A week ago, on Thanksgiving Eve, Rosie O'Donnell dug up the grave of olde-tyme TV variety shows hoping to reanimate the long-dead corpse of the genre lying within. The only problem was Nick Lachey & Jessica Simpson had already done just that back in 2004 with Nick & Jessica's Make It Stop Hour, so all that was left in the coffin was the faint scent of decay and a few stray fingernails. Nevertheless, Rosie gathered these items, baked them into a pie to throw into Conan O'Brien's face, and went ahead with her variety special Rosie Live! on NBC.
I didn't see Rosie Live!, but by all accounts it was like pouring quick-dry cement directly onto meninges of the American public, and NBC has done all that it can to scrub evidence of the show's existence from the Internet. There is just one lonely clip of the show on their website, so we can only assume that Alec Baldwin's ill-fitting jacket, and the aforementioned pie in frightened, unenthusiastic Conan O'Brien's face were the best, funniest moments of the entire show.
However, judging by the clips available on YouTube, the 99% of the population who didn't watch this show really missed out. After all, how often do you get to see Gloria Estefan and Rosie O'Donnell stiffly interact with dancers dressed up like giant cupcakes? If you watch the clip below, it's at least once too often.
And outside of your worst discotheque nightmares, you never get to see second-rate Cirque du Soleil performers spin various things to the tune of a house remix of "You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)."
Just think: Had Rosie Live! succeeded, the underground art of Segway dancing would have finally been legitimized, and talented (relatively speaking) Segway dancers like whoever that couple was could have become big stars. Now, they have nothing to fall back on except their careers hosting Rock Band karaoke night–on Segways, of course, but the magic is gone–at some bar in Atlantic City, and telling anyone who shows up about the time they were on the worst TV variety special since Nick & Jessica's Variety Hour.