By Scott Buckner

Get on a hotel bus with a dozen or so Mexicans on a Saturday afternoon and you never know where you’ll end up. Especially when you don’t understand a lick of Spanish.
I was channel surfing when I came across a big Sin Rodeo graphic on Galavision, a Spanish-speaking channel on my satellite menu whose logo is apparently on loan from the Green Bay Packers. I’m a fan of sin, and I don’t mind a good rodeo now and then during the monster truck pull off-season, so Galavision had my attention for the next hour.
The host of the program was a chipper young woman who works as Gloria Estefan’s somewhat-less-hot sister. She used the first quarter of the show in the back of a hotel bus interviewing roughly a dozen Mexican fellows who appeared to be in their mid-30s with the same hair stylist and buying habits at The Sunglass Hut. What made these guys special enough for their own bus ride, I wondered. Were they on their way to find sin? To to the rodeo? My gringo curiosity needed satisfaction.

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Posted on January 8, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Okay, if immigrants can come to New York with barely two nickels to rub together and end up owning a whole string of gas stations, restaurants and bodegas, then why can’t an employed guy in Queens with $89 in the bank and a $100 savings bond get his slice of The American Dream without turning to a life of crime? Because it wouldn’t be funny.
I like my TV humor dark and dry, but you can’t beat a show that makes you almost piss yourself. It takes my mind off my own underpaid part of The American Dream that has me a paycheck or two away from living under a bridge. That’s why I liked Wednesday’s 30-minute pilot episode of The Knights of Prosperity, on ABC. I figured any show originally called Let’s Rob Mick Jagger had to have something going for it. I wasn’t sure what, exactly, since the Internet Movie Database says the working title before that was I Want To Rob Jeff Goldblum, and the working title before that was Untitled Donal Logue Project, but still.

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Posted on January 4, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Back in the day, the best reason to have cable TV was because it was the only place short of National Geographic and porn theaters where you could encounter profanity, sex, and full frontal nudity all in one place. Without commercials, too. For those of us growing up then, cable was a place more reliable than the gutter to learn about the facts of life, and more accessible than your dad’s stash of Playboy and Penthouse. Then, around a decade or two ago, someone shoved a stick up the nation’s behind, and before you knew it, we got Al Pacino and Samuel L. Jackson telling everyone “forget you” a few hundred times and the evaporation of the highly pivotal Getting To Know You scene between Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon that explains Bound so well.
Artistically speaking, it just ain’t right, you know? It’s like Michaelangelo’s David. If Mike had intended us to see it wearing pants, he would have sculpted out a pair of Levi’s. Which leads me to the pilot episode of FX Network’s new, hour-long original series Dirt. For those of us who knew what cable was originally intended to be, it’s one more reason we should thank all that’s right with the world for whoever’s running FX. (That, and the fact that FX is very kind to the TiVo-less, as it repeats its original-program shows a few times throughout the week.)

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Posted on January 3, 2007

By Scott Buckner

If you were alive and owned a TV set during the early 1960s, Twilight Zone was one of the most creative shows around. If you were alive between New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day this past weekend, you could watch what was probably the entire series during Sci-Fi Channel’s Twilight Zone marathon. Since I paid good money for a color television, I settled for just two episodes, all filmed in classic black-and-white.
If NASA was anything like the space program depicted in the 1960 episode “I Shot An Arrow Into The Air,” you’d wonder how we ever managed to get to the moon in the first place. A half-dozen or so astronauts sent on the first manned space flight disappear from radar just after lift-off, crash-landing on an “asteroid of some kind,” killing half the crew on impact. Since it would take another four-and-a-half years to build another ship from scratch because, well, NASA was more laid back then, the three surviving ‘nauts embark upon a campaign of killing each other over water rations until a sign for Kilson’s Motel (Eats – Gas – Oil) informs the last survivor that he’s a mere 97 miles from Reno, Nevada.

