A KRIPPLING CURSE

INSIDE THE IDIOT BOX - January 22, 2006

Remember Jenna Elfman? She was on that show Dharma & Greg back in the late 1990s – I think she played Dharma, but I can’t be sure since I avoided the show as studiously as I avoid beets. She was also supposed to be the Next Big Thing, at least for a few minutes.

However, her career was derailed – as so many promising careers have been – by a little something I like to call the Krippendorf’s Curse. You may never have heard of this rare condition, but trust me, it’s real, and it afflicts anyone who had anything to do with the 1998 film Krippendorf’s Tribe, about an anthropologist who makes his family dress up as New Guinea tribe members so he can claim that he has “discovered” a new African tribe.

Do I even need to tell you that this was a truly awful movie? I watched a few fleeting moments of it on cable once and was so stupefied by it that, had my hand not already been clutching the remote control, I might have been forever paralyzed by the sheer force of its atrocity. Thankfully, I quickly flipped to something less disturbing, like that channel where they show surgeries.

Besides Elfman, the stars of movie were Richard Dreyfuss, Natasha Lyonne and Lily Tomlin. In the years since, those actors have combined to appear in approximately zero watchable pictures, unless you count the mug shot of Lyonne taken after her 2001 arrest for drunk driving. In fact, the once-promising young actress’ most memorable line since falling under the Krippendorf’s Curse came not in any movie, but at the scene of the DUI arrest, when she reportedly told the cops “I’m a movie star. Can I talk to my entertainment lawyer?’

But let’s get back to Elfman. Sure, she hung around on TV as Dharma for a few more years after getting Krippendorf Cursed, but she lost her It factor. And then, once the show went bye-bye in 2002, she disappeared so completely you would have thought she witnessed a mob hit.

But wait. The leggy blonde is back on the small screen this week on Courting Alex, which premieres on CBS tomorrow night at 9:30. On the show, Elfman plays the title character who, according to its web site, is “an attractive, single, semi-workaholic with one simple goal: to find true love while balancing a career as a successful lawyer.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but that kind of sounds like two goals to me. Perhaps I'm confused by the legalese.

Now I’m not saying the Curse is already in effect, but I would like to point at that most discerning TV viewers will be watching Fox’s 24 at that hour. The Fox hit returned last week with a quartet of ridiculously exciting episodes and scored some of its best ratings ever As if the Krippendorf Curse weren't powerful enough, would you want to be taking on Jack Bauer, too?
Courting Alex premieres tomorrow night at 9:30 on CBS.

NOT SO BLEAK: It’s true that we Idiot Box addicts subsist mainly on junky TV fare like MTV’s Cribs and Fox’s Family Guy, but once in while we do step out for a little sophistication. And by step out for a little sophistication, I mean stay in and watch PBS. That’s why tonight at 9, I’ll be checking out the premiere of Bleak House, a six-part mini-series based on the Charles Dickens tale. Now I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a regular viewer of Masterpiece Theatre, which is a bit too tea-and-crumpets for my beer-and-pizza taste. But then again, not every Masterpiece Theatre show can boast an ex-X-Files star (Gillian Anderson) and “some of the most famous plot twists in history, including a case of spontaneous human combustion.” HELLO! Did someone say “spontaneous human combustion”? I am so there. The main plot has something to do with an inheritance dispute that last for generations, which should provide its own fireworks, too.
Bleak House premieres tonight at 9 on WGBH, Ch. 2, and continues at the same time for the next six weeks.

COUCH POTATO OR MOVIE MOGUL? You don’t have to travel all the way out to Park City, Utah, to keep track of all the happenings at the Sundance Film Festival, Robert Redford’s annual showcase of indie film that has become one of the main showcases for emerging show biz talent. The festival runs through next Sunday, and every night this week, the Sundance Channel will air “Sundance Dailies,” a recap of each day’s events and premieres. Check it out nightly at 11:30 p.m. For more information, visit. http://www.sundance.com