENTITY but also brought you JUMPERS. 90210 is a series set in the same high school as BEVERLY HILLS 90210 and all the students are still 30 years old. It will air on the CW, because there ain’t no WB any more.

Next a couple of shows that are familiar to you if you get BBC America, one of those cable networks they’re trying to lure you away from. Life On Mars is he story of a cop who finds himself trapped in the 1970s. As someone who grew up in the seventies, believe me, we were ALL trapped there. He’ll just have to wait ten years like the rest of us. Worst Week tells the story of a bride groom who has a serious run of bad luck in the week before his wedding. Hilariously they’re going to extend the week to twice as many episodes for the American version. Remember the first season of 24, and how you couldn’t believe they could do a second season? If the show takes off, I guess they’ll have the guy marry someone else next year. 

Okay, enough with the remakes! What about the original stuff? Well, there’s Crusoe, which is based on a classic novel about a guy who is trapped on a tropical island. It will include flashbacks to Crusoe’s life before his jet went d– before he was shipwrecked. Eleventh Hour is a detective show but get this: the detective uses FORENSIC SCIENCE to solve crimes! The show will be on CBS and is produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, who runs the 12 hours of TV a week with the word CSI in the title.

Gary Unmarried, Kath and Kim, The Ex-List, Bad Mother’s Handbook - two shows about dating, two shows about unmarried women living with their mothers. Separate ‘em out yourself.

America’s Toughest Jobs is a reality show about people with tough jobs. Stylista is a reality show about life at a fashion magazine. By mid season when they’re both tanking, someone will realize that if you just swap contestants you’re going to have fantastic television. 

This leaves my pick for the only original idea for a show this year: My Own Worst Enemy. Christian Slater plays a mild mannered suburban dad who also is harboring a split personality. His other half is a mysterious international spy.  Don’t get me wrong - it’s a terrible, terrible idea, but it doesn’t sound like any other idea out there. Actually it does, a little.  In 1965 NBC aired THE JOHN FORSYTHE SHOW, in which Forsythe played the headmaster of an all-girls school in San Francisco. By mid-season NBC realized the ratings were bad and they changed the premise abruptly - Forsythe was an undercover government agent running an all-girls school in San Francisco. By the end of August the show was cancelled for good. Just saying.

-daniel k.

Apparently Cheese proved how completely devoid of class he is…

Todd Cochrane, who uploaded the YouTube videos of Cheese’s hand coming directly at a phonecam lens, has this to say in THE ULTIMATE CLASSLESS ACT:

During the Coverville 500 a concert …I got to witness the biggest jerk I have ever seen during a live event.

Incidentally RC weighs in himself in the comments section. Fireworks! I strongly recommend the comment sections in both these blogs, to get a flavor of the discourse here.

I live for stuff like this.

-daniel k

How indeed. Last week I talked about my adventures (or singular lack of them) in Las Vegas at the New Media Expo. The high point of the trip for me was the Coverville 500 concert, a big revue show that was held in a ballroom at Bally’s. Coverville is one of the most popular podcasts going (outside of offerings by our own Podcast Network, of course) hosted by a guy in Colorado named Brian Ibbott. Brian thought it would be cool for his 500th show to have a live concert, and he rounded up various acts he had featured on the show over the years - Natalie Gelman, Jonathan Coulton, Chance and The Choir, a comedy group called The Radio Adventures of Doctor Floyd, emcee Dan Klass of another popular podcast THE BITTEREST PILL, and to finish up the night, Richard Cheese and Lounge Against the Machine.

Of these acts, Cheese is the only one who isn’t best known for original material. He is a swanky lounge singer with a martini glass and a leopard-skin tux, dragging songs by Incubus and Weezer and  Sir Mix-a-Lot back with him to the fifties. It’s not an original idea (he thanks Bill Murray in the liner notes of his second album, and his Nick character on SNL is a pretty clear inspiration) but Cheese has the ace up his french cuff of being a very talented lounge singer. He has a voice like Steve Lawrence or Paul Anka, and he surrounds himself with skilled musicians who pull the whole thing off musically, which just makes it more hilarious. It’s almost as funny as seeing hearing Frank Sinatra’s duet with Bono.

So taken with his act was I that I didn’t notice just how much some of the audience despised him. Seriously, there is so much bad mojo coming out of that set that I’m not even going to link to the YouTube clips, because Ibbott is begging people to take them down.

It’s these YouTube clips that seem to be at the heart of the commotion. The other acts didn’t have a problem with fan taping. Cheese was the only one who had a rider specifying that he could not be recorded. And quoting Ibbott:

… had there been physical tickets sent to attendees who purchased their tickets online, I would have been able to indicate that preference on the tickets. Since there wasn’t, we posted signs around the show, provided by Richard Cheese, which indicated, among other things, that his portion of the show couldn’t be recorded.

This kind of thing would be difficult to enforce nowadays under any circumstances, but imagine a roomful of bloggers and podcasters. Not only were they taping, about half were uploading between sets. 

So when Richard Cheese came on, he reminded the crowd that there was no recording. At that point the people taping held their cellphones up a little higher to be sure they caught him saying it. What happened next depends a lot on your perspective and how you view comedy. Cheese either petulantly snatched a guy’s phone out of his hand, walked it across the stage and threw it at another concertgoer, snarling “free cameras!” or he playfully took this guy’s phone and gamely tossed it to someone at the other end of the stage, cheerfully shouting “free cameras!” 

And he also spit a glass of water out into the audience, but that was earlier.

Thing is watching Cheese acting this way, I was reminded of something Alice Cooper said: he was asked how he reconciled his strong baptist upbringing with his stage act, and he responded, “well that’s not me up there. That’s Alice.” Richard Cheese is a character, obviously. He’s brash and insensitive, like any of those Rat Pack guys. If he’s not, there’s no funny. And for whatever unfortunate combination of elements, it went sour on him that night. 

Not with everybody. Most people stayed through the whole set and enjoyed it. A few even put away their cellphones. It seems to me that most of the negative chatter about the show is coming from people who are hearing about it second and third hand. After the set Cheese hung around and signed CDs. He remembered me, because he had aimed a bubble machine at my face. “I always pick a guy with glasses,” he said. “You’re a bastard,” I responded. And I moved on, because Richard Cheese and I, we can take a joke.

-daniel k