Chicago - A message from the station manager

By Scott Buckner

I was a little concerned when I tuned in to The U for Svengoolie at 9 p.m. last Saturday and ended up with the final hour of The Mask of Zorro, an overwrought 1998 piece of crap with Antonio Banderas, Anthony Hopkins and Catherine Zeta-Jones. It turned out Sven was just bumped back an hour, which gave me the time to interject plenty of silly Zorro commentary as The Great Cornholio and the talking bee on those Zyrtec commercials.
Sven’s feature was the 1967 Joan Crawford star vehicle Berserk!, which is like saying a Yugo is a star vehicle because a major Hollywood star imploding into itself happens to be driving one at the moment. It’s also one of the few Svengoolie features where playing The Svengoolie Drinking Game of Death has the real potential to kill you within the first 15 minutes simply because it’s a Joan Crawford movie.

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Posted on February 16, 2010

What I Watched Last Night: Kitchen Nightmares

By Scott Buckner

Some years ago, I was introduced to Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares on BBC America and became kind of fascinated with it. Like the American version of the show that came later, Ramsay spent his time traipsing around the United Kingdom on a mission to whip some mom-and-pop restaurant the size of a Dairy Queen into shape within the span of a few days. If I learned anything from that show, it’s that food created on that island is basically unidentifiable slop even on its best days, so if you ever visit, you’re probably better off just drinking your three squares a day at the closest pub.
Here in the States, our mom-and-pop dining establishments have many of the same problems as those across The Pond, except without meals involving sheep innards or eels. Their kitchens are just as filthy and disorganized, their food storage practices just as abhorrent, and the food cooked by the same stressed-out, lazy and incompetent kitchen people who seem to have developed their social skills in prison. Likewise, our dining establishments are being mismanaged into the dirt by bickering family members who probably should have found something more profitable to mismanage into oblivion, like a steel mill or a record company. In many cases, it has taken entire families generations of hard work to drive their business over a cliff, so the possibility that it might be resurrected in less than a week by one guy is pretty inspiring.
That said, you’d think having Gordon Ramsay dedicate seven days to save your own personal Titanic would make you cream in your jeans. Or if you were a really hard case, at least make your nipples tingle a little. But no. That’s why another entertaining season of Kitchen Nightmares is now back on Fox.

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Posted on February 4, 2010

What I Watched Last Night: Conan As Jesus

By Pat Bataillon

I was reading the Bible again the other night. Something I do to remind me to fear for my soul at all times. I re-read the Cain and Abel story as well as some Jesus stuff and realized we have a modern day version unfolding right before or eyes. Leno is killing the younger Conan for the approval of his superior. I love it when biblical tales come to teach us in modern day situations. See Haiti’s pact with the devil. Kudos to Pat Robertson for pointing that one out, I would have completely missed it.
I have never watched an episode of Leno’s prime time show and never made it through an entire hour of his version of the Tonight Show. I watched Conan a few times when it started, and over the last two weeks. The Late Night show with Conan was really something special and looks to be in good hands with Jimmy Fallon. Seriously, Jimmy Fallon is worthwhile. His take on the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is a can’t miss. Through all these shows though, Letterman has been holding my attention since I could stay up past 10.

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Posted on January 22, 2010

What I Watched Last Night: The Last Picture Show

By Scott Buckner
When you’ve made a choice to live your life without cable TV, finding something interesting enough to write about is often a dismal challenge. This is why I was was glad – and completely surprised – to see Chicago’s very own MeToo (digital 26.3) airing 1971’s critically-acclaimed The Last Picture Show at 3 a.m. last Sunday.
I was even more surprised to notice there were only one or two very short interruptions during the entire two-hour block, most notably by a flashback of the classic Keep America Beautiful “Crying Indian” commercial, which looked like it could have been filmed yesterday along the Grand Calumet River and the Borman Expressway near the Indiana-Illinois border.

