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

By Scott Buckner

Bears kinda sucked and the Seahawks kinda sucked, but the Bears kinda sucked less. Bears kickers Brad Maynard and Robbie Gould did not suck. That’s the only relevant observations necessary for anyone whose Sunday afternoons don’t revolve around football.
*
IN THIS EDITION:
– At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul
– Bad Girls Club
– Dirt
– The Surreal Life: Fame Games
*
The high point of my weekend watching was Friday night’s At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul, a 1963 black and white Brazilian horror flick on the Independent Film Channel. I’m not big on subtitled movies because I tend to miss something important in the acting while I’m busy with the subtitles, but it was almost midnight and I’d never seen how Brazilians go about swiping souls. I also hung around because it’s been a long time since I’d seen anything not presented by a major corporation uncut and commercial-free. This probably means IFC will have its own soul stolen within the year, too.

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Posted on January 15, 2007

By ML Van Valkenburgh

Okay, I’ll admit that I’m one of the suckers whose been drawn into the inevitably tear-jerking, feel-good, pay-it-forward mojo of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. I watch it reasonably religiously, probably because (a) it’s cathartic and (b) it gives me hope that some day something really cool, like a bus full of people with lots of money and good intentions, will pull up at my door, send me on vacation, and build me a stunning home while I’m away. Ty and his gang are living proof that such things happen.
Unfortunately, it’s not going to happen to me. At least not this season. See, this year, they’re doing it a little differently, and they’re doing one home in each state. And on Sunday night, well, they were right here in Chicago, in Lawndale, “giving a family a second chance.”

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Posted on January 15, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Sometimes television is inventive. Most times, though, it’s perfectly happy to just invent new ways to eat its young. So the cannibalizaton of American Idol continued Thursday night with an installment on Bravo of Grease: You’re The One That I Want!.
I didn’t like Grease when it was a movie because two things on my list of Things I Really Don’t Like Because They’re Stupid are musicals and ’50s music. I’m no fan of American Idol either because, well, I got sick of hearing about it long ago. But it’s not that I didn’t like this snoozer because it’s a ripoff of a program I don’t particularly like. Ripping off TV shows is a long-honored tradition in American TV, and it’s the only reason we got our own versions of the original British Who’s Line Is It Anyway and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. No, I didn’t like it much because whoever came up with this show is a total failure at ripping stuff off right. The reason Whose Line and Millionaire went over so well is because the Americans hosting the shows were far more interesting than those in England.
In America, personality spells success. Which is why one of the first things Millionaire did when Meredith Viera took over from Regis Philbin was head into the tank.

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Posted on January 12, 2007

By Scott Buckner

If there was a contest right now for Biggest Fucking Genius Of The Universe Ever, I believe I know who the undisputed champ would be. No, not Stephen Hawking. Jeez, even the clinically insane can come up with concepts not a single breathing human being could possibly grasp. Bert and Ernie could do it with crayons. No, the true BFGOTUE would, collectively, be the think tank at VH1 that came up with Tuesday night’s The Surreal Life Fame Games: Welcome to Celebrity Island.
The genius here is not the game itself, but rather that VH1 has found yet another way to keep the same bunch of celebrity driftwood off the dole.

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Posted on January 10, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Monday night is the only night in which TV puts me to sleep. Truly. Not just to sleep, but barely after nine o’clock Old People Early asleep, so I’m up at the crack of fucking dawn the next morning with nothing to do but look out my window for opportunities to stick my nose in my neighbors’ business.
I just moved to a new neighborhood. I have seen my neighbors. I really don’t want to know what they’re doing.
Someone in charge of Monday night TV programming needs to please stop this before I need a hip replaced or start talking about goiters or something.
The wooze-inducing culprits last night were The New Adventures of Old Christine and CSI: Miami – I was more or less defaulted into watching CBS because I had already seen the Mythbusters guys try to replicate an Archimedes Mirror to harness the reflective power of the sun, possibly to incinerate Rachael Ray.

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Posted on January 9, 2007

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