Margaret Cho » The Cho Show

The Cho Show: Season Finale tonight!

cho team — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 18:43:31 +0000

Hey Cho Fans,

The final two episodes of “The Cho Show” air tonight at 11/10c and 11:30/10:30c on Vh1. You can grab extras, previous episodes and behind-the-scenes interviews here! (If you’re in Canada, go here for clips and full listings).

Margaret’s “Beautiful” tour hits Tampa and Jacksonville this weekend!

See you on the road,

-The Cho Team

ps. You can support Bowling for Boobies and the Busted Foundation, by bidding on an exclusive ticket and aftershow meet and greet package with Margaret, for her show in Long Beach, CA on October 25th.

The Cho Show: Extras from Episode 5

margaret cho — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 17:46:01 +0000

Charades!

The Cho Show – Game!

margaret cho — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 16:46:22 +0000

Ahh! Play this!

The Advocate“Somewhere Over the Rainbow”

margaret cho — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 04:03:03 +0000

By Dennis Hensley

Margaret Cho forces a little reality into her fantasy life on The Cho Show… Click Here to read the full article…

“The Cho Show” – Episode 2 Tomorrow at 11pm

margaret cho — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:44:48 +0000

Thanks so much for watching “The Cho Show” last week!! Please tune in for the second episode on Thursday night at 11pm on Vh1. We want the chance to make a second season, and we need you to keep watching to help us do it!

Come join our family.

Love, Margaret

Extras from The Cho Show: Episode 1

margaret cho — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:10:58 +0000

extras! extras! extras! check it out!

News and Observer‘Cho Show’ shocks by being sweet

margaret cho — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 04:19:33 +0000

By Danny Hooley

“The most fun reality series about a star’s family since season one of MTV’s The Osbournes.”

“Cho finally has her day, her say, and don’t forget, “her gay.” She makes the most of this opportunity, and so should we.”

The dramatic hook of comedian Margaret Cho’s new VH1 reality series “The Cho Show” is that she finally gets to right the wrongs of “All American Girl,” her failed 1994 sitcom that left her struggling with cultural and body-image issues for a long time.

ABC executives pressured her to lose weight for the series, and a panicky starvation diet resulted in serious illness. To make matters worse, the network suits also complained that she was not coming off as “Asian enough,” while the Asian community slammed the family sitcom for stereotyping. The show was quickly canceled because of poor ratings.

“For years, I yo-yoed between skinny and fat as the Hollywood game tried to play me,” she says over the opening sequence of “The Cho Show,” which depicts her current happy life in L.A., surrounded by her loyal Glam Squad (”Every dog has his day, and every diva needs her gay,” she reminds us). She’s also joined by her 3-foot-10 “assistant” Selene Luna and, best of all, Mr. and Mrs. Cho, the parents oft cited in Margaret’s riotous standup act.

As it turns out, Margaret’s well-known, hilarious impression of her mom’s Korean accent is pretty spot-on. And as expected, the elder Chos just don’t get some things about their daughter, in that way that all parents don’t. But their supportive, sweet, often unintentionally funny presence on “The Cho Show” contributes to making it the most fun reality series about a star’s family since season one of MTV’s “The Osbournes.”

It’s not that “The Cho Show” is terribly groundbreaking. Visually, it’s not snazzily new, like E! channel’s new Pamela Anderson series “Pam: Girl on the Loose.” Awkward moments on “The Cho Show” are underscored by the bassy boom of a drum, and quick shots of people looking squirrely. It’s a device straight out of Reality Show 101.

And some scenes feel like setups, such as when Margaret needs a dress for her acceptance speech at a Korean of the Year awards dinner. One of her Glam Squad boys has the bright idea of painting a Chinese-style dress on her nude body, which, of course, they preview for the parents. As a contrived “shock” moment, it doesn’t work anyway — after 39 years with Margaret, the Chos don’t shock easily. Leave it to Margaret to save the scene by riffing off mom’s main complaint that the painted-on dress looks too Chinese.

