TV Tidbits: Missed Madhouse? Catch up with marathon next week

By: Tim Clodfelter | Winston-Salem Journal
Published: February 07, 2010

Madhouse, The History Channel reality series about race-car drivers at Bowman Gray Stadium, will be off the air tonight so that it won't have to compete against the Super Bowl. But Madhouse will return next weekend with a minimarathon of the four episodes shown so far, starting at 8 a.m. next Sunday and running until noon. A new episode will air that night at 11 p.m.

Ratings for the show have dropped somewhat since its Jan. 10 premiere, which drew about 1.3 million viewers. It now averages 1.11 million viewers, according to the Nielsen Company. The 2009 average for the 10 p.m. Sunday time slot on The History Channel was 1.2 million viewers.

"What the ratings do reflect is that we have an awesome, hard-core fan base that never seems to miss the show," Grant Kahler, one of the producers of Madhouse, said in an e-mail interview.

"We are hoping for that fan base to grow, but there's still a lot of the season left, so I'm pretty confident that it will," he said. "I'm anxious to see how people react to how the show progresses and the characters' stories build throughout the season."

The show's time slot has moved from 10 to 11 p.m., according to the Web site www.history.com. Kahler said he's not sure if it's a permanent change.

There will be 13 episodes in the season, with a season finale scheduled for April 11.

WGHP and WFMY won Emmy awards last weekend at the Mid-South Regional Emmy Awards in Nashville.

At WGHP, reporter Chad Tucker won an award in the category "General Assignment Report: Within 24 Hours." It was for a story about the closing of Nancy Reynolds School in Stokes County.

WFMY's Emmy was in the "Business/Consumer Report" for the report "Tough Cell Phone" by reporter Tanya Rivera and producer Alan Wagmeister.

Cringe-inducing humor doesn't come much cringier (is that a word?) than The Life & Times of Tim, a bawdy, animated HBO sitcom about a sad sack who gets into awkward situations and can never seem to dig his way out of trouble. The first episode, for instance, revolves around Tim trying to explain to his girlfriend and her parents why there's a hooker in his apartment.

The animation is limited, to say the least, but the show is fun for fans of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Arrested Development and other shows that revel in the idea of the socially uncomfortable faux pas.

The first season will come to DVD on Tuesday with bonus online shorts. The second season will start Feb. 19 on HBO.

Also new on DVD: the first season of the CBS sitcom Gary Unmarried, with Jay Mohr (who was much funnier in the Fox sitcom Action) as a recently-divorced dad; the second season of The Patty Duke Show; the third season of Lifetime's military soap Army Wives; Larry the Cable Guy's Tailgate Party, a stand-up comedy special that aired recently on Comedy Central; and the sixth season of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. That season of Moore included one of the show's most memorable episodes, "Chuckles Bites the Dust," a classic in the genre of cringe-inducing comedy, in which Mary gets the giggles at the worst possible place, a funeral.