Edward Wyatt

Lead-writing rule: It's good to open with conflict, right up top. Thus Edward Wyatt on Sarah Silverman:

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 30 -- Those who know Sarah Silverman only from her much discussed star turn in the 2005 comedy film "The Aristocrats" and from her one-woman concert movie, "Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic," might bristle at the notion that another overnight wonder has been granted that holy grail of comedy, the self-titled sitcom.

Witness the might of "might":

* IF there are people who only know Sarah Silverman from two movies, and

* IF those people, on watching The Aristocrats, concluded that this woman who appeared onscreen telling a joke, in the middle of a movie that consisted of dozens of veteran professional comedians telling a joke, was not a veteran professional comedian, and

* IF those people were then to hear that Silverman had landed a self-titled sitcom, and

* IF they were tired of the television industry's constant practice of building name-branded sitcoms around unknown and unproven comedians then...what? They "might bristle." Unless Edward Wyatt of the New York Times--having executed the classic Straw Man Lead, aka the Flying Pig--is there to placate them:

But "The Sarah Silverman Program," a six-installment Comedy Central series that has its premiere on Thursday night at 10:30 (9:30 Central time), is far from the work of an overnight success.

At ease, bristly people, wherever you might be! Edward Wyatt is here to tell you that Sarah Silverman is actually a hard-working comedy veteran. And, um, also (with less fanfare) that her "holy grail" sitcom consists of a six-show run on cable--which puts her in a bit of a a different league from Bob Newhart.

"I've acknowledged that there were embellishments in the book, that I've changed things, that in certain cases things were toned up, in certain cases things were toned down..." - James Frey on Larry King Live, January 11, 2006.

"I suppose I could have done that book... It would have been shocking and I could have gotten all kinds of attention, and I could have toned things up and toned things down." - Martha Sherrill, quoted by Edward Wyatt, in Memoir Becomes Novel, Secret Remains Secret, The New York Times, January 30, 2006.

—Matt Haber

In today's New York Times, Edward Wyatt delivers a journo-publishing scoop: It seems that Bob Woodward's Deep Throat memoir, The Secret Man, is not selling anywhere near as well as its publisher hoped--though it has made a decent showing on bestseller lists. Like Woodward fighting for three decades to keep W. Mark Felt's identity secret, Wyatt carefully preserves the anonymity of his sources. Nowhere does he mention that the news of the lagging sales was first broken in Publishers Lunch on July 15. Nor does he mention that someone else had noted on July 28 the confusing relationship between the book's lower-than-expected sales and its bestseller status. Look for a credit line around 2036.  read more »