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

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

By Pat Bataillon

I am through with all the pompous commercials I have been seeing as of late. I wrote about “Macrimination” recently, and that was just the beginning of this new onslaught of unbearable advertising. I still don’t get those new Lexus commercials, and all those commercials with that Verizon ass really need to go. And what’s the deal with those jewelry outfits, Jared and Kay?

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Posted on December 5, 2006

By Pat Bataillon

Murder By the Book
Court TV
Court TV puts what it calls some of America’s “best” crime writers on camera to talk about real-life cases that either got them started in crime fiction or inspired them throughout their careers.
Their list includes James Ellroy, Michael Connelly, Faye Kellerman, Jonathan Kellerman, and Lisa Scottoline. As for America’s “best”, there are some noticeable gaps there, but I guess not everyone who writes murder mysteries has an interest in self-promotion.
The show itself is wildly uneven. The series opener, repeated last night, starred James Ellroy, who is riveting as he narrated his own life story and the murder of his own mother in a suburb of Los Angeles when he was ten years old. Ellroy himself comes across as troubled and enigmatic. He and a retired cop criss-cross the area, follow up every lead in the long-cold case, and ultimately realize that nearly everybody on the witness and suspect list has long since died. But Ellroy, who has hated his mother all his life, comes to realize that the point of his search for her killer isn’t the real point. He simply has to “find” his mother, and come to terms with who she was. He wrote about the story in his book My Dark Places and claims that the Court TV segment is the last time he’ll ever speak of it.

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Posted on December 1, 2006

By Pat Bataillon

I watched a little of that Real World last night and really found it annoying, so I got on my computer and did some holiday shopping. So I didn’t really watch any television worth writing about last night. The only thing I can think about to comment on is the incessant sobbing on the Real World.

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Posted on November 30, 2006

By Pat Bataillon

My Boys is an awful show. It is the new show on TBS that has been advertised to everyone in Chicago over every medium for the last few weeks. There is so much wrong in this show I don’t even know where to start.

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Posted on November 29, 2006

By Pat Bataillon

Monday nights and still nothing on the television and that is too bad. I would like to ask the readers of this fine little column, however, to start watching The Real World Denver. This show will definitely serve as my Thursday morning outlet for the rest of the season.
To bring you up to speed, there is a gay guy, two sluts, a girl who doesn’t talk too much, a white “cool” guy, a Bible beater, and a huge guy from Omaha. You can already see the problems facing this place. Gay rights, racism, sexual promiscuity, a mental disorder (only a matter of time) and we’ll have another hit on MTV.

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Posted on November 28, 2006