Friday, March 5, 2010

The Latest Olympic Victory Laps: Johnny Weir on "The Bonnie Hunt Show"

The promised “Favorite lines from non-Olympic TV coverage about the Olympics!” will have to wait… because I didn’t realize until this morning that an Olympic TV Appearance would be happening on a show I actually do watch sometimes.

And it seems like a good idea to draw attention to it anyway, since the show I’m talking about (The Bonnie Hunt Show, a syndicated gem you may or may not have heard of) is not a huge ratings-getter as I understand it. In fact, it’s been common knowledge for a while among the fans that Bonnie’s show will not continue beyond this season. But she’s terrific, and while Evan Lysacek “tweeted” this week about taping a BH episode around mid-March… Johnny Weir spent five minutes on the episode that aired today.

Bonnie’s website contains a clip right now of the interview. I admittedly didn’t yet see Weir’s Live with Regis & Kelly appearance from earlier this week, but here are some of the things discussed on Bonnie’s show today…

+ His fashion sense (he wore a spiffy black & white jacket and shoes he wanted to show off, so he swung his legs up on the couch alongside him (I never got a good look at them, in spite of this… sorry)


+ The Olympics (duh)

+ Plushy’s haircut (“that would be… a mullet,” Weir diplomatically declared)

+ Johnny’s own hair, which they agreed was a variation on… a mullet

+ The Plushy quad/man debate…Weir started out by claiming he thought the extent of Plushy’s comments were lost in translation. Me, I’m thinking there was no need to translate some of his expressions, gestures and actions since then… but Weir ultimately broke it down to the athletic vs. artistic progress debate. (He preceded all comments by adding that Plushy was a friend of his…)

+ Weir’s reality show (Be Good, Johnny Weir), which was what he was there to promote first and foremost (complete with a clip of him vacuuming and talking about loneliness… yeah, kind of hard to explain)

+ Understandable, then, why they didn’t spend any time talking about this guy’s reality show

+ Oh, and near the very end of the segment Bonnie made Johnny “promise” he’d be in Sochi for the next Olympics… and then he invited her to join him over there. He went along with the whole thing, stopping short of giving some variation of the I’m-not-retiring-well-maybe-I-am speech.

Cute stuff.

And while I’m here… I haven’t seen much about this yet, but while poking around TVGuide.com I came across
this announcement about a Dancing With The Stars “spin-off” that comes off sounding like Ice Dancing With The Stars…and is apparently now being planned for ABC in the Fall. No, I’m not talking about Thin Ice (which airs on ABC in a couple of weeks)… and no, I’m not flashing back to 2006, when Skating with Celebrities had it’s brief run on FOX. This is an all-new (for the U.S., anyway) effort by the same BBC people that have imported DWTS so nicely, and have been having such a great time with the skating version of it over in the U.K. Will let you know if/when I hear anything more about this.

Until then, enjoy Lysacek’s Top 10 Reading on Letterman’s Show
as it ran here, earlier in the week, as the clip of the day.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It is ridiculous to shove Evan Lysacek into the artistic vs. athletic controversy. The problem is exactly that HE IS NOT a very artistic skater. It is especially ridiculous to hear someone like Johnny Weir call Lysacek "artistic". This is exactly why 'artistic' as a judging criterion does not make any sense. Lysacek perfectly executed two programs written according to the Code of Points. The feathered gloves and the snake were the most artistic part of it.