The magic comes from the bonding moments between Margaret, her parents and the extended family. In one touching, funny scene, Mr. and Mrs. Cho take Selene out shopping, and it dawns on everybody that they treat her like the grandchild they’ll likely never have. Ribbing aside, Margaret’s parents actually do “get” their daughter more often than not, which works in the show’s favor — it cuts down the contrivances a bit and gives Margaret room to be herself. So when she mockingly proclaims “I will put you in a home!” after Dad asks her to cover her tattoos for the awards dinner, the parents laugh, which frees Margaret to riff some more.

She’s good at it, which lightens things up refreshingly when a scene starts to get too heavy, or the star begins to act too “Hollywood.” After 13 years of regretting her shattered TV dream, Cho finally has her day, her say, and don’t forget, “her gay.” She makes the most of this opportunity, and so should we.

The LA TimesReview: ‘The Cho Show’

margaret cho — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 04:16:36 +0000

by Robert Lloyd

“Good-natured reality entourage sitcom.”

“Benefits to no end from the presence of Cho’s parents.”

We have come to the time when starring in a reality show no longer means you have exhausted all the other options — that you, the star, might represent a reasonably well-functioning, otherwise successful human being rather than the sort of train wreck that the form initially seemed to favor and from whose cluelessness viewers drew their dark enjoyment. In other words, you do not have to be Anna Nicole Smith, or Whitney and Bobby to want to get into this game.

Korean American comedian Margaret Cho, whose new good-natured reality entourage sitcom debuts tonight at 11 p.m. on VH1, is by any visible standards doing quite well.

She has a big house in the hills, parents who love if not necessarily understand her, fans who adore her near to the point of speechlessness, colleagues who owe their careers to her example, and a career of her own that can keep her as busy as she wants to be.

She’s been given awards by NOW, the ACLU, GLAAD and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. And her helpers — “assistant” Selene Luna, makeup guy John Stapleton, hair guy John Blaine and wardrobe guy Charlie Altuna — are also her friends, and they seem to be there happily, because they love her and not, as is often the case in reality TV, fearfully, because they need her.

Although Cho’s career and personal life took a downturn in the mid-1990s, after a dispiriting foray into network sitcomedy(1994_TV_series) left her with kidney failure — she starved herself to get thin for the pilot — and an identity crisis (was she too Asian, or not Asian enough?), Cho bounced back at decade’s end with the one-woman show “I’m the One That I Want.” It’s been tours, concert films and kudos ever since.

She further remade herself in the Hollywood underground where performance art, comedy, bodyworks and the new burlesque all bump up against one another — the witty Luna, a 3-foot, 10-inch Tijuana-born burlesque dancer and comedian, comes from that scene — and if the not-thin, extravagantly tattooed Cho has body issues now, she faces them head on. We see her tonight half-naked, clad mainly in body paint and rhinestones. (The show is rated TV-14.)

Still, comedy subsists on pain, and the show, whose tenor is largely happy and light, goes for fuel to still-painful memories of darker times.

“I totally forget,” she says, tearing up. “Like, I’m so, like, fabulous now, I’m so glamorous now. But I really didn’t feel like that when I was a kid at all — it was really hard.”

On the premiere episode, Cho is to receive an award — KoreAm “Entertainment Achievement Award” and not, as she insists, “Korean of the Year” — which brings up questions of acceptance by her community.

She’s “angry” about the years she felt rejected by them, she tells her “spiritual advisor.” (This overplays somewhat the hostility of a group that is, after all, throwing her a party, but it ends in love.)

In next week’s episode, she and Luna, deploring mainstream notions of attractiveness, stage a beauty pageant of their own. They get spray-on tans and instruction in ventriloquism for the talent competition — a Shari Lewis parody with Luna as Lamb Chop.

“The Cho Show” also benefits to no end from the presence of Cho’s parents, who are billed as Mr. Cho and Mrs. Cho and seem incapable of artifice. (She keeps them near, she says, because “old people are a really good source of prescription medicine.”)

To be sure, this is the sort of engineered reality in which things mostly happen because someone is there to film them, and not the other way around. But that it is only a partial, edited view of its star — she has, for one thing, a husband, artist-provocateur Al Ridenour, who is neither seen nor heard — doesn’t mean that real thoughts and feelings don’t come through. It’s best when they do.

