By Scott Buckner

The biggest collection of head cases any American network has ever had the balls to produce in television history returned to FX with a rerun of the fourth season opener of Rescue Me. While the networks serve us reality-show slop and bad sitcoms and then wonders where all the viewers have gone, recovering boozer Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary) and the men of NYFD Station 62 are back elevating into an art from the state of being incredibly fucked in the head by bad childhoods and worse adulthoods. It’s no wonder guys like this don’t mind going into blazing warehouses. For some of them, death would be easier and cheaper than the years of therapy it would take to undo the messes they’ve become.

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Posted on June 19, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Welcome back to hell, everyone. Chronically pissed-off Scottish chef Gordon Ramsay was back last night to guide us through a third expletive-laden season of failure and humiliation in Fox-TV’s Hell’s Kitchen – a show that might as well be called Get The Fuck Out Of My Fucking Kitchen, You Fucking Worthless Lazy-Arse Pieces Of Fucking Shit.
In last night’s two-hour extravaganza, which repeated last Monday’s premiere episode, we met 12 chef wannabes looking to win a $250,000-a-year salary (plus profit-sharing) as head chef at the Green Valley Ranch Resort in Las Vegas, which we last saw on TV as the home base of the American Casino reality show that got a little too real.
To win the Hell’s Kitchen chef-off, our contestants have to prove to Ramsay that they possess both the backbone to withstand his verbal abuse and the basic cooking skills to actually run a kitchen that serves high-falutin’ cuisine – all while cooking for crowds of real, high-falutin’ people in the Hell’s Kitchen restaurant. To prevent the guests from being food poisoned or notes hurriedly scrawled in pencil saying “Help Me” being stashed under customers’ cuts of Beef Wellington, Ramsay has to approve every appetizer and entree dish that goes out.

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Posted on June 12, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Back in 1995, Court TV brought everything that was sordid and wrong with the O.J. Simpson and the Menendez brothers trials into the living room of anyone who had cable TV. Since there hasn’t yet been a trial of the century this century to justify the network sucking up space on the dial, owner Time Warner decided it will dump the Court TV name in January 2008 in favor of something that reflects a move to programming about “real people and real situations.”
You know, because real women on trial for poisoning their real husbands aren’t real situations. On top of that, in a drastic move to get trashy America and old people to finally break down and buy computers and high-speed Internet connections, the company announced that actual trial coverage will be aired only on the Web.
If last night’s Speeders and Getting A Ticket In America is any indication of what the new Court TV is to become, I have a suggestion for its new name: Succhiamo!

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Posted on June 8, 2007

By Scott Buckner

I’m glad the data-entry stoner in charge of my satellite TV program guide at 2 a.m. this morning was promising “super heavyweights arm wrestling” on ESPN2. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have found the taped replay of the previous evening’s NCAA Division I Women’s College World Series softball finals in Oklahoma City between Arizona and Tennessee. It was a do-or-die game for Arizona, which trailed 1-0 in the best-of-three series. I was looking forward to some good heavyweight arm rasslin’, but I stayed with the softball because I’m a guy, and I naturally welcome three-hour events involving a whole bunch of attractive college women. Especially when a TV camera spends practically the entire time trained on their backsides.

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Posted on June 7, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Bravo began its Sunday programming day at midnight with a showing of The Terminator a film which has now taken on same slightly washed-out look as movies shown on WLS-TV at 3 a.m.
It’s 1984 in Los Angeles and cyborg Arnold Schwarzenegger has traveled 40 years back in time from a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles to scare the shit out of a garbage truck driver by appearing naked in an alley and stealing clothes from community college-level gangbangers too skinny to have clothes that would actually fit him. Now dressed like Michael Jackson, Arnold begins to lay the foundation for his gubernatorial campaign with a thorough cleansing of the voter rolls, starting by shooting every constituent named Sarah Connor.

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Posted on June 4, 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.

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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.

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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.

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Posted on May 22, 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.

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Posted on May 17, 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.

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Posted on May 16, 2007