Last week, the unthinkable happened: Justin Silver’s Dogs in the City crushed Justin Bieber’s Justin Bieber: All Around the World in the ratings, with 4.9 million viewers to 3 million viewers. This is a great thing for literally everyone in the world, and only good things can come of it. Just think: Bieber’s agent is probably on a conference call and screaming, “The freaking dogs beat us?” to everyone at NBC right now. It’s morning in America.
Here are the five best things about this week’s episode of Dogs in the City:
1. The Dogs Were All Fine
Dog-training host Justin Silver never lets an opportunity pass to let viewers know he is really training owners, not their dogs. This week, he trained a lot of owners. He’s good at training owners, at soft-talking them into revealing their problems and then fixing their problems in that quick-segment, daytime-TV talk-show way. He’s so good that it sometimes seems like Dogs in the City is the equivalent of Dr. Phil’s Oprah segments: Silver is angling for a daytime slot, and he’s going to get it (Tony Danza got it).
In this show, we meet a just-engaged couple, a sad lady, and parents who didn’t discipline their kids. The dogs? The dogs were all fine.
2. The Sad Lady
At first, Silver thought the sad lady was fine, because she was taking professional photos of her dog and rattling off a list of shows that the dog has appeared on, which is quite normal for New York dog owners. Really, it is. In New York City, it’s normal to act like an idiot. But when she said her dog had appeared on SNL more times than Alec Baldwin, I nearly took an ax to my television set and nearly scattered its remains in the street and nearly slept a week. I don’t care who you are! Don’t tell me your dog has appeared more times on SNL than Alec Baldwin!
Then Silver intuited that she was in fact a sad lady when she told him how many times she took her dogs outside in the previous week: 0 (zero). And when you say that to a dog-training host about to go national in daytime (perhaps), then the dog-training host is gonna get real.
3. The Dog-Training Host Gets Real
Silver, in full daytime talk-show mode (coming this fall opposite Ellen? Is Ellen still on?), got the sad lady to admit to being sad. It was a masterful effort. He was very smooth. The dogs were forgotten. The hardness of life was remembered. The idea of Silver on daytime talk was sparked in the minds of executive vice presidents of daytime at all the major networks. (“He’s better than Tony Danza, isn’t he?” they all murmured collectively, causing Tony Danza to look up from his parfait at Spago’s and gaze wistfully around the room.)
The sad lady’s dogs were fine, by the way. The dogs just needed to go outside.
4. This Quote
“Having our dogs at our engagement party is like a dream come true.”
5. The Fact That the Quote Came From That Muscle-Bound Man With the Pit Bull
I am not making fun! It’s nice to see man’s dreams come true.
Are you still enjoying Dogs in the City as much as I am? Do you think Silver is a smooth cat who can hold his own on network daytime? Before you answer, have you seen that Wendy Williams show? Let us know in the comments!
