English Entertainment
Star World gets ‘Stark Raving Mad’
MUMBAI: Looks like Tony Shalhoub is a hot property on Star World. After the channel re-launched Monk , it is all set to launch Shalhoub’s ‘new side’ in Stark Raving Mad.
The show will launch on Sunday, 30 May on 7 pm on Star’s English entertainment arm. The show will be replacing the quirky comedy show Malcolm In The Middle.
Starring the Emmy, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild award winner Shalhoub and Golden Globe nominated Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser, M.D.), this new comedy series comes from the house of Emmy Award winner Steven Levitan. He is the creator of the hit comedies such Just Shoot Me and Frasier, which are currently being aired on the channel.
Termed by the critics as crazy, flaky, strange, peculiar yet amazingly frantic show, the story is about Henry McNeely (Harris)- a young, uptight book editor- who is thrust into the dark and chaotic world of best-selling horror writer Ian Stark (Shalhoub). Shalhoub’s character in Stark Raving Mad, is poles apart from his obsessive-compulsive San Francisco investigator Adrian Monk act in Monk.. This time on, the tables have been turned and Harris plays the neurotic, compulsively neat character assigned to work with Shalhoub’s boozing, slovenly and eccentric Ian Stark.
An ‘odd couple’ style comedy, the show has sassy Eddie McClintock as Stark’s dazed writing assistant Jake Donovan, Heather Paige Kentas bartender/college student Maddie Keller, and Marty as Stark’s overly affectionate dog Edgar providing distractions as Henry tries to keep Stark on track.
The first season begun airing on the US airwaves from 23 September 1999 till Mar 2000, Thursday 9:30-10 pm. While the second season, or the concluding episodes aired till July 2000. The last telecast was aired on 13 July 2000.
The show begun its stint during the tenure of then NBC entertainment president Garth Ancier and former West coast president Scott Sassa. Despite receiving a full season pick up, the show was abruptly plugged off.
Apparently Stark Raving Mad never clicked owing to the time slot it was placed in. It followed Frasier and despite coming from the same production house, the sarcy brand of comedy was incompatible with that of Frasier
After the original 13 episodes were broadcast by January 2000, the series bounced off and on — mostly off — the schedule. Nearly half of the back nine that the network ordered in November 1999 were never broadcast at all.
Produced by Steven Levitan Productions, in association with Twentieth Century Fox Television, Stark Raving Mad also won the 2000 People’s Choice Award for Favorite Television New Comedy series.
In addition to Stark Raving Mad, the channel has also launched Still Standing, a comedy about a blue-collar Chicago couple working to raise their three children responsibly. The show is currently aired on the channel, as a part of its Monday comedy line up, at 8:30 pm.
The show stars Mark Addy and Jami Gertz as couple Bill and Judy Miller as high-school sweethearts, who after 15 years of marriage still make each other laugh, and try to keep their marriage intact, even when their family pulls them in different directions.
Judy’s unmarried sister, Linda (Jennifer Irwin), butts heads with Bill, and the Millers’ precocious teenage daughter, Lauren (Renee Olstead), thinks her parents are uncool. Meanwhile, their uptight, studious son, Brian (Taylor Ball), is just discovering girls, and their youngest child, Tina (Soleil Borda), would prefer to run around naked. Since Bill has a far more immature approach to marriage and raising children than Judy does, they work at striking a balance and remembering why they love each other, quirks and all.
The series has been produced by Twentieth Century Fox Television, in association with CBS Productions.
UK: The aerial is losing its grip. As broadband becomes the default way Britons watch television, the UK is edging towards a decisive, and divisive, question: should Freeview be switched off by 2034? The issue, highlighted in reporting by The Guardian, has exposed deep fault lines over access, affordability and the future of public service broadcasting.
For nearly 25 years, Freeview has delivered free-to-air television from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 to almost every corner of the country. Even now, it remains the UK’s largest TV platform, used in more than 16m homes and on around 10m main household sets. Yet the same broadcasters that built it are now pressing for its closure within eight years.
Their case rests on a structural shift in viewing. Smart TVs, superfast broadband and the Netflix-led streaming boom have pulled audiences online. Advertising economics have followed. By 2034, the number of homes using Freeview as their main TV set is forecast to fall from a peak of almost 12m in 2012 to fewer than 2m, making digital terrestrial television, or DTT, increasingly costly to sustain.
