Who would have possibly guessed that Fox would have the
classier of the season's two "can you remember the words to this famous song?" game shows? Watching
Don't Forget the Lyrics last night, I was amazed by how restrained it all was, from affable stump of a host Wayne Brady to its
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?-esque "lifelines" to the fact that the contestant could actually kinda, sorta sing. Compared to the gaudy, eye- and ear-harassing cattle call that is NBC's
Singing Bee, it was positively ... subdued. Which means it shouldn't have a prayer against a show that has both Joey Fatone
and Europe's "The Final Countdown," but apparently
Fox was ratings champ last night (by a scant .8 million viewers). Surely some of that is down to the success of
So You Think You Can Dance? (go Lacey), but as long as Fox keeps
Dance as
Lyrics' lead-in, it looks like we're looking at the summer of the battling tuneless d-bags.
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Idolator
Fox 411 columnist and amateur American Idol conspiracy theorist Roger Friedman has a new maligned music-industry heavy that he wants to prop up: The megapromoter Live Nation, whose feelings apparently got hurt by yesterday's New York Post item on Madonna's somewhat-soft ticket sales. In his latest column, he accuses one "Warner M. Group" of planting stories to make Madge—and, by extension, Live Nation, which signed her to an expensive deal last autumn—look bad! But while he's defending his friends, he goes way beyond the bounds of his usually slippery relationship with reality.
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Just in time for the writers' strike to 