News and Gossip

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News and Gossip

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NeWs

"8 Simple Rules" moves to T.G.I.F.

Starting next season, "8 Simple Rules" can be seen on Fridays at 9pm, 8pm central. It will be the Show's third season, and first full season without Ritter.

John Ritter dies at age 54.

1948-2003

Prolific funnyman John Ritter, who got famous playing a bumbling young ladies' man and recently made a comeback playing the bumbling overprotective dad of two young babes, died suddenly of a previously undetected heart problem, his reps said Friday. He was 54

Ritter, who would have been 55 next week, collapsed on Thursday night while filming ABC's 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter.

The former Three's Company star was rushed to Providence St. Joseph hospital in Burbank, California, across from the studio where he had been taping. But doctors at the hospital were unable to save him, and he died shortly after 10 p.m., from a "dissection of the aorta," an undetected flaw in a main artery from the heart, according to his publicist.

Ritter was accompanied to the hospital by the show's producers, coworkers, his wife and Problem Child costar Amy Yasbeck and his 23-year-old son Jason.

What caused his death

Sudden death is always shocking, but there was something particularly unsettling about the way actor John Ritter died last week. He suffered what is known as an aortic dissection, an uncommon condition in which the major artery that carries blood from the heart to the rest of the body basically tears itself apart. More precisely, blood, which is propelled by the beating heart, gets between layers of the arterial wall and pushes them apart, moving down the blood vessel like a run racing down a nylon stocking. As you might expect, if the tear occurs close to the heart, death can occur in minutes.

I must say that I was a huge fan of John's and I know that he will be missed dearly. Whether it was comedy, drama, or even horror, he was the best at what he did. I also must say that as a person who has Cerebral Palsy, I am proud to say that John has helped me out a lot, and for that I thank him.

Ritter's "Rules" rules the airwaves:

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - He may be gone, but TV viewers have not forgotten John Ritter

Excluding the professional baseball playoffs, the actor's final TV appearance on ABC comedy "8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter" was the most-watched program on television on Tuesday night, according to early ratings released Wednesday by Nielsen Media Research.

Tuesday night's show drew an average of 17.45 million total viewers and a 20 percent share of the 18-to-49 year old audience most networks consider key to the advertising community. A year earlier, the Oct. 8, 2002 episode of the show drew 14.6 million viewers and a 16 share in the 18-49 audience.

Ritter died of a heart condition on Sept. 11, after shooting three episodes of the second-year series that ABC was counting on to be a cornerstone of its prime time TV schedule this season.

After a few days of mourning, ABC said it would show the three episodes then take a break and air reruns while the writers for "8 Simple Rules" craft new episodes that weave in the death of Ritter's character and its impact on his TV wife and their three children.

Tuesday's episode of "8 Simple Rules" aired at 8 p.m., when many TV stations in California were cutting away from prime-time programming to call Schwarzenegger's victory in the California recall election, though it was not clear if those news cut-ins had any impact on the ratings.

Fox claimed overall victory for the night with a closely fought game between the Chicago Cubs and Florida Marlins in the first game of their National League championship series. The network said the game was up 53 percent over the first game of last year's series.

Reuters/VNU

Contributed by Erica

More News

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Ritter's "Rules" will go on:

'8 Simple Rules' to Continue, With -- and Then Without -- Ritter

By Lisa de Moraes
Wednesday, September 17, 2003; Page C07

ABC will go ahead with Tuesday's second-season debut of "8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter" and will air all three episodes that had been shot before lead actor John Ritter died unexpectedly last week.

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ABC suits announced yesterday that the series will continue and will follow the sitcom's Hennessy family members as they cope with the death of their father.

"We don't pretend to know exactly where this will take us; we will take episodes one at a time," ABC Entertainment President Susan Lyne told TV critics during a telephone news conference late yesterday afternoon.

Ritter, who made his TV sitcom comeback on "8 Simple Rules" last season, 25 years after becoming a star on ABC with "Three's Company," collapsed while working on the fourth episode; he died soon after of a previously undetected heart defect.

