Even USAToday has caught on

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on July 4th, 2006

Flying from Vegas to Reno, we bought a McPaper to occupy our short time in the air. We scoped out their Reality Check feature, which keeps USAToday readers up on the latest developments in the various reality TV shows. They have wrapups and tables and charts that enhance reader pleasure in following their favorite unscripted docutainment.

We were struck by the fact that this issue had wrapups of three shows, but not a wrapup of Last Comic Standing! Notable because they’ve covered LCS in the past. Doubly ominous is that they found it worthy to comment on an Animal Planet reality series that documents the lives of a bunch of African meerkats, Meerkat Manor, but not on our comedy pals on the Queen Mary. Triply ominous is that, in their online version, where, let’s face it, real estate is not at such a high premium as it is in the hard copy, they offer wrapups of a total of six reality shows, but still no LCS.

That’s right: Animal Planet finds a series on a bunch of freaky ferrets to be more believable and more satisfying to watch than the standup abomination on NBC. To quote Howard Cosell, “It’s… over.”