'Mobbed' delivers a wake-up call

Every so often – actually, all too often – readers of stories in Variety will somehow confuse themselves into thinking that the journalist writing about a film or TV show actually has a job on that TV show. I truly have no idea why, unless they think that the media actually runs the industry, or that the media is just the public relations arm of the industry (hold that last thought).

Anyway, the premiere of "Mobbed" on Fox in primetime Thursday obviously whipped around the brains of several in its audience, because at exactly 7 p.m. Pacific (the moment the show ended on the East Coast), I started getting e-mails from people with the subject head "Fox, Mandel get 'Mobbed,'" relating to the news story I wrote Feb. 18 about the new flash mob surprise series. A host of people who couldn't take a breath between Googling "Fox Mobbed" and realizing that an e-mail address they found at the bottom of a story about the show wasn't necessarily the casting guru.

The final straw came from the New Jersey man who called my cellphone (the number having been left on my work voicemail greeting) to tell me about how great it would be to create a Fox-Mandel mob at his daughter's wedding. He called at 6:05 a.m., having never considered the possibility of this thing called "time zones" – or perhaps just not caring.

Look, we all make mistakes – me included – but this doesn't seem like too hard a lesson to learn. If you're going to wake someone up about a TV show, wake the producers (conveniently listed in the story) who are making all the money from it, not the poor sap who is merely writing about it.