With the new TV season a week away, ABC execs had "little choice but to dive in and make the decision" whether to continue the series without Ritter, said ABC Entertainment Television Group Chairman Lloyd Braun, also on the conference call.

Their first thought was to cancel the show, Lyne said. "That was our initial instinct, because John is clearly irreplaceable; he was such a powerful force in our company, and certainly on that show, that our first instinct was that we should retire it."

But after talking to other cast members and producers, as well as Ritter's wife, actress Amy Yasbeck, the ABC suits said, they decided to try to keep the show going. They did, however, quickly dismiss the idea of recasting Ritter's role.

"It didn't feel right on any level," Braun said, adding, "We know that this will make it a different show."

After showing the three episodes already in the can, ABC will air reruns from the first season for a period yet to be determined. Those episodes will get some special packaging, but the execs said details have not been worked out. When original episodes resume, they will start with one in which the writers address the death of Ritter's character, Paul Hennessy. It has not been decided whether the death will mirror what happened to Ritter, the ABC execs said.

Lyne said they see this as "an opportunity to do something that would break out . . . to deal honestly and truthfully with something that everybody deals with at some point in their lives."

"We can't lay out for you right now exactly how long we'll be dealing with death and loss" on the show, she told reporters.

"It may be several episodes; it may be longer. . . . Certainly the first episode and several after that will be more dramatic and more emotional than you expect" from a sitcom.

Odds of a series surviving the death of its star actor are slim. NBC recast Freddie Prinze's role after he committed suicide in 1977 during the third season of "Chico and the Man"; the show was canceled in a year. CBS tried to bring back Redd Foxx's comeback series, "The Royal Family," six months after his death but scrapped the idea after just a few episodes.

On the other hand, Disney, which owns both ABC and "8 Simple Rules" production house Touchstone, already has invested in a year's worth of episodes on the series.

For a series to become a viable product for syndication, a studio must amass several seasons' worth of episodes. Stephen McPherson, president of Touchstone Television, told critics yesterday that if the retooled show survives, the episodes with Ritter would be pooled with all future episodes for syndication purposes.

Fox, the network that targets hip young viewers, has decided instead to target angry old white men to kick off its 2003-04 TV season.

So rather than air the next episode of its latest singing competition series, "Performing As . . ." at 8 p.m. on Monday, Fox will run an interview with President Bush from the White House by Fox News Channel chief Washington correspondent Brit Hume.

How -- I know you're wondering -- do Fox suits get from a place where they think that a show in which groupies imitate Cher, Britney, Barbra and Faith is the best way to counterprogram the season debut of NBC's "Fear Factor," featuring contestants who battle for a $1 million prize by holding their breath in a flooded coffin filled with thousands of blood-sucking leeches, to a place where they think the best way to counter those blood-sucking leeches is George W. Bush discussing his administration's efforts to obtain a new U.N. resolution on Iraq and the current "situation" in the Middle East with one of the Fair-and-Balanced Boys of FNC?

Did I just answer my own question?

A rep from FNC, which, by the way, is not running the Bush interview until another day, said it offered the interview to the broadcast network, which jumped at the chance.

Fox sources tell a different tale, one in which brass from News Corp. -- which owns Fox and FNC -- place a call to the suits at the broadcast network and remind them that News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch signs all their checks and that he wants them to to find room on their schedule somewhere -- they didn't say whether he specified prime time -- to let Bush do some on-air spinning on the eve of his address to the U.N. General Assembly.

So fans of "Performing As . . ." will have to wait until 9 p.m. Monday to see the new episode, while fans of Fox's Monday "put out or get out" reality series "Paradise Island" will have to wait until the next night for two back-to-back episodes.

Gossip

Here I'll include some of the juicier stuff I hear. No guarantee of the accuracy of what you read in this column!

Be sure to let me know what you hear and I'll add it to this page!

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