Fox Cancels Yankees-Marlins World Series

fficials at the Fox network announced last week that despite record ratings for the first two rounds of baseball’s postseason, the Yankees-Marlins World Series will be cancelled due to lack of viewer interest. The announcement stunned and disappointed sports fans, who thought Fox was talking about canceling the World Cup. Executives have since issued a statement assuring the viewing public that the little-watched soccer tournament, which appeals to foreign-born Americans and small children who play soccer, will go on as scheduled.

“Our focus group research indicates that watching the Yankees play in the World Series has the same level of audience appeal as watching the Iraqi National Guard gang-rape Mother Theresa,� explained Fox Sports head Walter Lawrie. “And the Marlins’ name recognition ranks comfortably between one-hit wonder Jim Basnight of ‘Sex Teen’ fame and Secretary of Commerce Don Evans. Frankly, if we hadn’t made this announcement, I doubt anyone would have noticed the change.�

Fox executives originally announced that the Yankees-Marlins series would be replaced with footage of the cast of Malcolm in the Middle playing catch in their backyard, interspersed with thousands of commercials for the upcoming Fox shows Skin, Arrested Development and 24. But after focus group research conducted by opening office windows and listening indicated that baseball fans would still be interested in watching a Red Sox-Cubs World Series, rules be damned, a mid-season replacement series was organized.

“Yankees-Marlins was underperforming in several key markets, most notably the entire United States of America,� said Fox spokesperson Lana Rauch. “We were originally taking consolation in the notion that we’d at least get strong numbers out of New York and Miami, but it turns out fans in New York consider anything short of a four-game World Series sweep by the Yankees an unwatchable travesty, and the three Marlins fans don’t live in Nielsen households. So even in those markets, the numbers stank like David Wells’ burp-up rag.�

Network executives hope a Red Sox-Cubs match up will breathe new life into the flagging World Series franchise, which lost some if its luster after last season’s breakout star Barry Bonds was unable to return for the 2003 season due to the failure of his supporting cast. Fox executives attempted to engineer a trade of Bonds to the Cubs after San Francisco’s first-round exit from the playoffs, but Cubs manager Dusty Baker vetoed the trade on the grounds that the 39-year-old Bonds wasn’t old enough to warrant displacing any of Baker’s trusted veteran players.

Fox had gone to great lengths in the preceding weeks to ensure a Red Sox-Cubs World Series, expected by many to be a ratings bonanza. But after succeeding in bombarding the Oakland A’s lineup with microwave radiation in the ALDS and scheduling ALCS Game 4 during a flash flood to prevent Boston Achilles-heel John Burkett from taking the mound, Fox was ultimately thwarted by the Red Sox and Cubs’ own considerable self-destructive quirks, ending up with an albatross series slung stinky-like around their necks.

Some baseball purists have decried the move, which goes beyond Fox’s usual postseason gametime juggling and bizarre scheduling decisions. But when questioned, all admitted they weren’t actually watching the Yankees-Marlins series, they were just tired of waiting for The Simpsons’ Halloween special to air.

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In honor of this week's Six Feet Under theme, and, what the hell, every person who has ever died, ever, we're going to use this column to take a look at how humans throughout history have dealt with the problem of what to do with dead bodies once the life spark has farted on out the door.

It has often been said that a lot can be learned about a culture by the ways in which they honor their dead, which is only really true for the few cultures throughout history that have buried their dead in a papier-mâché shells made from encyclopedia pages. For most other cultures, funeral customs just show how lazy they were feeling at the time.

For starters, in really ancient times, no real thought was given to burial formalities, mostly because it was just too much work to dig someone's remains out of a hunk of dinosaur poop.

After dinosaur times, but before Dinosaur Jr., man dealt with the death of his fellow man by getting far away from the dead body as fast as humanly possible, much like the way children deal with breaking a window or rolling a car into a lake. In fact, hauling ass away from death was an effective strategy for thousands of years. Some have interpreted this as evidence of early man's fear of death, but in all likelihood it was merely a smart move on early man's part, since funeral details are, without exception, a huge pain in the ass, and you can't get stuck with the bill if you're beating cheeks across the other side of the valley before anyone else has any idea what's happened.

This same sensible strategy is, I must point out, frowned upon as highly illegal or at least considerably rude in our own society, so I'll leave it to you to decide if we've really evolved in the right direction over the last several thousand years.

As time went by, man eventually figured out that death was nothing to fear, and that for hundreds of years he'd been hastily abandoning family members who were merely sick or sleeping. At this point, it didn't take man long to discover how fun death could be, and for a time the dead were valued as fun puppets and stunt people for early man's action-packed theater productions. But eventually man learned that keeping the dead bodies of family members around for group portraits or sex posed some daunting health concerns, and when man discovered bathing and finally washed off thousands of years of B.O., he realized that the dead fucking stank. This led to several hundred years of man burning his dead, for hygiene, cave heating, and general revenge purposes.

Eventually the Egyptians would come along, in Egypt anyway, and put a unique spin on death rituals thanks to their paralyzing fear of nudity. Mummification developed as a way for Egyptians to make sure their dead were never caught with their man-dresses down, and to prevent the embarrassment of accidentally seeing some long-dead asscrack. Eventually, the custom grew until it became common for mummification to begin in childhood, with parents taking their kids out in the fall to buy a new wrap for the school year, and making sure everyone in the family got enough preservatives in their diet. By the time the average Egyptian died at the age of 25, their bodies were ready for thousands of years of timeless, decomposition-free sleep.

