The support of more than 40,000 people on Facebook did not result in William Shatner being appointed as the new Governor General of Canada.
Yet, more than two million people in the country watch the Montreal native's sitcom "S#*! My Dad Says" on Thursday nights, which would suggest the former Capt. Kirk is more popular than ever on the cusp of his 80th birthday.
Shatner will be widely saluted when he reaches that milestone on March 22, which the Walrus magazine has already commemorated with a tribute, "Man of Enterprise."
Part of his contribution to the acting profession, explained writer John Semley, is the self-deprecating deadpan style defined as "the poof." The term was spawned after Shatner exclaimed "The poof is in the pudding!" during a 1961 Broadway production of "A Shot in the Dark."
The flub generated laughter from everyone, except for the actor himself, who knew to remain stone-faced throughout.
"The audience knew I had blown my line," Shatner wrote in his 2008 memoir "Up Till Now." "But for farce to work it has to be played earnestly."
"S#*! My Dad Says," based on a popular Twitter account from last year which was allegedly inspired by 29-year-old Justin Halpern's 74-year-old dad, has garnered Shatner some of the worst reviews of his 60-year professional career.
The CBS sitcom has also proven to be his most popular venture since the "Star Trek" reunion movies, having scored more than twice the viewership of NBC's Thursday night competition "30 Rock," which was pushed to a later time slot as a result. And the show is twice as popular on CTV in Canada.
So, there will be even more Shatner supply to meet the demand in 2011: an animated web series, "The Zenoids," will be hosted on his sci-fi social network Myouterspace.com. The forthcoming cartoon about an alien family gained attention for promising to crowdsource script ideas to be voiced by Shatner and Canadian actress Amanda Tapping.
Shatner is also recording a new rock album, which will add to his discography of spoken word vocals dating back to 1968's "The Transformed Man," rumoured to pair him with the guitarists from the original Deep Purple, Queen and Yes songs, along with an already-recorded remake of Black Sabbath's "Iron Man."
Not bad for a guy who was living in a truck bed camper half his life ago, following the cancellation of the original "Star Trek" in 1969, which helps explain why he hasn't wanted to stop working ever since he started on the comeback trail.
Watch a classic William Shatner commercial for Loblaws supermarkets below:
There are no comments yet