Wow. Get the tapes of last night's Rosie Live special on NBC, pack them up and ship them to the Paley Center for Media or some other broadcasting Hall of Fame because it was so classically wrong it made The Chevy Chase Show look like Curb Your Enthusiasm. We were still getting used to the sight of dour Rosie stuffed into black female drag and dotted with red lipstick when she came out dressed up as an Irish beat cop for a vaudeville skit with a grown woman playing a little girl in stereotypical Pocahontas drag. While Rosie may be working out some recovered memories of being abused by a family member while watching the Abbott & Costello show, it's just lazy to try and pass off an ersatz Provincetown fundraiser as the revival of the network television variety show. Call this the worst network TV special of the new century. We're calling it that and we only watched it on fast-forward. Keep a copy to play over and over and over again...
(UPDATE: A mere 5 million viewers tuned in for the 8 p.m. premiere of “Rosie Live,” with the program earning a 1.2 preliminary adults 18-49 rating. The telecast matched ABC’s recently-canceled “Pushing Daisies” as the night's lowest-rated program on a major broadcast network.)
