Word: nebbishness
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...photos of the NBC programming chief on his show and make cruel remarks. In The Late Shift, HBO's recent movie about the late-night battle, Littlefield comes across as the arch network dunderhead, the guy who lost Letterman to CBS. In one scene, Littlefield (played as a smarmy nebbish by Bob Balaban) is so surprised by a phone call from Jay Leno that he races out of the toilet in his boxers, with his pants around his ankles...
Unfair? The real Littlefield is more earnest preppy than pantsless nebbish, a boyish executive with a neatly trimmed beard. One thing his 21 years in the TV business have taught him is that it doesn't pay to be a sourpuss. He claims he used to "crack up" at Letterman's on-air gibes, even when Letterman went so far as to smash a Tiffany candy dish Littlefield had given him as a gift. As for the Late Shift portrayal, Littlefield laughs it off, though he points out that "I don't wear boxer shorts. I wear briefs." He shrugs...
...Polish nebbish gets even with the nasty Frenchwoman of his dreams. In this dark comedy (second episode in the wonderful Blue-White-Red trilogy), director Krzysztof Kieslowski cannily observes the flourishing of capitalism and the festering of emotion in his wayward homeland...
...when this sounds unconvincing, he switches to socialism. Baker's ideology, however, is only a mask for his real motive, frustration at the unfulfilling existence of a lower-middle-class office worker. Thomas Derrah skillfully portrays Baker as a sweaty-palmed nebbish in a cheap brown suit, using the borrowed finery of sophisticated Marxist rhetoric to disguise his feelings of inferiority...
...thought too timid to sculpt his own political persona, the patrician who ran a pallid third in last month's Iowa caucuses and staggered into New Hampshire facing extinction, the bland campaigner who ended one debate by apologizing for his lack of eloquence -- this consensus choice as political nebbish suddenly transformed himself into the prim reaper who could not be denied. Bush last week harvested victories from Massachusetts and Rhode Island to Oklahoma and Texas. His weakest rival, Jack Kemp, promptly quit the Republican contest. Pat Robertson, another ostensible threat on Bush's right flank, collapsed in a puddle...