The Star Telegram“VH1 show allows irreverent Cho to act naturally”

margaret cho — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 04:11:54 +0000

By HEATHER SVOKOS

Finally a reason to tune in.”

“Cho is finally doing her own thing, her own uncharted way. And she’s a pioneer and a role model — X-rated potty mouth and all.”

Celebrity reality shows assault us from every corner of our cable box — Corey, Tori, Hogan, Snoop and Denise Richards. But now, thanks to Margaret Cho, there’s finally a reason to tune in to one of these puppies without feeling the sticky film of shame. And if you’re already a Cho fan, you’re pretty much duty-bound to tune in to VH1 tonight, when “The Cho Show” makes its debut.

Cho is, of course, the irreverent, sexcentric, political comedian whose imitations of her Korean mother are legend.

Conceptually, the seven-episode “Cho Show” is less “Tori & Dean” and more “Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List.” (Minus the sometimes shrill Griffin.) In fact, VH1 is calling it a “reality sitcom.” So although it focuses on Cho’s real life, it will blend reality “with some imaginative and comical situations that touch on all aspects of Margaret’s ‘anything goes’ lifestyle,” according to press materials for the show.

Everyone in the cast plays his or her real-life persona, although certain things about them have been scripted to elicit a springboard for Cho’s comedy. For instance, her mom and dad play themselves (how fun it is to hear her mom speak after decades of listening to Cho’s imitations), but Cho’s longtime friend, 3-foot-10-inch Selene Luna, acts as her personal assistant on the series. And her “Glam Squad” — wardrobe person, hairstylist and makeup artist — only just met Cho during casting for the show, according to The Advocate.

“It’s the closest I’ve been able to come on television to what I do as a comic,” Cho told the publication.

Indeed, her first attempt at bringing her comedy to TV sent her to the hospital. That was in 1994, with ABC’s “All-American Girl” — the first Asian-American sitcom on TV. The experience was a fiasco for Cho, who faced network battles that included arguments over her weight. Pressured to drop pounds, she went on an insane two-week crash diet in which she lost 30 pounds and ended up in kidney failure. (She later chronicled the saga in her stand-up routine, which ultimately became a movie and a book, “I’m the One That I Want.”)

If you have caught any of Cho’s recent stand-up — or seen her live in April at Nokia Theatre — some of the material will be familiar. She mentions, in passing, that Jack Black purportedly used to only have one towel, and how a radio DJ asked her: “What would you do if you woke up tomorrow and you were beautiful?”

But the show is not simply a retread of her act. The premiere tackles Cho’s insecurity and anger over her precarious place in the Korean community. A group wants to fete her with its Korean of the Year award, but she’s torn. Until now, the outspoken, pansexual comic has felt snubbed by Koreans. Before the ceremony, Cho cracks: “Oh, please don’t turn this into Korean Night at the Apollo.”

Her preparation for the event makes for an engaging family scene. For instance, when her parents get a load of a dress she threatens to wear to accept her award (it’s actually just intricately-designed body paint on her nude form), they voice mild disapproval. “It’s too much,” her mother murmurs.

Cho playfully snaps: “I’m 39. Whaddya gonna ground me? If you try to ground me, I will put you both in a home.”

After the ceremony, there’s an achingly touching moment between the entertainer and a young Korean-American fan who has prepared a short speech (which she puts down on paper, afraid she’ll be too nervous to remember everything she wants to say). When she reads it to Cho, your heart will swell. And you will get it. Cho is finally doing her own thing, her own uncharted way. And she’s a pioneer and a role model — X-rated potty mouth and all.

USA Today“Margaret Cho returns to TV on her terms this time”

margaret cho — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 04:08:40 +0000

By Gary Strauss, USA TODAY

Margaret Cho hopes her new TV foray is more satisfying than her last one — 14 years ago.

The actress and comedian stars in VHI’s The Cho Show (tonight, 11 ET/PT), her first series since 1994’s short-lived ABC sitcom All-American Girl, an experience from which the outspoken San Francisco native still appears to be recovering…

Click Here to read the rest…