BRITNEY SPEARS - CHRISTIAN ACTIVIST GROUP SAYS IT BLOCKED BRITNEY SITCOM EPISODE

The Rev. Don Wildmon's American Family Assn. (AFA) is taking credit for killing a planned Will & Grace episode on NBC that reportedly was to feature Britney Spears as a Christian conservative co-host with Jack, the gay character portrayed by Sean Hayes, on Jack's Out TV cable channel. According to an early NBC news release, she was to appear in a cooking segment of the show called "Cruci-fixins." The network later said that the script for the episode had yet to be written "and the story line will not contain a Christian characterization at all." In a statement on Monday, the AFA said, "When NBC said that the script 'has yet to be written,' what they didn't tell you is that the 'story board' had been completed, and the offensive material was scheduled to be a part of the episode." Wildmon himself was quoted in the statement as saying, "Plainly put, NBC heard from their affiliates that they did not want to go through another Book of Daniel situation while losing millions in advertising revenue." NBC recently canceled The Book of Daniel following an AFA letter campaign that, the organization claims, generated hundreds of thousand of written protests.

07/02/2006