By medieval times, the dead had come to be valued as an important military asset, and no army worth its codpieces would dare go into battle without a fleet of catapults loaded with plague-ridden corpses having their back. During these exciting times, it was within every person's reach to be a military hero in life, or in death if they were a giant pussy in life.

This timeline must, due to its brevity and my weak stomach, gloss over many other customs from around the world, like the Calatians who ate their dead, or the many native tribes around the world who believed the dead had cooties and therefore should only be porked with a condom. I think we can all agree that these dark times, much like haircuts in the 1970's, are best forgotten to the sands of time.

Equally forgotten, but much funnier, were the various foolish customs of the East regarding death, most of which involved honoring a person's death by killing even more people, and sometimes little yappy dogs. In India, a man's corpse was cremated along with his live wife, which has to explain the extraordinarily high rate of deathbed divorces among Hindus in those times. Fijians would strangle the deceased's slaves, wives, and friends, due to widespread confusion between funeral rites and concepts of mafia revenge. A nobleman's death in Japan was seriously bad news for the deceased nobleman's slaves, who were all expected to commit seppuku, which is sort of like sudoku but even less fun. In Africa, the death of a king pretty much meant everybody was fucked, so the Africans understandably kept a string of king look-alikes always on hand to step in and secretly take the king's place should he die, leading to a royal succession that went on like a bizarre game of genetic telephone.

As the world became more enlightened and funeral customs evolved, people would eventually stop killing each other to honor the dead. Unfortunately, the part about killing little yappy dogs also had to be thrown out with the bathwater.

In more modern times, our present-day funeral traditions gradually came about, mostly for reasons no less stupid than those given by our ancestors. Dressing all in black was originally a ploy to fool the spirits of the dead, who were expected to follow the living home and crash on their couches indefinitely, becoming a major pain in the ass. Wakes were originally attended by people who were waiting for the dead to come back to life, which helped the tribe identify its biggest optimists, who were reportedly the most delicious and the first on the list for when cannibalism would eventually swing back into favor on one of the inevitable 20-year cycles of public opinion about the rightness of eating folks. The custom of firing rifles at funerals dates back to the days when the living would try to spear the spirits of the dead at funerals, just for the hell of it, though modern technology is decidedly more effective for blowing ghosts all to shit than crappy old spears ever were.

Most modern funeral rites were designed to placate the dead, in the hopes that they'd take a hike and not hang around, scaring the crap out of everybody forever. In this, not much has changed to present day, as most funerals sill involve dressing a dead body up really nice, and people taking turns flattering the deceased and playing his or her favorite music as if they all enjoyed it. Basically, for the dead a funeral is like being Billy Mummy from that "It's a Good Life" Twilight Zone episode for about an hour, which isn't a half-bad consolation for later being blown all to shit by a nearby military funeral.

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Did you know ALF is coming out on DVD? No kidding, ALF, the show with the puppet doing vaudeville. I hated that stupid show, and not just because they wouldn't hire me to play the title character. But they're not the only one. What's Happening?, Magnum, P.I., The Dukes of Hazzard—these aren't what I'd call classic shows. Okay, I'll give you Dukes, except for the Coy and Vance years. But I'm sure you know where this is leading—Where's my show?

Maybe it only lasted three years, but there's a lot of classics that lasted less time than that. What about Sledge Hammer! or The Richard Pryor Show? Those lasted less time than my show and they get the honor of DVD release. I don't really see the difference. Are you TV types trying to say Who's Your Daddy? doesn't rate? I talk to people all the time who remember that show. Not my creditors, but people on the street and stuff remember it. I always get, "Hey, you're the Who's Your Daddy? girl!" Or, "Wow, I just caught the Who's Your Daddy? girl shoplifting in my store!" Does that sound like a show nobody remembers?

Don't lecture to me about costs. We already filmed the shows, and I know I'm not getting any revenue from them sitting around in your big-ass TV vaults. We had this discussion before, TV biz, and you didn't want to air them on TV Land or Nick at Nite. So let's forget that battle. What about DVD? You can release all the seasons in three cheap box sets, make everybody a cool little cash, and you're not taking up expensive airwaves with them. Jiminy, I saw Who's the Boss? sitting on a DVD shelf at the local store, you can't tell me people were standing in line to get that? At least give me a goddamn shot.

I got bills, bills, bills, guys. It's not like anybody ever died from releasing a TV series that wasn't a ratings blockbuster. That first year TV Guide called us a "show with promise"… you don't hear that but two or three times a year from them. Sure, I got caught in that crack den during the summer (once again: just visiting some friends) and the show took a dive from there, but still, that first season brings back some awful good memories for me. I bet I'm not the only one.

I'd jump at the chance to do DVD commentary, if you're wondering. Get the show creator, Nills Fiberglass, me and him will sit down and jaw on forever about how it all came to be. I actually did a hell of a lot on the show, which is why they legally have to retro-credit me as creative consultant. And don't sweat about Brad Van Danner dying last year, I visited him a while back and recorded our conversations. We didn't talk about the show, but I've got enough stuff that sounds like we were talking about it. Lines like, "I can't believe how much it hurts" and "To think of what I could have done with my life instead" are vague enough, we could fit them in anywhere.

So give the people what they want. And by people, I mean me. I need some dough, and I hear the Seinfeld people are getting a major cut of their DVD sales. Not that I want to ride that death ship. You can deal me out, settle up with me ahead of time for a good two or three hundred bucks, forsaking all future royalties. But I'm telling you, it's a good idea. Hell, you'll never know until you try it, so let's do it. Give me a time and place, I'll show up with enough anecdotes to choke James Lipton.

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