But critics say the rush to switch off risks abandoning those least able, or least willing, to move online.
“I don’t want to be choosing apps and making new accounts,” says Lynette, 80, from Kent. “It is time-consuming and irritating trying to work out where I want to be, to remember the sequence of clicks, with hieroglyphics instead of words. If I make a mistake I have to start again.”
Lynette is among nearly 100,000 people who have signed a “save Freeview” petition launched by campaign group Silver Voices. She fears the government is about to “take [Freeview] away from me and others who either don’t like, can’t afford, or can’t use online versions”.
Official figures underline the fault lines. A report commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport estimates that by 2035, 1.8m homes will still depend on Freeview. Ofcom’s analysis shows those households are more likely to be disabled, older, living alone, female, and based in the north of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Freeview is owned by the public service broadcasters through Everyone TV, which also operates Freesat and the newer streaming platform Freely. After two years of review, DCMS is expected to set out its position soon, drawing on three options proposed by Ofcom: a costly upgrade of Freeview’s ageing technology; maintaining a bare-bones service with only core PSB channels; or a full switch-off during the 2030s.
The broadcasters have rallied behind the third option. They argue that 2034 is the logical cut-off, when transmission contracts with network operator Arqiva expire. By then, they say, the cost of broadcasting to a dwindling audience will far outweigh the returns from TV advertising.
Ofcom agrees a crunch point is approaching. In July, the regulator warned of a “tipping point” within the next few years, after which it will no longer be commercially viable for broadcasters to carry the costs of DTT.
Others see risks beyond economics. Questions remain over whether internet TV can reliably deliver emergency broadcasts, such as the daily Covid updates, in the way that universally available DTT can. The UK radio industry has also warned that an internet-only future for TV could push up distribution costs and force some radio stations off air if PSBs no longer share Arqiva’s mast network.
“It is a political hot potato,” says Dennis Reed, founder of Silver Voices, who says he has “dissociated” his organisation from the government’s stakeholder forum, which he believes is “heavily biased” towards streaming.
The Future TV Taskforce, representing the PSBs, counters that moving online could “close the digital divide once and for all”. “We want to be able to plan to ensure that no one is left behind,” a spokesperson says, adding that rising DTT costs could otherwise mean cuts to programme budgets.
The numbers show the scale of the challenge. Of the 1.8m Freeview-dependent homes projected for 2035, around 1.1m are expected to have broadband but not use it for TV. The remaining 700,000 are forecast to lack a broadband connection altogether.
Veterans of the analogue switch-off, completed in 2012 after 76 years, recall similar fears of “TV blackout chaos”. Around 6 per cent of households were labelled “digital refuseniks”, yet a targeted help scheme and a national campaign, fronted by a robot called Digit Al voiced by Matt Lucas, delivered a largely smooth transition.
This time, the BBC is less keen to foot the bill. Tim Davie, the outgoing director general, has said the corporation should not fund a comparable support programme for a Freeview switch-off.
Research for Sky by Oliver & Ohlbaum suggests that with early awareness campaigns and digital inclusion measures, only about 330,000 households would ultimately need hands-on help ahead of a 2034 shutdown.
Meanwhile, viewing habits continue to fragment. Audience body Barb says 7 per cent of UK households no longer own a TV set, choosing to watch on other devices. In December, YouTube overtook the BBC’s combined channels in total UK viewing across TVs, smartphones and tablets, albeit measured at a minimum of three minutes.
That shift may accelerate. YouTube has recently blocked Barb and its partner Kantar from accessing viewing session data, limiting transparency just as online platforms consolidate power.
“When the government chose British Satellite Broadcasting as the ‘winner’ in satellite TV it was Rupert Murdoch’s Sky instead that came out on top,” says a senior TV executive quoted by The Guardian. “There already is such an outsider ready to be the winner in the transition to internet TV; it is YouTube.”
Freeview’s future now hangs on a familiar British dilemma: modernise fast and risk exclusion, or protect universality and pay the price. Either way, the aerial’s days as king of the living room look numbered.
