Everybody Loves Hurlmond

waLooking at Hurl sitting there in the bowl, one would never know about his close brush with stardom. This is partly because fish, even with their big, glassy, soulful eyes, cannot talk. Also, many of them look alike, so without any sort of scar tissue or navel piercing, Hurl just looks like any other fish.

Hurl was almost the star of Everybody Loves Hurlmond, a FOX-network takeoff on the hit comedy Everybody Loves Raymond. The FOX studio execs pitched the show to advertisers as "You know, like Ray Romano's old show... but with fish." Sure, to the uncriticalmind like yours or mine, this may seem like a lame, derivative knockoff of another show that, frankly, while popular wasn't actually any good. But what you're missing is this: lame, derivative knockoffs are the lifeblood of the television industry.

So when Hurlmond was cancelled before the pilot even finished shooting, critics were shocked -- SHOCKED -- to learn that it had nothing to do with the program or its potential ratings. Instead, it's because Hurl and his agent reached a stalemate with the studio in the negotiation process. Hurl was looking for $980,000 per episode for the first season, with the option to renew for two more at $1.5M per episode, along with a studio car and driver on the weekends. Because Fish can't drive. Because, aside from the obvious reasons, fish do not have legs.

What happened next was shocking. Hurl was auctioned off at a joint FOX News/Republican National Committee fundraiser to former White House Chief of Staff Don Regan. Regan gave hurl, in a little glass dish, to his housekeeper Lorinda, who he had never bothered to have verified with INS. One day, Lorinda missed some dust on one of the Regan family chandeliers. The next day, Don had her deported.

Hurl was taken to the local Wal-Mart, because Don's wife figured that's where Hispanic people got everything. The Wal-Mart customer service rep, a 54-year-old woman with three teeth, nine kids and no health insurance, put him in a small plastic cup and put him no the shelf. She never knew how famous this special little guy could have been.

For weeks, Hurl sat, pining for his life that could have been -- the money, the fishes, the fame -- and he sort of spiraled into a deep depression. In 2007, leading psychiatric authorities have started calling such rapid declines in social standing -- from potential millionaire to a shelf at Wal-Mart -- and the resulting depression as "Kevin Federline Syndrome." There is no known cure.

But Hurl, always a fighter -- because he's a fighting fish -- pressed forward. He saw his friends come and go. He saw other male fish and got very, very angry at them and wanted to fight them. This had nothing to do with his Kevin-Federline Syndrome and instead that he is a fish that is bred to violently ravage other fish. But he doesn't know that, because he is a fish and does not really know much of anything.

One day in March, sitting on the shelf in the middle of a 27-hour staring contest with his own reflection, he heard a noise. And then a kid started crying. It seems like the little paper lid on the top of one of his neighbor's condos was knocked off by the night crew, and the neighbor, wrought with his own depression, leapt heroically from his cup and landed on a dirty wal-mart floor. At this point, a kid with one of those annoying "Shopper in training" carts ran him over, slipped on the resulting fish-goo on the floor and cracked her elbow on the floor.

This whole ordeal granted Hurl a new perspective. Shocked from his malaise, Hurl started trying to date again -- sure, these weren't celebrity babe-fish, but they were sort of cute in that hometown-y kind of way. He found religion. He then decided religion wasn't for him and found MTV. And amidst all these personal discoveries, Hurl was transferred to the Wal-Mart in Carson City.

And then he was depressed again. Who wouldn't be?