By Scott Buckner

Spring Break sucks when you grow up. You can subscribe all you want to that “You’re only as old as you feel” business, but once 40 starts looming large, you’re just Creepy Uncle material to anyone in a string bikini along the entire Florida Coast during the month of April. But that’s okay. The National Geographic Channel informs us that yes, Virginia, there is a Spring Break for the aging. Yeah, it’s held during the summer, but still. It’s a place where, for an entire week, you can drink until you puke and witness feats of beaded necklace-collecting that reduces Mardi Gras New Orleans to a burg of rank amateurs.

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Posted on January 31, 2007

By Scott Buckner

I had a crummy day Monday, so I grab a seat at the end of the bar at the Home Plate Pub in Hessville. That’s where I find ABC ordering me somewhat rudely to ponder What About Brian since there’s no question mark in there asking me politely. I haven’t seen the show, so I do wonder: What about Brian? Did he fall down a mine shaft? Does he overcome adversity and teach others deeply meaningful lessons about their own lives despite having some sort of handicap that would defeat a lesser fellow? Does he save others from certain death through heroic surgeries or stunning lifeguardsmanship? Does he sell insurance? What?

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Posted on January 30, 2007

I wish I could hear Esteban’s students play, but his backing musicians are too loud.
What It Is: A 22-piece set that includes a handmade acoustic-electric guitar, packaged with accessories and instructional DVDs featuring rugged guitar veteran Esteban. It also includes a guitar chord poster, strings, picks and a cleaning cloth.
Description: In principle, not too much different from the guitar starter kits you might see at a Guitar Center or, frankly, K-Mart.
Quote: “This man has touched nearly a half-million lives with his amazing guitar packages!”

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Posted on January 30, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Are you one of those country music purists who firmly believes Garth Brooks is the Antichrist and the eyes of hormone-raging young boys should be shielded whenever the new, improved version of Faith Hill turns up on CMT? Then you’d be right at home with The Wilburn Brothers, as I was Thursday night. Well, I wasn’t really at home with them. It was more like who in the world digs up these things?
The RFD-TV network does, that’s who. (For those of you born well after Andy left Ken Berry in charge of Mayberry, RFD is an acronym for Rural Free Delivery, which brought home mail delivery to the sticks and gave farmers the same right as city folk to have their mailboxes cluttered up by Publisher’s Clearinghouse.)
Billing itself as “rural America’s most important network,” RFD-TV is where the Propane Research and Education Council does its advertising, and I guess if I watched long enough, I could probably have picked up a subscription to Grit newspaper too, except now it’s not really a newspaper anymore and that’s just another fine example of how corporate America has screwed the heartland, dagnabbit.

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Posted on January 26, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Take a sick day and lay in bed with some temporary but nonetheless uncomfortable physical malady until afternoon and it becomes clear that satellite TV during the day has the same miserable choices of any other form of TV reception at night. Since I was miserable enough, I tuned in to The Last Days on Earth on The History Channel to see how much more miserable I might have been Wednesday if we were in the middle of global annihilation.
This program (the DVD on sale in March at the A&E store contains “stunning graphics and representations depict[ing] every doomsday scenario in precise, excruciating detail“) showed seven very real ways that either nature or man itself can conspire to doom the whole camping trip. Whoa. Forget the chicken soup, I thought. What I’d be needing is a bigger umbrella.

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Posted on January 25, 2007

By Scott Buckner

The Chicago Bears: proving yet again you don’t need a quarterback to win a football game.

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Posted on January 22, 2007

By Scott Buckner

I have this theory about how TV shows which aren’t spinoffs of something else are developed. It goes something like this: A guy comes up with a brilliant idea and spends a year or three (even longer if he has a day job or a relationship) developing and refining the concept, the characters, the treatments, an actual script, and whatever-else have you for the pilot show. It’s hilarious, the network suits love it, so they all sign a deal and tell him to go home and come up with a dozen more scripts.
Soon enough, it dawns on him what has just happened. So he sits back, stares blankly at his shoes and says, “Oh, shit. Now what?”
I think that’s what happened with The Knights of Prosperity, the show about a bumbling crew of people so sick of their stations in life that they dream up a plan to rob Mick Jagger and/or his apartment. They’re not yet entirely clear which, so neither am I. I missed the show last week, so I thought maybe Natasha Julius was woozy from her two-week juice fast to comment so harshly about Knights in the Beachwood’s mid-season review, but you clearly don’t need animal protein to see that this show has quickly turned into a disappointingly unfunny show just like everything else that passes for comedy on ABC.

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Posted on January 18, 2007

By The Beachwood TV Desk

Lost and Jericho are gone for now and they’ve been replaced by mid-season shows that don’t have many obvious synergies with their predecessors. A pair of comedies are on in place of an ultradramatic show about grim, grim survival. Meanwhile, a time slot where viewers have come to accept nuclear armageddon is now all about a gun-toting midget.
The first in a planned series of TV reviews as the “mid-season” unfolds until, like, March.

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Posted on January 17, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Just when you think you’ve gotten over the fear of flying, driving over suspension bridges, nuclear power, and riding in submarines, The History Channel airs Modern Marvels: Engineering Disasters. Here, we get an astonishingly simple explanation of how Engineering Disasters happen in the first place: Say you’re zooming your way home 12,000 feet over Iowa and there are 473 little things going wrong at once. If those 473 things are just happening all willy-nilly, the worst that will probably happen is you’ll end up taking a shuttle bus home from Gary. But if they all go wrong in a very particular order, you can pretty much count on a front row seat to the asphalt ballet.

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Posted on January 17, 2007

By Scott Buckner

When I was a kid, Mystery Date was a board game popular with the neighborhood girls. The object, if I recall, was to see whether you wound up with The Dreamboat or The Dud when you opened the white door. Monday night, Lifetime Television brought something like this to television with Gay, Straight or Taken?
Nobody has ever told anyone at Lifetime that women have already been playing this game for ages in drinking establishments throughout the industrialized world, so now we’ve got this show. As we might imagine, they aren’t any better at guesstimating who might be gay, straight or taken on television than they are in real life.

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Posted on January 16, 2007