money

As if a lot of TV viewers didn't already have enough ammunition against CNBC, they accidentally provided more yesterday afternoon.

During coverage of a live interview with Larry Summers, the financial network has to cut away because of video and audio problems. Just as they went back to the studio and anchor Bill Griffeth, a notable toilet flush could be heard. It wasn't just something that TV viewers heard, Griffeth stopped in mid-sentence and looked off-camera to figure out just what the heck was going on. Looks like someone who works there and had a mic on forgot to shut it off when they went to the restroom. It's been a weird year or so for CNBC. First the arguments and the odd interviews, now this.

And I can hear every Law and Order: SVU fan screaming at the same time, "Noooooooooooooooooooooo!"

Michael Ausiello is reporting that stars Christopher Meloni and Mariska Hargitay are asking for more money (they currently get $7 million a year), and sources say that the network might replace them if the stars keep asking for that money. The show was recently renewed for an 11th season.

I'm not too sure they couldn't be replaced. I mean, it would, of course, depend on who they go to replace them, but haven't they replaced the cast of the original Law and Order quite a bit? Characters left, characters died, some actors died in real life, and they brought in new people. Though I wonder if Meloni and Hargitay, since they have been on the show for so long, are the show and just can't be replaced. Or maybe they can just have it be John Munch: Private Eye.

Bless Oprah Winfrey's soul for all the good work she does in the name of bettering humanity. She gets people to read, she gives poor kids scholarships, she reaches out to victims of environmental disaster, and, of course, there was that time she gave a new car to everyone in her audience. She's a money fairy out to save the world, and we applaud her for it.

But then there are times when Oprah's weird side comes out, when that unique connection she so strongly maintains with her audience - both in the studio and viewers at home - is broken in favor of reminders that, oh yeah, Planet Oprah might not be such a crazy notion. The lady probably uses $100 bills to clean her teeth. And, in case you'd forgotten, she and buddies Gayle King and Tyler Perry will remind you, as they did while palling around on Friday's show, on which Oprah retold a super-nauseating story about Perry giving her the most incredibly unnecessary gift a media mogul could ever not hope for.

Like AIG, The Sarah Silverman Program needs a bailout.

Comedy Central is cutting the budget for the comedy show by more than 20%, and the three executive producers - including Silverman herself - have threatened to quit the show. The series has not been picked up for a third season yet.

It's actually MTV Networks that is telling Comedy Central that they have to cut the budget. Right now each episode costs around $1.1 million to produce. MTV Network wants that cut down to $850,000 an episode. That's probably more than can be saved by simply replacing the fancy food on the craft services table with stuff from the supermarket.

I predict that they'll settle this, though I have to admit this is a show I don't really watch, even if I do think Silverman is funny. I wouldn't mind having a second new episode of Important Things with Demetri Martin every week if this show is a goner.

I think we're going to start a new weekly feature here at TV Squad: "This Week In CNBC Crazy." We've had Dennis Kneale wondering if Steve Jobs has PMS, we've had Charlie Gasparino and the incredibly odd what have you got video, and now we have another weird moment. And, yes, it features both Kneale and Gasparino, going after each other.

This one has the comedy duo talking about Citigroup. At one point, Gasparino accuses Kneale of being a bad reporter, leading Kneale to say that one CNBC reporter shouldn't be saying something bad about another CNBC reporter. Anchor Larry Kudlow had to break it up. Thankfully, they weren't in the same studio (though a fist fight on CNBC might actually be kind of funny).

There was a time when I watched CNBC all of the time. I got to know the anchors and the reporters, memorized many of the company symbols flying by at the bottom of the screen, and even watched Power Lunch every single day at noon. I don't watch it that often anymore, though it has been fun to tune in here and there during the current Wall Street crisis (and by "fun" I don't mean the crisis has been fun, I mean the coverage of it).

But I'm not sure that even die hard fans of the network would be able to explain the video after the jump. It's from a segment the other day with Charles Gasparino, Dylan Ratigan, and Melissa Lee. Ratigan and Lee, on the floor of the stock market, are trying to get Gasparino, in the studio, to talk about Merrill-Lynch. But Gasparino can't get the phrase "what have you got" out of his head and just keeps talking about it, as Ratigan and Lee try to get him to move on. It's all very strange, but those are the best kinds of live TV moments, right?

And remember: "what I got is not what I have." Someone make a t-shirt or bumper sticker with that phrase and sell it on CafePress.

He hasn't won an Emmy (although that might change in a little over a week from now) and he's not going to win People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive (although I think he very attractive), but at least Hugh Laurie, the star of Fox's House, is being rewarded in another way -- the wallet.

Laurie is getting a raise in salary to $400,000 an episode. That's not as much as 24's Kiefer Sutherland ($500,000) or CSI's William Petersen ($600,000) or Two and a Half Men's Charlie Sheen ($825,000), but it's pretty darn good.

