If someone told you that Roseanne Barr had a new 16-episode reality show focusing on her “new life on a macadamia nut farm on the Big Island of Hawaii,” you’d probably think they were yanking your chain.

And you’d be wrong.  From Newsweek:

The 58-year-old comedian is launching a 16-episode reality series, Roseanne’s Nuts, on Lifetime on Wednesday. It shows her new life on a macadamia nut farm on the Big Island of Hawaii, which she bought in 2007 and moved to fulltime last year. She lives with her boyfriend of eight years, Johnny Argent, and teenaged Buck, with her adult children and grandchildren around, too. They’re all on the show, which Barr said is like “Larry David meets reality.” Meaning, it’s not exactly reality? “It’s based in reality,” she said. “But it’s funny. It’s not the Kardashians.”

It’s long been said that reality is stranger than fiction, but reality television might be stranger still.  Big Hollywood readers probably would agree that Roseanne is just about the last person they would want watch star in a reality show, but if those nauseating “Real Housewives” are any indication, the crazier you are, the better chance you have at pulling in an audience.

There’s nothing in the Newsweek piece–needless to say–to suggest the magazine or Lifetime had any issues with a recent photo shoot of Roseanne’s where she dressed as Hitler and ate burnt “Jew cookies,” but Newsweek did make sure to get Roseanne’s take on Michele Bachmann: (more…)

The African nation of Malawi is one of the poorest places on earth, a land in which villagers easily live an entire year on less than Madonna’s annual budget for soy chai latte, and AIDS claims a depressing chunk of the population. It’s no garden spot. But last week it was as if this country, which holds on to its strong tradition of family values in spite of intense international disdain and patronization, defended its honor in the face of a scourge that might do as much psychic damage to its long-term future as disease, hunger and rejection of kabbalah. 

 When Madonna showed up, via private plane, with her personal trainer and assorted underlings, hoping to snatch yet another evidently healthy child to add to her growing, international brood – and fill a hole in her soul left vacant by the departure of a husband, and soothe her jealousy over other starlets’ ability to save the world – Malawi did something unprecedented. The country said, through a judge, “Take your millions and your treadmill and your vegan diet, and scram!” (more…)

After winning the Oscar for Shakespeare in Love, Gwyneth Paltrow has been shamefully idle (Shallow Hal, anyone?) Even her latest film, Two Lovers, co-starring Joaquin Phoenix, premiered, depressingly unnoticed, at the Sunshine Cinema on New York’s Lower East Side.

But Gwyneth, who moved to London after declaring, “We’re all going to die when George Bush has his way,’’ is far from allergic to taking home our money. Nor is the lady bred in an exclusive Manhattan private school opposed to reinventing herself in a curiously American kind of career:  lifestyle guru.

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