Poor Mojo's Newswire

We've discussed in the past how Hulu's owners -- the major Hollywood/TV studios -- absolutely hate that Hulu is actually useful and convincing people to watch TV online. Because of that, they've been trying to destroy Hulu. Hulu's management -- which mostly seems to understand the internet -- tried to get out from under this potentially paralyzing ownership structure, but the studios (stupidly) telegraphed the message that they would block Hulu from getting their content, meaning that no one wanted to pay the ridiculous asking price. Well, now it appears that phase one of making Hulu absolutely useless to people who might cut the cord from pay TV is going into effect, with plans to join the networks silly "TV Everywhere" setup and require users to have a pay TV subscription in order to access parts of the service. Hulu's main (non-studio) investor, Providence Equity Partners, sold its shares last week because it heard about this plan and knew it was suicidal. In no rational world would Hulu move in this direction on its own. Hulu's key selling point is that it's the go-to source for cord cutters, helping it build up a very large audience. Taking that crowd out of its audience makes it close to useless. While the studios love this because they make so much money from pay TV companies, it's incredibly short-sighted in the long run. It's pure protectionism of legacy revenues, done by sacrificing the one truly innovative platform they've invested in.

"When you become famous, you've got like a year or two where you act like a real asshole," Bill Murray told Tom Shales and James Miller when they interviewed him for Live from New York, their oral history of Saturday Night Live. "You can't help yourself. It happens to everybody. You've got like two years to pull it together — or it's permanent." He was talking, of course, about Chevy Chase, his opponent in a famous backstage fistfight. The two are friendly now, and it seems as though Murray wanted to imply that Chase had "pulled himself together" following his sudden rise to fame. But by most accounts, Chevy Chase's assholedom was permanent. The history of Chevy Chase being a jerk is long and varied, and from what I've heard Chevy is hard at work creating new legends of his own dickishness as the old stories become more widely known. I heard a recent story about Chevy unloading on a nervous intern who spilled a small amount of Coca-Cola in front of Chase and SNL creator Lorne Michaels. "Why don't you just piss in it?" he snarled. But you don't even need to hunt down anecdotes of Chevy screaming at interns: between the hundreds of thousands of words that have been written about Saturday Night Live, his weirdly public ongoing spats with actors and writers on Community, and the unbelievably dickish and petty interviews he's given over the years, there's plenty of evidence that Chevy Chase is an asshole. Here's a working timeline.