Chicago -
By The Beachwood TV Plot Affairs Desk
According to IMDB.com.
1. M*A*S*H
Army Nurse | Clairvoyant | Ignorance | Alcoholic | Immaturity | Alcoholism | Strait Jacket | Satire | Surgery | 1950s | Anti War | Army Life
2. One Life to Live
Soap | Sex | Multiple Personality | Borderline | Personality Disorder | Human Relationship | Interracial Relationship
3. MacGyver
Science | Spy | Gilligans Island Character Similarity | Improvisation | Espionage | Hero
Posted on May 30, 2007
By Scott Buckner
Um, excuse me, but who on God’s Green Earth thought it would be a sterling idea to turn last night’s two-singer showdown finale of American Idol into the goddamn Oscars? The Academy Awards telecast is a boring, drawn-out affair with a lot of extraneous crap the world could do without occupying 99.9999 percent of the show. So how did we end up with the same thing with last night’s Idol?
I’ve never been an Idol fan, or even a casual follower. For people like me, following Idol is like following Chicago’s professional sports teams or the Indy 500: You might tune in a few times in the beginning just to see who’s crashing and burning, but you’re only there for the big season finale for the free beer and food at someone else’s house. And if the commercials interrupting your eating and drinking and socializing don’t suck, that’s even better.
All the Lost fanatics were at home for that show’s season-ender last night, so that left ESPN baseball diehards and Idol fans to duke it out over TV time at the two gin mills I visited last night. Consequently, I didn’t get to see the whole two-hour Idol finale in its entirety, and the sound was off for most of the snippets I did manage to see. But that didn’t stop me from making some observations anyway.
Posted on May 24, 2007
By Scott Buckner
It’s early Tuesday morning and A&E Classroom is chronicling the life of U.S. president and poker aficionado Dwight D. Eisenhower, from his humble beginnings in Abilene, Kansas, to his place on one of the worst American dollar coins ever designed.
Posted on May 23, 2007
By Scott Buckner
TV is an incestuous playground, particularly when it comes to one (or often several) TV series being spun off from another. The list of television programs doing a lot of begettin’ and begottin’ is pretty considerable, particularly once the 1970s. (Yes, Mork and Mindy was indeed a Happy Days spinoff.) While Norman Lear and Aaron Spelling were perhaps the most successful purveyors of incestuous small-screen lineage, the undisputed king of the big screen tree-without-branches during the 1960s had to be Walter Elias Disney.
This thought dawned on me during this past Saturday afternoon’s Hallmark Channel doubleheader presentation of the still-incredibly popular Disney films Old Yeller and Swiss Family Robinson. Go ahead – try and play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with any 1960s Disney movie and see how far off the ground you’re able to climb.
Posted on May 22, 2007
By Don Jacobson
Rock has had seven “ages,” according to BBC Television, which has launched what seems like a pretty darn comprehensive seven-week, seven-part documentary called, appropriately, The Seven Ages of Rock, which works out to one age per week. That’s a lot to cover. Here’s how they break down the history of rock ‘n’ roll.
Posted on May 21, 2007
By Scott Buckner
Is famous multimillionaire drag racin’ funny-car driver and confessed marital failure John Force a seething ball of anger who needs professional managing, or does the world just make him fucking nuts? That was the question anyone tuning in to back-to-back episodes of A&E’s Driving Force early Tuesday morning was left to think about.
Even though I don’t catch it anywhere near as often as I’d like, Driving Force is one of my favorite A&E shows. I started watching it last summer because I initially thought John Force was the separated-at-birth twin of whacked-out actor Gary Busey before he crashed his motorcycle while not wearing a brain bucket and ended up even more whacked out. While he’s still and all Busey-esque, Force isn’t the same sort of whack job. He’s an old-school guy who, in his judgement, had the basic misfortune of siring girls to follow in his drag-racing footsteps instead of boys. He’s had cars disintegrate around him, and he’s been on fire after plowing into concrete walls at 300 miles per hour, “but nothing could prepare me for having daughters,” he says during each program intro.
Posted on May 17, 2007
What it Is: An ultra-light, slim vacuum cleaner.
Quote: “It cleans forwards, but it also cleans backwards!”
Cost:$40 (Apparently cheaper here.)
Shill: Young-ish, slim, British infomercial super-hunk Anthony Sullivan. What is it with these Brits in infomercials? Some sort of shill-exchange program we haven’t been told about?
Posted on May 16, 2007
By Kathryn Ware
Gilmore Girls ends with a whimper, in character with these last two disappointing seasons. The entire town of Stars Hollow throws Rory a going away party. She’s leaving to cover the Obama campaign for an online magazine and apparently won’t be seen again for years.
Posted on May 16, 2007
By Eric Pytel
The greatest infomercial on network TV isn’t really an infomercial at all. It’s Poker after Dark, televised on NBC after the late-night talk shows and the nightly replay of the 10 o’clock NBC 5 news. I recently came upon the show after a bout of insomnia and quickly found myself glued to the tube. It’s shown nightly (Monday-Friday) with a weekly behind-the-scenes director’s cut on Saturday in the wee hours of the morning. A director’s cut!
NBC has partnered with Full-Tilt Poker.net to show weekly themed broadcasts of no-limit Texas Hold ‘Em. In between the action, commercials run that are part noir/part campy theatrics aimed at enticing viewers to try their luck at online poker. Each episode is an hour long. It starts with six seated players on Monday and by Friday the table is narrowed to two who go head-to-head until there is a victor. It’s an imaginative – and winning – formula.
Posted on May 15, 2007
By Steve Rhodes
Who knew Todd Bridges could act? And that I would learn this seeing something I thought I’d never see on TV – black people on Little House on the Prairie? And that I would actually watch an entire episode of LHOTP, as I assume fans call it? Holy crap was it good.
Posted on May 14, 2007
