Heaven help us. Channing Dungey is desperate and on the ropes but she's still got a few whores who will lie for her. (EW, what gift did you writer get because three ABC execs tell us there was gifting and kudos involved in the last two write ups.)
THE CONNERS is dead.
As it should be. (Marcy Carsey was right.)
Channing's lies are many but the two biggest one she pimps are (1) the show is a hit and (b) this is a new show.
Let's deal with (b) first. MODERN FAMILY, to pump its ailing ratings, is doing a death on the show shortly. When that character dies, MODERN FAMILY will not be a new show. Channing's a liar trying to save her own ass.
Why? THE CONNERS debuted last night and the audience? Half what it was for the debut of ROSEANNE last season.
Half the audience is gone. And she's trying to spin this as good. It's ABC highest rated sitcom!
It's a show that lost half the audience, that's what it is. And stockholders (including us) are not pleased. We're not pleased at all with Channing's inability to program effectively. It's not just THE CONNERS, she is failing big time and everyone under her wants her fired. She's destroying the network.
The problem, the really big one, for Channing right now?
That's the highest rated THE CONNERS are going to get (as we noted earlier this week in "TV: Roseanne didn't kill ROSEANNE, ABC did").
MODERN FAMILY is killing off a character as a ratings stunt.
THE CONNERS episode explaining where Roseanne Conner is now? That was what aired last night.
That was the stunt episode.
It was episode eight of RHODA, the episode where Mary Tyler Moore and others from THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW (Cloris Leachman, Ed Asner, Gavin MacLeod and Georgia Engel) show up because . . . Rhoda (Valerie Harper) is getting married ("Rhoda's Wedding," written by James L. Brooks, Allan Burns, David Davis, Lorenzo Music, David Lloyd, Normal Barasch and Carroll More).
That's all it was, Rhoda's wedding. And now that's over. The curiosity factor only works once.
THE CONNERS now, like every other sitcom on ABC currently, will dip each episode. If it only loses two million viewers between the first episode and episode ten, it will be like the other ABC sitcoms who start out each season with a stronger debut than everything that follows.
It's over. Channing killed the number one show on TV. That's on her. She needs to answer for it. She also needs to answer for refusing to protect the spin-off by telling Sara Gilbert to STFU. Sara's comments fueled the anger more than anything else. And it doesn't help that Sara herself could have been fired. ABC wanted her fired throughout the run of the original series. They thought she came off "dykey" and that she had a lesbian vibe. Roseanne Barr refused to replace Sara. She stood by Sara. The same, of course, can't be said of Sara. And her attempt in the last two weeks to erase the remarks she made and pretend only made her look like even bigger jerk.
No man would have been fired for what Roseanne did. No man would have. It's a sign of how little value women have that the star of the number one program on TV gets fired.
And Roseanne was told, "Leave it alone, we're handling it." No. They were firing her. There's a whole back story that people don't even know.
Equally true, Channing has a very trashy life. ABC execs keep leaking to us on that, they even provided us pictures. Well let others cover that, though. Our point is ABC sucks and that's because Channing can't program a network. There are no hits for ABC and that falls on Channing.
She lost Shonda Rhimes. That falls on Channing.
Shonda Rhimes, who's provided more content for ABC than anyone. She's now at NETFLIX. How do you lose Shonda Rhimes? (By not treating her with respect and by not paying what she's worth.)
Channing is an idiot and she needs to be fired. Immediately, she needs to be fired. ABC needs someone new as president who will look at the schedule and (a) realize a lot of dead weight needs to be cancelled immediately and (b) new programs need to be airing no later than March, new shows because ABC's current line up is crap.
-- Ava and C.I.
P.S. To be clear, those photos we have of Channing? We're not publishing them online. But we are sharing them within the industry so everyone can know just how trashy that woman is. We're sharing them and we're all laughing together at Channing.
