SITCOMS | More like ‘Rita’ meddles

I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to write about Lifetime’s Nicole Sullivan sitcom Rita Rocks, which moves to Mondays at 8:30p/7:30c starting with tonight’s new episode.

I’ve been a huge Sullivan fan since the middle years of Mad TV, which she dominated with characters such as the Vancome Lady. I even watched the horrible Talk To Me a few years back. And I was glad she found steady work as the dog walker on the later seasons of The King of Queens.

Finally someone has come up with a vehicle for her, and I have to admit I expected it to be a disaster. As a harried mother, Rita juggles kids, husband Richard Ruccolo (who remembers Two Guys and a Girl?), and part-time employment with little time for herself. So of course she starts a garage band with the mom from My Wife and Kids, the gay coffee shop manager from Felicity, and Phil of the Future on drums.

The early episodes were a little rough, but the cast’s chemistry smoothed that over until the writing picked up. Lately, the show has hit its stride, the keys to which seemed to be straying from the original concept (Post-It notes and awkward band storylines) and embracing the fact that it’s your typical family sitcom.

So instead of rocking out with the band, Rita meddles in the lives of those around her, with a predictable rate of success. A recent episode had bandmate/neighborhood mail carrier Tisha Campbell-Martin and Rita spying on their bandmate, whom they suspect of cheating on Rita’s daughter. It turned out that the drummer boy was cheating — on Rita and friends — by moonlighting with another band.

Given producer Media Rights Capital’s recent high-profile failure programming The CW’s Sunday nights, they caught a needed break, with Rita qualifying as a hit by Lifetime standards. Yeah, yeah. That Lifetime. Fine then. Don’t watch it. It’s not going to be winning any Emmys, I grant you. But if you do, don’t say I didn’t warn you if you laugh out loud just a little bit.

REALITY | ‘Blush’ mystery haunts finale

I’ve read more about Lifetime’s reality series Blush in the last few days than I did in the entire time it’s been in production or on the air. Described as “Project Runway for makeup artists,” the show concluded last night.

Thus, the news today that one of its three finalists died of unknown causes over the weekend is eerie. Given all the dangerous things reality contestants undertake (bungee jumping, stunts, fake weddings), it’s a little surprising that the genre boasts relatively few casualties after nearly a decade of prominence. But Blush would seem to rate pretty low on the danger scale, and Todd Homme’s death occured well after production wrapped.

The only other reality show death I can recall is NBC’s Contender suicide a few years back. The Newsday article suggests that Homme and his partner were happy and planned to relocate to Los Angeles soon. Natural causes (or perhaps an undetected malady) are a possibility, but Homme was the same age as me — 23. Natural causes are usually pretty low on the cause of death list for twentysomethings. It’s not unheard of, just unsettling.

No word on when a cause of death will be determined.

CABLE | What’s new at Lifetime (…and Oxygen)

• Lifetime’s Friday night block returns tomorrow with new original episodes.
  • Lisa Williams: Life Among the Dead kicks off its second season at 9p/8c.
  • America’s Psychic Challenge premieres at 10p/9c.
  • Vampire drama Blood Ties is also back for season two at 11p/10c.
  • Yahoo TV is streaming all three episodes in advance of their premieres. These premieres are also a free download at iTunes.
• All this rearranging has landed Lifetime’s repurposed runs of Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives in a back-to-back two-hour block on Saturdays at 11p/10c.
• From the Lifetime Original Movie Department, The Gathering is a two-night miniseries premiering Saturday, October 13 at 9p/8c. The leads are Peter Gallagher (The O.C.) and Jamie-Lynn Sigler (The Sopranos). It’ll probably be terrible, but these two have made potentially awful material work before (Gallagher in “Center Stage”, for example, and Sigler in “Call Me: The Rise and Fall of Heidi Fleiss”).

MEANWHILE, AT THE COMPETITION | Oxygen, one of the pretenders to the “women’s cable destination” throne, was acquired this week by corporate giant NBC Universal for $925M

Unsolved 2.0: This is how a heart breaks

“Long, long time ago / I can still remember how that music used to make me smile”

As far back as I can remember (up until sometime last year), Unsolved Mysteries has been the best thing going in interactive crime solving television. Robert Stack’s grandfatherly voice was a comforting guide through worlds of murder, mayhem, and of course mystery.

Sure, the reenactments were cheesy, at least to the naked eye. But the show made it work by combining the human-interest element of real cases, the first-person interviews, the reenactments themselves, and most importantly, the fact that Robert Stack sold every single segment by at least making us think he believed what he was saying.

And the show solved some mysteries, for sure. After a few years, the case updates were one of the best parts of the show. I used to scare myself to death watching Lifetime reruns of the show in my parents’ basement late at night, thinking the murderer the show had just profiled would be kicking in my windows any second, and then Stack saved the day with an update on how home viewers helped solve the case.

When Stack died in 2003, I mourned for a week. Now, I’m mourning again.

HBO TV Distribution is teaming up with Cosgrove/Meurer Productions to overhaul the original series and sell 175 refurbished episodes in cable syndication. And they’re cutting Stack out of every last one. Mind you, no one is lined up to replace the man. The distributor plans to let whoever buys the show pick the host — and there may be an option for new episodes!

They’ve got me over a barrel here. It seems like blasphemy to replace Robert Stack, America’s mysterious grandfather, despite the fact that he passed away four years ago. At the same time, I’m curious enough about the promised case updates that I’ll be tempted to watch the new, 21st century Mysteries.

No matter who they ultimately choose to take the helm, no one, but no one, will be able to draw me in quite like Stack did for fifteen years of reruns: “Join me,” he’d say with a smile. “Perhaps you may be able to help solve a mystery.”