Reality gets a bit ‘Stranger’ with new Fox show

Network developing series in which brides-to-be meet husbands on big day

LOS ANGELES - Fox is developing "I Married a Stranger," a matrimonial reality series in which brides-to-be don't meet their husbands until they exchange vows.

The premise of the show is that a woman frustrated by the dating scene agrees to wed a man she's never met. While she prepares for her blind wedding, friends and family select a spouse from a pool of six eligible suitors offered by the show's producers. The men are eliminated one by one until only two candidates remain. Both finalists walk down the aisle, but only one makes it to the altar to reveal himself to his new wife.

"She never meets him until the actual moment when they say 'I do,'" a source close to the project said. "It's like the big scene that comes after an entire season of 'The Bachelor,' only this is in every episode."

...MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, who owns three $850 Legends Suite season tickets, was unhappy prices were cut only for those with front-row seats while others will be given additional tickets.

"If they're offering only selective refunds, depend upon it: There are going to be lawsuits," he said. "Great, more tickets nobody wants. The silver lining here is that even more charities are going to be getting even more tickets from me."

...This study investigated biased message processing of political satire in The Colbert Report and the influence of political ideology on perceptions of Stephen Colbert. Results indicate that political ideology influences biased processing of ambiguous political messages and source in late-night comedy. Using data from an experiment (N = 332), we found that individual-level political ideology significantly predicted perceptions of Colbert's political ideology. Additionally, there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said while liberals were more likely to report that Colbert used satire and was not serious when offering political statements. Conservatism also significantly predicted perceptions that Colbert disliked liberalism. Finally, a post hoc analysis revealed that perceptions of Colbert's political opinions fully mediated the relationship between political ideology and individual-level opinion....

The phrase - well, the "palace" part - is Derek Jeter's. It's unoriginal, cornball, and entirely accurate. In managing to transplant the history of Yankee Stadium, and amplify the grandeur of the old place, and wrap the whole thing up in state-of-the-art hi-tech bells-and-whistles, the Yankees have created a landmark.

I'm a traditionalist, as pro-past as anybody watching the game. Since my first tour of the shell of the ballpark a year ago this month, I have been waiting to be disappointed. At every turn, I have instead been overwhelmed.

The ballpark is deliberately outsized, to recreate for an adult the awestruck feeling of walking into the old place, for the first time, as a kid, when you might've gotten the impression that the people who built Yankee Stadium were the same ones who had done The Grand Canyon.

* HANNIGAN'S BIRTHDAY BABY
AMERICAN PIE star ALYSON HANNIGAN was given a special gift on her 35th birthday -- her first-born child.

The actress and husband Alexis Denisof welcomed baby Satyana into the world on 24 March (09) - meaning mother and daughter will share the special anniversary.

A spokesperson for the star tells People.com, "They're very excited, and mom and baby are doing great."

And Hannigan, who kept the sex of her baby a secret throughout the pregnancy, will be glad she has given birth - because she lost the ability to concentrate while she was with child.

She told TV host Ellen DeGeneres in February (09), "I get tired a lot and I have pregnancy brain, which I never realised was a thing but it is. I sort of feel like a Koala bear where I'm slightly stoned all the time and I'll say the wrong word."

Hannigan and Denisof met on the set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 2000 and married in California in 2003. (MJ//LR)

• Four of my least favorite words: "reshape and dry flat."


• Having said that, I had a good day! Yesterday at work was crazy. Practically everyone on my team called out. I -- like an idiot -- went to work. I was there for ten hours. It was incredibly rough. Today was a vacation in comparison. But my boss was really pleased with my performance from yesterday. \o/


• I was amazingly productive this morning. Took Hubby to the train at 6:00, went and got the car gassed up, came home, did a good workout on the treadmill, showered & dressed, took out the garbage, made a protein shake and packed my lunch. And got to work on time. Boo-yah!


• Ha! The impostor Life on Mars has perished, not even making it to the second season like the original. Dear TV people: stop remaking perfect British TV series. You cannot improve it. The Office was lightning in a bottle. Just stop it.


