Here's a test: The potential availability of Emily Skinner for a role in the show constitutes a major dramatic turning point in the plot.
When he is touring in Scotland and appears on a TV show to discuss his father, who'd been a soccer star there, the three elements of the show constitute "a Scottish orgasm: there would be talk about soccer, nostalgia about soccer and living evidence that they had never allowed their racism to interfere with soccer".
What made it doubly odd was that the shows constituting the special had, of course, been "edited for television" long before ABC ever got hold of them, by the Pythons themselves.
Mr. Samak, 73, was ordered to step down on Tuesday when the Constitutional Court found that his paid appearances as host of a television cooking show constituted a conflict of interest.
Taken together, his three characters from Da Ali G Show constitute a body of work more like the work of a muckraking journalist than that of a comedian, work that reminds audiences of the vital place of comedy in our culture.
For the African-American actors, however, it means inhabiting roles that in their original incarnations — when minstrel shows constituted the most popular form of live entertainment in 19th-century America — were meant to debase blacks and sentimentalize slavery.
The courts found that viewers recording their shows constituted "fair use".
But the show will constitute roughly 10% of the network's programming hours, and that's somewhat worrisome given ABC's critical misstep of relying too heavily on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
News, music, and talk shows constitute the three major pillars of its programming.
Even viewed casually, the shows that constitute the bulk of primetime programming on upstart networks like UPN and WB tip over into the sort of call-and-response comedy that would have been familiar to steamboat audiences 120 years ago.
