Yesterday I was minding my own business reading the paper when I saw the latest story about Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson. Oh, goody! I don't have nearly enough Nick and Jessica information in my life. They were recently on the cover of some magazine (I want to say US, but it may have been People or InStyle. All of those are in my co-worker's magazine pile on the desk.) and the headline was something along the lines of, Is Fame Tearing Them Apart?
Well, let me tell you, I got so anxious at the thought of Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson being torn apart by fame that I didn't even read the article. Their love is the perfect love that everyone wants to achieve, they have to work it out! After their beautiful fairy tale wedding they cannot do anything other than live happily ever after.
And as we all know, the fastest ticket to living happily ever after is to get a variety show with your spouse. Look at Sonny and Cher! Or not. In that case their variety show was the fastest ticket to divorcing Sonny and marrying Gregg Allman. (I have no proof that their show was in any way related to Cher's marriage to Gregg Allman. I just wanted to make a Cher-Gregg Allman joke.)
Go ahead, remind me that the Captain and Tennille had a variety show and they are still happily married. They sure are, and I applaud them. Not for the long marriage, but for the fact that Captain is short for Captain Keyboard. That rules. I vaguely remember watching their show when I was little. But when it was cancelled in 1977, I was three years old. Maybe I am actually remembering their specials from '78 and '79.
I have recently seen clips on VH1 that featured Captain and Tennille footage from their shows, and it was just as I remembered. Toni Tennille had her very seventies hairdo, the Captain had his hat, and together they had some excellent pop tunes. I think that the Captain and Tennille made some really good music, ditto Sonny and Cher. And when I see the clips of the old Sonny and Cher show, the music is enjoyable and the sketches are funny.
And that is why I wonder how Nick and Jessica ended up with a show. They're funny, but not ha-ha funny. Not long ago, I had the misfortune to channel flip past an episode of Newlyweds and Jessica was trying to learn lines for a sketch. She was bothered that she had something like forty lines to learn, and some of them were in French. She was really having problems with the French lines. No one was making her recite a letter to Père Noël or anything, she was having problems with au revoir.
Granted, to a native English speaker, au revoir is not spelled the way it sounds. But when she was told the correct pronunciation she didn't say, "Oh, so that's how it's spelled!" No, she struggled to pronounce the phrase. How is it possible that she got to be in her twenties without ever once hearing au revoir? How can someone struggling to learn forty lines be on a variety show?
Of course, it isn't a variety series like Sonny and Cher or Captain and Tennille. Nick and Jessica already have a regular television series, this is just a special. Yeah, I'm sure it's going to be really special. With guests like the Muppets and Mr. T, how can they go wrong?
But that's not the part that made me laugh. The best part was the headline in my local paper. They were running the same AP story that everyone else had, but they had created their own headline. Other sources had headlines that said things like Nick and Jessica get show, but not my paper. My headline read: Jessica Simpson, husband to star in variety show.
Not just husband, but husband in lower case letters. He has been demoted even further, if that is possible. You know, not to wish ill on the talentless and annoying, but he might be better off if fame does tear them apart. At least he could go back to being Nick Lachey, former member of 98 Degrees, and stop being Mr. Jessica Simpson.
But no matter what he is called, I still don't know why he is going to be part of a variety show. He isn't a multi-dimensional performer. He couldn't hold his own with say, members of the Rat Pack. I think the Rat Pack set a pretty good standard for the talent required to pull off a successful variety show. Thanks to them, I always thought that variety shows were supposed to contain a variety of talented people showing off their variety of talents. But if Nick and Jessica are going to have a variety show, I must have been mistaken.