Rosie demand to move show to NYC last straw? (Fat slob in ratings nosedive alert)

Rosie O’Donnell’s TV history is repeating itself — and, as in the past, it’s getting ugly.

O’Donnell’s talk show, “The Rosie Show,” is imploding just five months after launching on Oprah Winfrey’s little-watched OWN cable network.

Not only is “The Rosie Show” a ratings disaster — it averaged just 150,000 viewers last week — but O’Donnell is selling her $2.5 million mansion in Chicago, where the show tapes, and reportedly wants to move the production to New York. That would leave producer Harpo with empty, expensive, unused studio space it might not want to surrender so easily.

Adding fuel to the fire are reports in the Chicago media that “The Rosie Show” is plagued by a lack of focus, a cranky, erratic, disinterested host and a backstage power struggle between Team Rosie and Winfrey loyalists who worked on the now-defunct “Oprah” and are at odds with O’Donnell.

It now seems that what’s worked for O’Donnell in the past isn’t working anymore.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1823102/posts

Rosie’s Success, and Failure: A Post-Mortem, or, “America, Say Goodbye to Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy”
Today, silly | Silly

Posted on Wednesday, April 25, 2007 1:51:53 AM by Silly

Let’s be real, folks: Television has merely been using Rosie. It needed her to boost ratings (and therefore dollars), by creating controversy and trapping eyes in the headlights.

Rosie brought little or no inherent talent or views of value to television. But she’s loud and pushy, and loud and pushy people tend to get heard over quiet, decent people. For a time, her political point of view was hip, but even that has lost cachet. Look at her poetry: She can’t even speak in complete sentences! What exactly is this woman’s talent?

What does a talentless person like O’Donnell have to offer its audience? Nothing but themselves, packaged for entertainment value. And Rosie was nothing if not herself: a loud, ugly, offensive freak of human nature.

Barnum and Bailey, and many other circuses, fascinated the dullest, most gullible minds of their day, playing them for suckers, by dragging out every imaginable freak they could find and promising entertainment for a nickel. People shows up in droves to see these freaks. Anyone too tall, too short, too ugly, too strange to make it in the real world using real talent to serve the public was preyed upon, placed in cages behind curtains, and exploited for the amusement of the mindless.

Nothing has changed since the days of Barnum and Bailey.

Look at a show like American Idol. Some of the people are truly talented, but it is the freaks that the public loves (this current looney, Jumbalaya, or whatever his name is), and it is the gifted ones that the show doesn’t know what to do with (for instance, Jennifer Hudson, who was talented with or without the pronouncement of Simon, and is likely on her way to Broadway).

(Even Simon himself is a sort of freak. He certainly doesn’t know talent when he sees it, he has little taste, and his personality is lacking in one important feature: namely, a personality. But he’s rude, arrogant, and in his way, a freak. People watch him for that reason. But his eye-rolling after the VT massacre may have been one of the final nails in his coffin.)

Which brings me to Rosie O’Donnell. I saw her in person once, a half block from the Schubert Theatre in New York, at one of the theatre industry’s many sidewalk sales for some cause or another. It was close to the opening of her disastrous Boy George musical, and she was sitting at a table steps from me.

Let me tell you, this woman was scary. Ugly doesn’t say it. Angry-ugly is a better word. Her ugliness, as Trump astutely observed, came from within and infected her exterior. It made me sad and heartbroken to see this ruined shell of a human being. It didn’t surprise me, but it did take me aback. All of her self-hate was pouring out of her eyes. This woman hates herself and her hatred for the world is just an outflow.

When you are a freak, you are only truly safe when you stay behind the bars of your cage and do not touch the customers. If you are Filthy Facial Pustule Man, sitting behind bars on a lice-ridden couch, people will look at your gross facial pustules and say, “Ewwww,” and tell their friends, and take one last glance before they exit. And you can do better for yourself as a Pustulite by finding a way to garner the audiences’ sympathy.

But as soon as you start popping your pustules and squirting them on customers, you no longer have value as entertainment, and no amount of sympathy of will bring them back. You are now a worthless freak: No inherent value, and no entertainment value either. Just a nuisance.

Rosie, in fact, is Jo-Jo The Dog Faced Boy. She was always been Jo-Jo The Dog-Faced Boy. She has been nothing more than a freak which TV execs exploited to line their own pockets.

For all her growling, yawping, bullying, and foaming at the mouth, she was always contained in the protective cage of her masters. She may wish to believe otherwise, and convince you that she had her say, and left on her terms, but it is not true. She only had an audience on The View because she sold soap and toilet paper. When her box office went down, she was no longer of use to Barnum and Bailey.

Rosie started scaring some of the people on the other side of the bars. Her ratio of sympathy and freakinss and grossness and offensiveness shifted, and now, instead of helping the show, she hurt it, in net terms. She will always have her fans that buy crap on her website, and always her detractors. But on this show she went over the line, and, refusing to listen or obey her true masters, the masters she willingly signed on with, she could not keep up her end of the bargain.

Rosie is now, therefore, toast. She is one step closer to being displayed in a bottle of formeldahyde, in a dusty trailer outside El Paso or Omaha.

And let’s be clear: Barbara Walters was merely her zookeeper. She herself is a washed out entertainer, a has-been, who once had credibility as a journalist, but now has none.

Barbara at best is the barker of this freakshow. She didn’t even qualify for ringmaster (unless Rosie’s ringworm qualifies). Walters now plays in the outermost tent, bringing people to dull daytime television (who has time to watch daytime except lazy people?), so they can be sold products and sucked into the evening and latenight viewing. Walters left the bigtop ages ago.

Recent rumors of Rosie’s upcoming departure from The View do not surprise me. They may or may not be true, but her star is falling. I use the term star loosely.

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