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You Make Us So Happy, Oh, Andy (Richter)

In case you haven’t seen it yet, Andy Richter was on Regis and The One Who’s Not Kathie Lee Kelly this morning, and while he didn’t dish a lot of dirt or anything (“I have children, I still need work”), he did talk frankly about the mistakes made by the network, and the fact that “low ratings” talk is sometimes — at least when the ratings aren’t great but aren’t terrible — used to justify a prior decision to dump a show:

The thing about network television is, if they like a show,  if there are extenuating circumstances, they’ll say “well, you have to think about the extenuating circumstances”… but if they don’t like a show, they’ll say, “well, they couldn’t get the ratings.”  They weren’t saying that about the local news. They weren’t saying the local news somehow got bad.

He also talked about the practical realities of the situation, like why being out of work is a bigger problem than usual for crew members who (as in this case) have just changed cities:

This was immediately irritating to people that worked on the show. From stagehands to producers, they’re getting all these emails and Facebook things about “enjoy your golden parachute” and stuff. It’s not like that. In fact, Conan is putting a lot of his own money out there. He formed a little corporation just to pay people, because all these people moved from New York to California to work on the show. They’re robbed of their contacts, so even in a down time like this, they don’t have the contacts they would have on the East Coast to get work elsewhere.

Kelly Ripa once again proves that she’s a likable interviewer. Plus she called the whole thing “a hullaballoo,” making her the first person to use that term on national television since Joanna Pettet. Joanna can get away with it because she’s hotter, though.

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