Sexcapades And the City

By Lisa de Moraes
Thursday, March 16, 2006

Look out, all you Washingtonians who ever had sex with Jessica Cutler, proposed having sex with Jessica Cutler, discussed sex with Jessica Cutler, or ever brushed up against Jessica Cutler -- the infamous Senate aide whose sexual antics scandalized/enthralled our fair city a couple of years ago.

HBO is plowing ahead with a sitcom based on "The Washingtonienne," the D.C.-set novel inspired by Cutler's blog of same name in which she discussed her exploits with a boatload of men around town in such glorious detail.

The pay-cable network project is being developed by Sarah Jessica Parker's Pretty Matches production company.

Parker, you'll recall, was the star of HBO's long-running sitcom about a sex-advice columnist in Manhattan, based on Candace Bushnell's columns about single life in New York City and subsequent book of same name. One year ago, Parker's Pretty Matches signed a deal to develop shows for HBO.

The comedy -- unless you're one of Cutler's sex partner-muses -- now has a scriptwriter attached: Vanessa Taylor. She was one of the creators of the WB's short-lived Washingtonesque show "Jack & Bobby," which was emphatically not about the Kennedy brothers, except that they were brothers named Jack and Bobby and one of them became president of the United States, only in this case Bobby.

And Jason Blum, described as a "young, hot, up-and-coming guy" by one of our sources, has been attached as a co-executive producer. He was the executive producer of HBO's flick "Hysterical Blindness," which starred Uma Thurman and Juliette Lewis as single chicks seeking guys in '80s New Jersey.

You'll get a kick out of this: Cutler, who less than two years ago was telling anyone who could use a laptop that she "just took a long lunch with X and made a quick $400," has gone all shy and reticent when we e-mailed her to try to talk to her about the HBO project. She declines to comment, a rep told The TV Column.

* * *

After thoroughly messing with our heads and making us think that a guy as pretty as Ace Young might actually get voted out this early in the competition, "American Idol" instead booted Melissa McGhee and the Earth returned to its axis.

McGhee had forgotten the words to a Stevie Wonder song -- not once, but twice -- during the previous night's Sing a Stevie Wonder Song competition, so she clearly needed to go.

But not before Wonder got to plug his new album, performing "My Love Is on Fire," and not before Ace was pronounced a Bottom Three vote-getter, both of which were strangely unsettling.

First, show host Ryan Seacrest made the enormous mistake of asking Wonder, who'd helped the Idolettes choose and rehearse songs from his medley of hits, what he thought of this year's top-12 crop.

He didn't appear to think much:

"I objectively wanted to hear how they sounded, and after I heard them, I had my own, you know, opinion, but most of all I wanted to give them my constructive criticism. So I hope I did something to help the situation," Wonder responded somberly.

And then he sang.

And he didn't sound so hot, frankly. We'd even go so far as to say he's no Barry Manilow, but then you'd just think we were just being intimidated by the Barry Manilow-fan fatwa on the column in the wake of yesterday's "Idol" coverage.

As if hearing Stevie Wonder Today wasn't hard enough on the millions of viewers, Ace Young went and got hauled up on stage as a Bottom Three, and millions of women at home begin to wail and tear their hair.

But it was all just part of an elaborate scheme to make us question what's going on in this crazy world of ours when people that pretty can't get anything they want.

It only got worse when Seacrest pulled pretty Lisa Tucker from the Seats of Safety and made her stand onstage in shame, along with Ace and Melissa, for whom Seacrest could not get much of a rise out of the live studio audience.

But, as we should have known all along, the pretty people were just a distraction. And Melissa got to sing about one bar of the Stevie Wonder song that did her in before Fox cut to commercial.

* * *

It's official: "Without a Trace" is indecent in Denver and Des Moines -- but not in Delaware.

This we learned from the upright, downright, forthright Federal Communications Commission, which yesterday congratulated itself on its earlier decision to fine some but not all CBS stations for the surprise visit of Janet Jackson's right breast to the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show and also generally slapped around a bunch of other TV shows that had been broadcast between 2002 and early '05.

(You can read about the whole tzimmes on Page D1 in today's Business section.)

Most notable, perhaps, was the episode of "Without a Trace" called "Our Sons and Daughters," which originally ran in November 2004. It's about a young man who is beaten to death and a girl who attempts suicide and claims he raped her. Turns out that was not true but that she had attended a teen sex party, which is shown in a flashback.

CBS says the scene was "not unduly graphic or explicit," notes the episode carried a TV-14 parental guideline and maintains the story featured an "important and socially relevant storyline warning parents to exercise greater supervision of their teenage children."

Interestingly, the FCC said it got "numerous" complaints alleging that certain CBS stations broadcast indecent material when it re-ran the episode Dec. 31, 2004.

In one of those astounding coincidences that make covering the TV industry such a miracle, that was right around the time FCC Commissioner Brent Bozell -- oh, wait, he's not a commissioner yet, right? -- told members of his Parents TV Council that the rebroadcast was the "Worst TV Show of the Week" and urged them to use his online form to file a complaint with the FCC with the click of a button.

The FCC is fining only those CBS stations in the Central and Mountain time zones, where prime time starts one hour earlier, at 7 p.m. Prime time is earlier in those time zones because it was determined at some point that people there go to bed earlier in order to get up in time to milk the cows. The show aired at 10 p.m. in the East, 9 p.m. in the Central zone.

Grievously, the brain trust that came up with the regulation establishing a "safe harbor" of 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., during which hours radio and television stations cannot broadcast indecent material, seem to have neglected to take into account the earlier prime time in those middle-America time zones.

Which is why, sadly, the FCC can protect the children of Denver from turning into tarts after seeing TV show episodes like the one in question here but could not save from the same fate children who grow up in Syracuse -- like Jessica Cutler.