The Winner - WHAAMY

THE WINNER debuts tonight on FOX.

OK, to be fair, I haven't seen it. But my BS-ometer is pretty reliable - and it says to stay away from this stinker.

This show screams of what I refer to as a WHAAMY Project (We'll Happily Air Anything Made by You).

These projects are usually very bad ideas, generated by folks fortunate enough to have had lightning strike once before in their life.

FOX gave Mike Scully a WHAAMY deal. Scully is a long time writer/producer of THE SIMPSONS. One would think Anything Made by Him would probably be worth airing. Maybe not. The result was THE PITTS.

Literally.

THE WINNER is from FAMILY GUY and AMERICAN DAD's Seth McFarland and stars THE DAILY SHOW'S Rob Corddry.

Six whole episodes have been produced. Four of them are available online - yep two-thirds of the entire series is already available on the internet - free of charge (FOX TV stations have got to be charged up about THAT).

FOX has displayed their deep confidence in the project by launching it immediately after the February sweeps - when it will do less damage to the ratings of your local FOX TV station (trust me - they ARE charged up about that one).

Further confidence is displayed by the net in the show's schedule. They'll be burning this bad boy of two episodes at a time, reducing the footprint of this embarrassment to a mere three weeks.

I have a suggestion for FOX. They're all about the innovation. Here's their chance to push the envelope again. How about airing THE WINNER split screen? They could put the audio for one episode on the left channel and the audio for the other in the right channel and burn the entire run off in 90 minutes.

My guess is there's a clause in McFarland's contract that requires a financial penalty to be paid by FOX if less than six episodes air. So, the net trots out and does its due diligence, a crappy show gets on the air.

And we all get the WHAAMY.