A while back I started reading a lot of articles that suggested Eliot Spitzer was slithering from his hiding place in search of relevance.  Then I read an article that said he’d been hired for an 8pm show on CNN which meant that he had stopped seeking relevance, but that he at least had the chutzpah to be looking for work instead of spending the rest of his life having icy conversations with his angry wife, or serving as a human dartboard for Dick Grasso and anyone else he unfairly screwed while trying to make a name for himself and his Muppet-sized mouth.

If Spitzer hadn’t been born with a silver 50-story central park high-rise spoon in his mouth he’d have been stuck going to a decent college like everyone else and then trying to make a living like everyone else and he’s probably just be renting an apartment a few blocks away from his wife and fighting for Wednesdays with the kids at this point but unfortunately for Ameica, he was a child of extreme privilege and got shuttled through life in such a fashion that made him believe he was smarter and more important than he was.  The impact of this delusion was merely a problem for New Yorkers and successful business people, but now that he’s crapped all over the public trust,  he’s decided the rest of the country, or at least the 10,000 or so people watching CNN at 8pm, should still be privy to his keen insights.

There’s nothing that says a first-rate lying creep hypocrite like Spitzer can’t be a good television personality, but luckily for me, he sucks anyway.

One of many reasons Spitzer’s show is terrible is that he and his co-host, conservative pundit… somebody Parker, have the type of chemistry generally associated with couples who sleep in separate beds .  This might be because Spitzer’s co-host thinks he is disgusting, or because there is a chance Spitzer is made out of very shiny clay.  During a typical show (22 minutes of television split into 5 intolerable segments of different lengths) the dynamic duo are generally good for one or more jokes, five or predictable sarcastic references to Parker’s conservatism, and at least four instances where Eliot Spitzer reminds the audience that he is a lawyer and talks about how much he liked being a lawyer. 

The obvious problem with this show is that the great unspoken is that Spitzer, in addition to being totally irrelevant, recently lost his job as governor of New fing York because he sought unprotected sex with multiple prostitutes over a period of years while wagging his finger at anyone who could bare to look at his disgusting face.  Generally, it would be beyond comprehension that someone of his ilk could obtain employment of any kind, but any place that has employed Larry King since before the cotton gin I am not all that surprised.

But the real hangover from the $800 per hour prostitute in the room is that everyone who sets foot on the show is immediately infected with awkwardness, which is less severe than being infected with syphilis, but makes for terrible television.   A few weeks back Hollywood Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin stopped by for a 9-minute visit to promote his movie “The Social Network” which grossed about as much in its first weekend as Parker Spitzer would gross if it were on for the next 275 years. 

Given that the movie was already a huge hit and that the reviews were excellent, it was hard to imagine why Sorkin felt the need to talk politics with televisions’ lowest-rated pair but my suspicion was that he was merely doing research for an eventual character.  After all, It’s not every day you get to break bread with a real goblin, especially one who’ll ask you edgy and 18-months late questions such as “what do you think of Sarah Palin?” and really especially one who was recently-ousted from his job as governor.  For someone who makes his living inventing characters, I assume Spitzer is quite a find and if all it took was a few minutes of awkward half-silence and uninteresting conversation it was probably worth walking down the hall from whatever real show he was in NY doing.

Maybe Sorkin will write a television drama about a disgraced politician-turned-political-pundit on a low-rated and unoriginal “liberal vs. conservative chat fest”.  Now that I’ve seen that idea on paper I don’t imagine it’ll be one that makes a lot of sense for him, but if he does decide to write it, and if people hate it and it only lasts one season, it’ll still be on longer than Parker Spitzer.