TV-Reviewed

The Daily Show – 100605 – Philip Seymour Hoffman
Original Air Date: October 6, 2005

Originally Published: October 18, 2005

Rating: 9.0

Jon starts the show off by trying to explain why he worked on a Jewish holiday. His explanation was somewhat funny, but ran a tad long.

Jon then moves onto the news, to the current health scare, bird flu. The estimates are there will be between 5 and 150 million deaths due to the bird flu. The press conference Jon showed was nearly empty, only two or three people in the entire room. I certainly hope this isn’t a sign of things to come. We need to pay more attention to this possible disaster in the making.

For more on the bird flu, Jon goes to Senior Epidemiologist, Samantha Bee, who is at the CDC. Samantha Bee suggests that the first pandemic will be terrible, because of the lack of readiness for such a thing, but they’ll be ready for the second one, much like the hurricanes which hit the gulf coast. After a series of mediocre, Samantha has been getting some pretty decent material thrown her way, perhaps because Stephen Colbert is moving on to his own show and has fewer appearances as of late.

With the attention on the bird flu, Jon decided to turn attention back to Hurricane Katrina and see how people are helping out. For this report, he turned to Rob Corddry. Joe Francis, the owner of Girls Gone Wild is planning on donating all proceeds from videos shot in New Orleans, to the Red Cross. He’s got detractors, of course. Rob decides to sit down with one of the girls, but doesn’t seem to be able to come up with any questions. Rob’s segment was funny, but the penis jokes went on a little long, and the last one about black people was a little over the top. It’s not often that this happens.

Back from commercial, Jon brings up President Bush’s recent speech to get attention off of the scandals at the White House, and back on the war on terror. President Bush tried to remind people of who we’re fighting and called on Islamic leaders to become vocal and denounce the radicalism. At the end of the piece, there was a humorous series of still photographs of various locations in the middle east, where no one was being shown doing what the President was asking for. There was also an answering machine at the tail end of the segment, which the audience enjoyed, and I have to admit was rather humorous.

Back from another commercial, Jon welcomed actor, Philip Seymour Hoffman. The entire interview centered around the character in which Philip portrayed in his new movie, Capote. I have to admit that this interview was of little interest to me, probably because I haven’t seen any of Philip’s movies, and I’m not familiar with Capote.