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Posted on January 2, 2007

By Scott Buckner

I’m not going to say one word about that car wreck known as My Boys. Badly-done references to Chicago aside, it’s just a stupid, boring fucking show – period – that I’m pretty sure even prison inmates don’t watch except when they’re being punished. If I’m going to fritter away minutes of my life I’ll never get back on a Wednesday night, I’m going with something that resembles entertainment. Yeah. Something like Spike TV’s “Most Extreme Elimination Challenge,” otherwise known as MXC.
Quite frankly, this is one of the funniest damn shows around.

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Posted on December 28, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

It’s not that I’m obsessed with how bad My Guys is, is that it’s so bad I keep watching out of amazement. I mean, the premise isn’t half-bad, though inherently sets up stereotypical gender bullshit as an integral part of the storylines. P.J. Franklin is the Cubs beat writer for the Chicago Sun-Times and hangs out with her guys, which hinders her dating life. Sportswriters have been done on TV ad infinitum – though rarely well – but it might have been more interesting to dial back the focus on P.J’s social life and write the show through the prism of her workplace. She could really have any job – the focus of the show is the poker table at her apartment, and whatever situations the writers can think up to put P.J. in. Bad choice.
The show is also incredibly strained in its efforts to namecheck Chicago in ways that both no national audience will understand and no local audience will countenance, given the incredible rate of inaccuracy, irrelevance, and ignorance these references display.

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Posted on December 27, 2006

By Steve Rhodes

I actually look forward now to watching My Boys every Tuesday night so I can continue to crusade against it. How many inane references to Chicago, sex, rock and roll, and baseball can one show make in an episode? My Boys keeps trying to top itself.

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Posted on December 20, 2006

By Kathryn Ware

How hard does My Boys suck? Pretty hard. Strained, tired, and outright weird references to the Billy Goat (“You know, the place that’s underground? ), Kingston Mines (“We had great seats!”), and Lord & Taylor (Lord & Taylor?!) aside, it’s clear the writing staff knows nothing about baseball, poker, heavy metal, or the male-female dynamic. Which pretty much leaves the show with nothing but a chick who looks cute in her softball uniform. And while that’s certainly something, it’s also certainly not enough.
To get a sense of the absolute horror that is My Boys, which airs Tuesday nights, we’ve compiled two lists of comments posted on the TBS-My Boys message board – 10 critical comments that sound like they come from genuine viewers, and 20 praiseworthy posts that sound to us like plants from the TBS-My Boys staff. You be the judge.
GENUINE COMMENTS –
1. HOLLYWOOD IS STILL MAKING WOMEN LOOK STUPID
Posted: Dec 10, 2006 12:51 PM
By: GetReal Now
Why do you continue to air shows that portray women as DUMB idiots? Every woman knows that guys hang around so they have a chance to sleep with you. Do you think that you can change mankind by airing these shows? Do you enjoy making women look stupid? Please pull this ridiculous show and replace it with something that is more real.
2. Re: Has some potential and hate the obvious product placement . . .
Posted: Nov 29, 2006 11:41 PM
By: pchaney
The blatant product placement pissed me off, literally. Here I was watching what I thought was a rather lame comedy (as compared to its counterpart SATC) and what I was actually watching was a 30-minute infomercial for Match.com. I felt violated and my “trust” in the entertainment value of the show – albeit very little as it was – was gone. They sucker punched the audience and there is no excuse for that.

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Posted on December 12, 2006

You can put your best face forward, but it’ll still leave you feeling inadequate.
What it is: A personal microdermabrasion system. Not to mention Susan Lucci’s beauty (that being a flexible term for our purposes) secret.

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Posted on December 11, 2006

By Kathryn Ware

Lucille Ball’s hair was made for Technicolor. It’s an amazing red color not found in nature and in Best Foot Forward, which I saw recently and was shown again last night on Turner Classic Movies, she wears it in a huge fortress style favored in the ’40s that easily adds another ten inches to her already impressive height. With her pale skin and bright red lipstick, she’s stunning. There’s a scene with Lucy wearing a vibrant ensemble, complete with a hat that looks like layers of bright blue-green phyllo dough balanced atop her rock solid flaming hairdo. It’s almost painful to look at.

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Posted on December 7, 2006