Culture-Wrecking Duo Gene Simmons and Mark Burnett Team Up Again For 'Jingles'
Half the stories on this sluggish midsummer news day seem to concern the same bad idea at CBS: Jingles, the Mark Burnett-produced product placement platform reality series squaring songwriters off against each other in the pursuit of... the perfect ad jingle. We can't make this up, folks, and even if we could we probably wouldn't want to — especially not the part in which the newsworthiest elements of the show are its judges: A kerfuffle-plagued, ex-Wal-Mart marketing guru and — seriously, we're too exhausted/sad/Dark Knighted-out to fuck with you — Gene Simmons:
Simmons will be joined by an "advisory panel"€� that include Madison Avenue gurus Linda Kaplan Thaler and Julie Roehm. But Simmons will be the final authority on the show who decides which contestants are eliminated each week.
CBS has pushed €œJingles (where contestants vie to compose commercial ad tunes) has been pushed back from its planned premiere date later this month. The show is still moving forward and is expected to join CBS' schedule sometime next season.
Roehm is perhaps definitely best-known for the sex scandal that verrrry publicly cost her her job at Wal-Mart in 2006, which helped make Jingles a must-see (or something) among Madison Avenue folks as well as TCA press tour attendees — the latter of whom got the Simmons news this afternoon in Beverly Hills. Meanwhile, we're just waiting for a premiere date from Burnett, who was last seen traveling in Hell and could not be reached for comment.