Entertainment Weekly: Nothing to see here, folks...

I actually anticipated an ish of "EW" for the first time in, oh, I don't know how many "Gossip Girl" seasons, when I saw a "humorous photo illustration of Jay Leno on the cover with a headline (Feel free to bark, "Headline!" right now in your best Leno voice) proclaiming TV's 50 biggest bombs inside. The mag defined "bomb" rather loosely to include poor decisions and other "what were they thinking?" moments as well as tanked shows, so it promised an entertaining article.

Well, as I should know by now, never trust a promise to be entertaining from "So-Called Entertainment Weekly, "or "Entertainment Weakly" as our friend Ivan would say.

Of course the article is a big letdown, but its weakness is amplified by the lateness of the issue. For some reason, my copy came 5 days late last week, building me up even more for the Cool Article That Isn't.

Oh, it provides a chuckle or two and isn't all that bad as EW goes these days. But what irks me is the magazine takes a premise rife with potential, hypes it on the cover, and delivers a feeble 6 pages, 2 of which show a big picture of Jay (this magazine loves big pictures nowadays) and a capsule summary of why the current NBC late-night debacle is the biggest bomb in TV history (which is in itself a debatable premise, but I won't even go there).

Bombs 2-25 are OK reading, predictably focused on the last 10-20 years or so (I do salute the inclusion of The Great One's notorious "You're in the Picture," one of several entries which proves some staffers who remember a pre-Simpsons media landscape still have some pull there), but they are all too brief. Notice I say "2-25." The second half of the list gets barely more than agate type at the end of the piece, thus ending the biggest disappointment the magazine has given me in months.

I won't say it was one of the biggest bombs, though, in recent memory, because the sad thing is I just don't expect much from "EW" anymore. It retains the capacity to disappoint me, but even that is fading. If a good list of stupid TV blunders sounds interesting, I recommend "What Were They Thinking: The 100 Dumbest Events in Television History" by David Hofstede, which is itself breezy and rife with errors but at least provides more than 5 minutes of entertaining reading.