• I love love love my iPhone! I've discovered why the white noise apps like Binaural Beats and Ambiance are so popular. It's absolutely the perfect stuff for me to listen to while I work and concentrate on these long complex loan credit agreements! I spent a huge part of the day listening to both apps, and when I took my headphones off, I felt like I was coming up from underwater. I can't listen to audiobooks; the talking is too distracting. Even rock music makes it hard for me to concentrate. But I could listen to thunderstorms or wind or the ocean for hours.


• Another app I've come to love: Lose It. It's a simple and elegant calorie tracker. It makes it easy to count calories and journal your food. The database is huge, plus it's easy to add your own foods. Oh, and it's free! If I have an easy system to help me work on losing weight, I will do it!


• More reasons to love mah prezdent: Obama Suspends Bush Rule on Endangered Species. Yeah, it ain't sexy, but it's the right thing to do!


• How did voting in the 2008 election look when analyzing voter incomes? FiveThirtyEight.com knows. The answer... will probably not surprise any of you. But there are cool graphs!


• "A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future. Regulations... were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn't afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day." Our prezdent gets it.


• Off to make a "brag book" album so I can have my favorite photos on... you guessed it, my iPhone! G'night!

...Rachel Maddow - in her own words a mannish lesbian policy wonk who doesn't own a television set - is not your average anchorwoman in America, or indeed on this side of the Atlantic. Later today when she goes live on air she must swap her Red Sox T-shirt and baggy Levi's jeans for what she calls "lady clothes" - a bland slate-grey trouser suit. (She won't say who it's by for fear of insulting the designer.) Her chunky Eric Morecambe glasses will be exchanged for contact lenses (which she's still getting used to). Reluctantly, there will be the merest smear of lipstick and blusher. She will, however, cling on to her trainers, safely out of sight under the desk. (The stylists at American Vogue recently offered her an array of extravagantly high-heeled Louboutin shoes for a photo shoot. She insisted on a pair of Converse boots.)

With their ironed hair and shrink-wrapped foreheads, women on American television news programmes all too often come across as shrill harpies or eye candy. Maddow seems to have both types on the run. She goes on air as if she's got nothing to prove, this despite the fact that she'll have done hours of preparation: a cheerful and clever geek, fluent in irony, alternately idealistic and sceptical, who doesn't believe in talking down to the viewers. Her aim? To raise the level of debate in America so that the right kind of decisions are made in the future....

NOW that Adam Baldwin has figured out how to make it look easy — this surly, deadpan, tough-guy thing he does every Monday night on NBC as the monosyllabic secret-agent sidekick on the action-comedy series “Chuck” — he doesn’t mind admitting how hard it used to be.

He was 18 when he got his first taste of movie-star limelight as the title character in the 1980 film, “My Bodyguard,” then roles in summer comedies like “D.C. Cab” in 1983 and smaller parts in prestige films like “Ordinary People” despite not having a clue about what he was doing.

“I was horrible,” he said of some of his early performances, particularly the one in “D.C. Cab” (in which his co-stars included Bill Maher, Gary Busey and Mr. T). “I didn’t know how to work. I didn’t know how to process a character, and, certainly, I wasn’t as funny as I should have been.

“But I did learn a lot of technical stuff, how to be on a set, where to stand, how to do a fight scene, things like that,” he said during a recent interview in a high-end Santa Monica coffee shop, one of those mad-scientist places where they grind the coffee in front of you and serve it in vacuum-sealed flasks on a silver tray. “But then I had to learn how to act. And that just takes some people longer than others. I’m no Leonardo DiCaprio....”

MSNBC Wants to Add a 3rd Prime-Time Show

by Brian Stelter

WASHINGTON — Building on the momentum of its prime-time hours, MSNBC is developing a 10 p.m. program that would complement its left-leaning evening lineup, the cable news channel’s president said this week.

A new program could increase the competition between MSNBC, a unit of NBC Universal, and its two chief competitors, Fox News Channel and CNN, for news viewers in the time slot. Unlike most major networks, MSNBC’s original programming ends at 10 each weeknight. The 8 p.m. program “Countdown With Keith Olbermann” is rerun at 10 p.m., where it usually ranks third.

But Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, is making 10 p.m. a priority now. In an interview on Tuesday in a studio on the Mall, hours after the inauguration of President Obama, Mr. Griffin said that the channel needed a third original show in its lineup.

“We can’t let this momentum stop,” he said.

( Cutting for length )