William Shatner is just f*cking nuts

Shatner’s Raw Nerve premieres Tuesday (10 ET/PT) on cable’s Biography Channel. The half-hour, 13-episode series features the popular star probing celebrity psyches, from Judge Judy to Jon Voight. Nerve eschews the prototypical talk-show format of guests plugging pet projects and answering softball questions. Instead, Shatner, 77, tries to delve deeper into personalities, probing for anecdotes of childhood, relationships and life-changing events — the “raw nerve” that Shatner envisioned for the show’s title. – from USAtoday

“Shatner’s Raw Nerve” puts its host’s peculiar brand of intensity on full display. The set looks like the cavernous basement lounge in a Balinese hotel. Mr. Shatner sits in an armchair that butts up against his guest’s on a diagonal: he is so up close he looks as though he is going to spoon-feed whoever is seated there in front of him. I kept expecting the opening question to be, “So how about a spring roll?”

But Mr. Shatner is much more probing than that. What does he want to know? He wants to know what Valerie Bertinelli thinks about sin. This Lifetime television star is the first guest on the show, and what she has to say about sin isn’t going to put Thomas Aquinas out of business. (Yup, she has done some sinning, and she feels really bad about it.) But Mr. Shatner is clearly modeling himself after the sort of interviewers who prod and prod for specificity. He just keeps going until he arrives at a question like this: “What lie lurks behind the eyes that you think is unforgivable?”

- from NYtimes

With a TV show carrying the title “Shatner’s Raw Nerve,” you naturally expect one crazed spaceman to show up with phasers set to kill.

William Shatner recently blasted his one-time “Star Trek” colleague George Takei for not inviting him to his wedding and branded him psychotic (“dilithium, meet crystal” – Hiyo! Nerdy “Trek” joke) and seems to be in a running snit with J.J. Abrams over the big-screen remake of “Star Trek” warping into theaters next year without him.

Can the TV icon and self-parody really get his Shat together to host his own Bio talk show (debuting Tuesday night at 10)?

- from BostonHerald