Whether you think Charlie is worth that much money or Bill (who's actually only going to be in half the shows on CSI in 2008-2009) or Kiefer, for that matter, but Hugh Laurie has earned this raise. He's the center of House, the most important character, and there is no show without him.

I was going to make some sort of "dough" and "doh!" here, but I'm sure that will already happen elsewhere.

The owner of a candy store in Aviles, Spain found a Euro with the face of Simpsons star (star? character?) Homer Simpson on it. The coin usually has King Juan Carlos on it. The other side of the coin wasn't touched, and no other coins have shown up with the likeness of Homer, or any other TV character, for that matter.

Which got me thinking: putting TV and movie characters on coins is a great idea. The U.S. is so obsessed with pop culture, what better way to show that then to put celebrities and characters on our money? I can imagine Montgomery Burns on the $100 bill.

Say it ain't so, Ho. Homey, that's is. According to Variety, even though Fox has given The Simpsons a renewal for season number 20, the voice talent that make the show have not been re-signed. Julie Kavner, Dan Castellaneta, Hank Azaria, Yeardley Smith, Nancy Cartwright and Harry Shearer -- the actors who are as integral to the success of The Simpsons as the writers and animators -- are looking for a new deal. The group make approximately $360,000 per episode. They want a raise to $500,000 per. While that sounds like a lot of money -- and it is! -- when you consider how much Fox and company are making off The Simpsons franchise, like the new ride at Universal Orlando, the talent have every right to expect their piece of the pie.

My father is a former economics major who spent 30 years as a mortgage banker before starting his own company (which does economical things so complex that to my simple mind, they might as well be magical). One of the things that constantly irks him is the loaded language that the nightly news uses to describe our economic situation: words like "crisis," "downturn," and, worst of all "recession."

Now, anybody who has spent more than forty seconds online in the last six months can see that we are, more than likely, in the middle of a recession brought on by a downturn in the real estate market because of the current credit crisis. That said, I'd like to ask the question: would we be better off if TV simply lied to us about all of these things?

The Fox Business Channel, which launches on October 15th, is trying to overthrow CNBC as the go-to network for news on money, business, and stocks. It's also going to be HOT.

Take a look at the female members of their on air anchor team. The women in the pic to the right are (clockwise from the top left) Alexis Glick, Jenna Lee, Dagen McDowell, and Rebecca Gomez. I'm getting a Charlie's Angel's vibe from this. "I took them away from all that. And now they work for me...my name is Rupert."

I love thumbs as much as the next guy. They allow me to grab things, I can use them for sucking in place of my pacifier and, most importantly, they allow me to pass pure, unadulterated judgment on everything from my mom's home-cooked meals (thumbs up) to my new neighbor Steve (sorry Stevie).

However, with the news that film critic Roger Ebert plans on withholding his famous thumb movie rating scale, I have grown tired of the thumb. I really wouldn't mind if you just lop it off (his, not mine).

Isn't there a rule where you can't say something about yourself or it automatically makes it untrue? Like if you call yourself "hip" or "cool" then that means you're not hip or cool?

I thought of that when I read this piece (scroll down) about CNBC's Maria Bartiromo. Several years ago people gave her the nickname "Money Honey" because she talked about finance on the network and...well, look at her. It was revealed that Bartiromo herself had trademarked the "Money Honey" phrase last year, and now Hamptons mag tells us why. She's starting her own show titled Money Honey.

How is she going to be able to say "Hello and welcome to Money Honey" with a straight face? Will she wear bikinis and evening gowns for various stock segments? Will there be Money Honey Dancers to entertain viewers?

[via TV Newser]

I know that the most devastating news that came out of the recent network upfronts was that NBC didn't announce when or if The Apprentice was coming back. I think I actually saw people crying and screaming on the street that day, shaking their fists to the heavens. But then NBC said it wasn't canceled, they just hadn't decided what to do yet. And then Donald Trump "quit" before they could "fire" him.

But wait! Trump told Larry King the other night that NBC wants to do another season of the show and he wants to do it too. He also criticized the network, saying they ruined the show by putting it all over the schedule (yeah, OK). So I guess they'll be another season.

GSN has bought the rights to the (very) short-lived ABC game show Show Me The Money, hosted by William Shatner. That's a total of seven episodes, including two that never aired.

Wow, what a get! Seven episodes of a lame TV show that lasted for five episodes. Did GSN get some sort of great deal on this? Are they that hard up for shows? It will run Tuesday night, but maybe it should be a daily show, so they can go through the entire run of the show is a week. Maybe they'll have a week long marathon and show the same seven episodes over and over and over again.

A network buys a short-lived game show but no one is currently running Kate and Allie or The Odd Couple, both of which lasted years. Crazy.