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Posted on December 17, 2009

What I Watched Last Night: Virgin Sex

By Scott Buckner

For us menfolk, the 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. network TV time slot is a torturous purgatory filled with little more than TV judges, people cooking things, and talk shows. This window of time was made even more torturous on Wednesday by the airing of the 1973 Robbie Benson/Glynnis O’Connor film Jeremy on ThisTV, one of WCIU’s digital children whose library seems to be comprised largely of movies from the 1970s that nobody in their right mind would have paid good money to see even back then, when theater tickets didn’t even cost five bucks.
On the other hand, if it weren’t for ThisTV, I’d have no idea that distinguished French actor Thierry Lhermitte even existed.
For those of you who weren’t teenagers in 1973 – or for those of you who were and would like to forget the whole experience – Jeremy ranks right up there with Ice Castles as a movie capable of giving you contact diabetes, or at the very least making the fillings in your teeth hurt.
That’s because they starred the incredibly scrawny and incredibly sensitive and emotional young actor Robby Benson, a kid who could make Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” sound like a James Taylor song. But America fell in love with doe-eyed sensitivity during the 1970s, so naturally, boatloads of tweenie girls fell in love with Robby Benson. He made several movies before dropping off the celebrity radar a few years later when everyone decided the kids in Fast Times at Ridgemont High were obviously more interesting and fun. (He – well, his voice, anyway – had a brief resurgence of sorts in Walt Disney’s 1991 animated film Beauty and the Beast.)
My problem back then with Robby Benson – and on Wednesday with Jeremy – was that it always took me half the movie to figure out that he wasn’t somewhat mentally retarded, or playing someone who was.

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Posted on September 18, 2009

What I Watched Last Night

By Scott Buckner
Okay, you know you’ve been unemployed far too long when Judge Mathis, Judge Joe Brown, AND Cheaters start repeating themselves for, like, the 290th time since the end of April. That’s when you know it’s time to switch gears to something else, like whatever else revolves around the dial during and after the Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotbe segment of Today.
Look – I’m pretty old, so I can say without much damage to my local reputation that Kathy Lee Gifford is pretty fucking hot and well worth watching, especially since she got a new hairstyle. But still, I’m young enough – and maybe haven’t had my nesting instincts divorce-lawyered out of me yet – to appreciate WTTW’s presentation of the subtle charms of Katie Brown and her workshop, the forgotten-chick member of ABBA cooking lutefisk and whatnot on the banks of Lake Ikea, or the fuzzy-headed landscape painter dude who never noticed that 1977 and the tour bus carrying his trumpet and the Average White Band took off without him.
Which brings me to Thursday’s presentation of The Martha Stewart Show.

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Posted on September 11, 2009

What I Watched Last Night

By Scott Buckner
There’s a point during every network TV season where we’d have little problem throwing up our hands, turning our television sets into fish tanks, and joining the Amish. Or if we were really disgusted about things, become total Luddites living in cardboard refrigerator boxes in the woods next door to the Unabomber’s old hovel. I believe I’ve moved closer to that point with Fox’s More To Love, a reality-contest show about a guy built like a linebacker in search of love and happiness with a woman built like a linebacker.
In this age of political correctness, I’m not exactly sure how to address this show beyond my friend Kathy’s description of, “Holy shit! It’s chubby-chaser TV!” It’s not that there’s anything terribly wrong with giving a national TV audience to a guy like Luke Conley, a real estate developer who proclaims on the show’s promos, “If she’s got a big behind, she’s a friend of mine!” I can see how Luke might think some women might find sentiment like this endearing, but paying homage a woman’s expansive booty even in complimentary ways like this is like saying, “She really fits if she’s got big tits!”

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Posted on July 30, 2009

What I Watched Last Night

By Scott Buckner
You’d think after almost 20 years of being on for an hour at the same time every Saturday night, we’d be sick of Cops. But we’re not. Sure, copping is tough business, but I think the real reason why Cops still hasn’t worn out its welcome is because week after week, the show illuminates one enduring, immutable fact:
People are fucking stupid. And boy, do we love stupid people.

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Posted on July 28, 2009

What I Watched Last Night

By Scott Buckner
If you’ve been feeling lately like Fox has been neglecting its commitment to the verbal torture of the lazy, the clueless, and the inept, you might be happy to know that Chef Gordon Ramsay is back with a sixth season of Hell’s Kitchen, a show that had become predictable in just about every way ranging from the cheftestants themselves, the head-to-head competitions, and the stinking or menial chores the competition losers are forced to endure.
So why did unappreciative ingrates like me keep tuning in every week? For the gasket-blowin’, meat-throwin’, trash-can-kickin’, bitch-slappin’ verbal abuse nobody else on TV has tried using as a motivational tool since Gunnery Sgt. Hartman met Pvt. Leonard Lawrence and his fellow worthless maggots in Full Metal Jacket.

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Posted on July 24, 2009

What I Watched Last Night

By Scott Buckner
If I’ve learned anything about daytime network TV, it’s that an hour of Cheaters (noon, WCIU-TV 26.1) provides one of the bigger bangs for the buck you’re not spending on cable. If you tuned in last Friday, you were able to witness what was undeniably the best episode of Cheaters ever to be aired in the entire history of Cheaters because it turned into the darkest, most twisted cookie jar any married guy exposed on this show so far could possibly be caught with their hand in.

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Posted on July 13, 2009

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