Chappelle's Premiere Delayed, AFI Picks 'Friends' Finale & Jon Stewart As Top 2004 Moments, New ABC Pilot

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The third season of “Chappelle’s Show,” originally scheduled to premiere in February, has been pushed back to March or April. The late launch for the Emmy nominated Comedy Central hit has been traced back to its star’s health problems.

According to the New York Post, Dave Chappelle has been suffering from the flu and borderline walking pneumonia.

“Dave — and his entire production crew for that matter — got a bit of a late start on writing season three,” Tony Fox, the executive vice president of corporate communications at Comedy Central, tells the Post. “We’re behind on the writing. He was recently sick for more than a week. There had been a built-in hiatus in the production schedule for the holidays.”

Fox continues, “We had about 10 days of production left, so we pushed that through the end of the holiday break to give him some time to recover and get some writing time in. We’ll resume production in January, so we’re not exactly sure what that means in terms of launch date.”

After acquiring some cult stature in its first installment, “Chappelle’s Show” became a hit when its second season premiered this January. The show, a mix of sketches, stand-up and musical performances, earned Emmy nods for outstanding variety, music or comedy series and also picked up writing and directing nominations in the same genre. The show’s first season became the best selling TV-to-DVD set yet.

Although he flirted with the possibility of ending his Comedy Central show after the second season, Chappelle re-signed with the cable network back in August. The lucrative deal, which covers two more seasons, or 26 total episodes, helps the cable network hold on to one of its signature shows along with “The Daily Show” and “South Park.”

Television dominated the American Film Institute’s 2004 list of Moments of Significance, honoring nine noteworthy events that had a great impact on the world of the moving image during the past year.

Of the nine moments, five related directly to television and a sixth — the May merger of NBC and Universal — dealt with the return of vertical integration between film and TV.

The list was led by the final broadcasts of Tom Brokaw, Barbara Walters and Bill Moyers, the retirement of “60 Minutes” creator Don Hewitt and the pending departure of Dan Rather. Those moves combined, in the AFI’s opinion, to reflect the changing face of television news.

“Today’s newscasters are more personalities than journalists, and the landscape has become one of ‘niche news,’ where viewers tune in to hear information that is skewed to a particular political agenda, not a public agenda,” the AFI says. “Audiences choose a report and reporter that agrees with their point of view, and ultimately, makes them comfortable.”

Although the AFI release makes it sound as if this fragmented news landscape is somehow a negative, the Institute honored “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” for its coverage of the 2004 election, it’s lead-up and its aftermath.

“It would be sad to document that one of the best sources of news today is a faux news show, if Jon Stewart and his creative team didn’t do it so well,” the group says.

The departure of comedy favorites “Friends,” “Frasier” and “Sex and the City” also made the AFI list, as the group argued that in their wake, television is left with a new breed of humor that finds laughs in unexpected places, shows like “Desperate Housewives” and “Boston Legal.”

Using the Janet Jackson Super Bowl debacle as a starting point, the AFI also made note of the increased power of the Federal Communications Commission, while urging caution from that regulatory group.

“The government’s voice in what is suitable for the airwaves is not a new concept, but the staggering rate at which the threat of it grew during the year has had a profound effect on television,” the AFI says. “Unsure of how the FCC will rule on an issue, the creative community has begun to self-censor their shows, a disturbing trend in a country founded on free expression.”

The AFI also mentioned new platforms of television distribution, including the success of TV on DVD as well as innovations like The WB’s decision to tease the pilot of “Jack & Bobby” on the Internet before its television premiere.

Memorable movie moments included the death of Marlon Brando and the public debate surrounding “The Passion of the Christ” and “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

ABC has bought a pilot script from writer Larry Reitzer in a move that will likely inspire the ranks of those toiling in Hollywood assistantdom.
Reitzer, who’s worked for the past four years as an assistant to writer-producer Marsh McCall (“Just Shoot Me,” “My Big Fat Greek Life”), broke through with a script about a quiet gay man who lives with his man’s-man of a brother, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The project is set up at Warner Bros. TV.

He will write the script and serve as an executive producer with McCall, whose eponymous production company, based at Warner Bros., is also attached.

Reitzer previously was credited as a writer on CBS’s short-lived “Greek Life,” a spinoff of the movie phenomenon “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” He also worked as an assistant on the very brief NBC comedy “Battery Park.”

In addition to the Reitzer script, McCall is also developing two other comedy pilots this season — one at CBS and one at The WB. Both are being produced by Warner Bros. and Jerry Bruckheimer TV.

Credit: Zap2It

Murtz Jaffer is the world's foremost reality television expert and was the host of Reality Obsessed which aired on the TVTropolis and Global Reality Channels in Canada. He has professional writing experience at the Toronto Sun, National Post, TV Guide Canada, TOROMagazine.com and was a former producer at Entertainment Tonight Canada. He was also the editor at Weekendtrips.com.