michael richards

One forgotten victim in this whole "Michael Richards goes nuts and screams racist remarks" controversy just might be Kenny Kramer, the real-life guy who was the inspiration for the Cosmo Kramer character on Seinfeld. While it's great to have the fake Kramer be associated with the real Kramer during good times, it can be sort of disconcerting if people start to associate the real Kramer with the fake one when things are bad.

Kramer (the real one) is upset that news outlets such as The Drudge Report and Michael Savage are saying "Kramer's a racist." Personally, I don't see how the two could possibly be confused. I mean, to be honest, do people really even think of the real Kramer that much? I don't think the news outlet's are saying "Kramer's a racist" to confuse anyone, and I don't think it's misleading. They're using the last name because it's the name of one of the most famous (and beloved) characters in TV history.

Richards went on Jesse Jackson's radio show over the weekend to explain himself, apologize, and to begin the "healing." In a related story, the character of Kramer will now be edited out of all the Seinfeld episodes he appears in.

• Have you checked out Trivial TV? It's a great site about, well, TV of course. But it has an incredible search engine for TV schedules. Type in the day, month, and year and you can see the TV network schedules for that night! Very cool.
• Paul Davidson has two TV-related posts up at his blog this week. One is Prison Break: The Drinking Game, and the other is about Battlestar Galactica and Lucy Lawless' fingernail.
• Ken Levine has some thoughts on the O.J. book/TV special (written before they were canceled).
• Entertainment Weekly's PopWatch blog says that John Stamos has pumped so much life into ER that the show just might be renewed for a 15th season.
• A TV Guide reader tells Matt Roush that the reason why Jericho is a hit is because "it's Lost for Republicans."

If you missed Michael Richards' appearance on Letterman's show last night after his racist tirade at a comedy club in West Hollywood, CBS' Late Show Web site has the video, which you can see here.

Setting aside Richards' racial slurs aside for a moment, watching the video of his onstage meltdown made me think of the kind of heated exchanges people get into where one becomes so enraged they reach deep into their reserves for the ultimate atomic bomb of an insult, the one word or phrase they can say that will completely flatten the person who is attacking them, and in Richard's case his racist comments . During his appearance on Letterman's show, Richards acknowledged that he lost his temper, and it seems fairly obvious to me that whatever self-censoring mechanism he had was overrode by his need to take down the people who were heckling him.

That's the word from Jason Alexander anyway. He revealed the news that the 7th and 8th seasons of the show will come in November while at the Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal.

This is good news for fans of the show that were worried that there might be some odd delay in the next DVD sets being released, since the most recent DVD sets for the show were released last year. These two seasons actually have some of the best episodes in the series (and how often can you say that about a show in its 7th and 8th seasons?), including "The Soup Nazi," "The Yada-Yada," "The Maestro," "The Sponge," and "The Checks."