By Scott Buckner

There’s a point in the Christmas-time film Trading Places where Billy Ray Valentine turns to Louis Winthorp III and says, “You know, it occurs to me that the best way you hurt rich people is by turning them into poor people.” That’s sort of the idea behind each hour-long episode of Fox-TV’s new reality-based program, The Secret Millionaire, which premiered this week with back-to-back episodes
I say it’s sort of the idea because here the rich people get turned into poor people on purpose. And after a week, they get turned back into rich people.

Read More

Posted on December 5, 2008

By Scott Buckner

I’m not sure what anyone might say about a local TV station that promotes a music awards show that already happened a month ago. But those folks might say WPWR-TV/Channel 50’s Wednesday night presentation of the World Magic Awards came as close to bitchin’ entertainment as bitchin’ entertainment gets since Lawrence Welk isn’t around to kick it out anymore.

Read More

Posted on December 1, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

Readers may have noticed that I have a strange fascination with The Hills. Watching last night’s episode, I was struck once again by the odd fact that I actually sort of like Lauren Conrad, who isn’t at all someone I normally would befriend or choose to spend time with at all. But – and yes, I realize this is a TV show and she’s been edited into a character – she seems well-grounded (especially compared to everyone else on the show, with the possible exception of wise Whitney) and . . . she has integrity.
At least this is my theory. Lauren has standards. She’s not mean or manipulative like those around here, but those around her being the kind of people they are, well, they tend to let her down. Will any friend be true to Lauren?
That friggin’ Audrina.

Read More

Posted on November 25, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

Often I spend at least a certain portion of my Saturdays watching really bad TV – as opposed to the slightly bad TV I watch during the week. One difference is that I often watch retread movies on Saturdays that I never ventured out to the theater to see in their day – and never would have even if I had the chance. It’s a way to numb my brain over the weekend – sort of like alcohol.
So that’s how I found myself watching Patch Adams and The Break-Up within hours of each other. Go ahead, make fun of me. I don’t have much of a defense. Both movies were pretty bad. At the same time, both movies could’ve worked. Let’s take a look.

Read More

Posted on November 17, 2008

By Scott Buckner

After years of searching, I’ve finally discovered the location of the top-secret farm that grows the world’s crop of smokin’-hot pole-dancing strippers and tavern beer-poster models. It’s Telemundo’s hour-long music video dance party Descontrol, airing Saturdays at noon on our city’s very own WSNS-TV/Channel 44.
If American farming techniques were this good, we’d have ears of corn the size of train locomotives.

Read More

Posted on September 15, 2008

By Scott Buckner

For years, I thought that one of this country’s major exports to Third World nations was championship T-shirts printed for losing sports teams. This is how we end up with all those photos of children from countries ravaged by war, cyclones, or abject poverty who will grow up believing the Chicago Bears won Super Bowl XLI. But thanks to last Saturday afternoon’s segment of The Woodwright’s Shop on Chicago’s WYCC-TV/Channel 20, I learned that an even more humanitarian American export is technology that hasn’t been used since George Armstrong Custer was recruited to make Montana the happiest place on earth by killing every Native American in sight.
Every weekend, Woodwright and cheerful host Roy Underhill celebrate the world of hand tools and construction methods using those tools popular among our settler ancestors when they weren’t too busy with other popular activities of the day, like dropping dead from cholera. Basically, Roy and Woodwright is what Norm Abrams and This Old House would be if nobody ever bothered to discover electricity. Sure, Roy looks Howdy Doody-ish in his tweed cabbie hat and suspenders. Sure, some of his guests can be a lot like those socially off-kilter railroad buffs able to recite the arrival and departure schedule for every train in the history of the Monon Railroad. But believe me, when the planet is a smoking cinder on Armageddon Day and the rest of us are worrying about how we’re going to survive without cell phones and Internet porn, Roy’s going to be the only guy around able to build a two-seat outhouse without even using nails.

Read More

Posted on September 9, 2008

By Scott Buckner

As the late Bernie Mac might say: Go ahead, America. Spend a 10-day vacation with nowhere to go, nothing to do, no money to do it with, and nobody to spend it with except plain old local TV from stupid-ass rabbit ears antennae that only works when you hang it off a nail next to the window. Even then, you still never get Channel 2. Kids today don’t know TV hardship until they have to flip the channel with a pair of pliers because the selector dial disappeared.
But old-school’s luster only goes so far, so sooner or later, you start forming opinions about daytime TV that have nothing to do with Jerry Springer. This is especially true if you somehow manage to avoid a single encounter with Jerry Springer without having to rent anything from Blockbuster or bend over and grab your ankles for what Comcast charges these days for basic cable.

Read More

Posted on September 3, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

I don’t think I have to remind readers how much I detest My Boys – okay, maybe I do, see the Kill Me Now Again item – but it’s back and it’s as bad as ever. And no, I’m not just thrilled to hear our teeny tiny burg mentioned on, gadzooks, TV! Oh my God, they mentioned the Billy Goat!
Last night’s season debut was a typical mish-mash of underdeveloped story lines (PJ’s here-and-gone-again attraction to Bobby; what happens when a bar regular sleeps with, in the show’s words, a cocktail waitress, though who would use such a term at a bar like – talk about trying too hard – “Crowley’s”?); underdrawn characters (can these guys get any more single-dimensional?), stale dialogue (“Enquiring minds want to know!”) and inane overexertion (er, um, a Chicago radio jock who wants to play “alternative” music and wears a different band’s t-shirt in every scene? Please.)

Believe me, the sneak preview is far better than the actual show. I mean, the sneak preview isn’t bad. But trust me, it goes very far downhill from there.

Read More

Posted on June 13, 2008

By Kathryn Ware

This installment of “What I Watched Last Night” should really be called “What I Didn’t Watch Last Night But Recorded on My DVR to Watch Sometime in the Next Few Years.” Yes, that’s right, years. There are programs recorded on my digital video recorder (DVR) that date back to the spring of 2005. Allow me to explain.
I live in a household of three distinct TV-watching personalities. If the three of us were to be illustrated by a Venn diagram, the littlest segment at dead center, where the three circles meet, would represent the sole regularly recorded program we all have in common: The Office. A slightly larger fraction of the recorded programs are enjoyed by a pair of us, but definitely not by the third. And the lion’s share of the DVR is taken up by a wildly divergent hodge-podge culled from all that our Comcast cable provider has to offer, recorded for individual viewing.
Our DVR is a constant juggling act of disc space and couch time. We’re forever flirting with the 100% maximum capacity mark, which for us represents dual tuners packing 120 GB of storage – that’s 60 hours of standard or 15 hours of HD programming. Some of us watch our shows promptly and remove them immediately. One of us likes to record everything in HD and why not? It looks great. The trouble with that is it makes for a heck of a lot of TV to keep up with on a weekly basis. With space at a premium, there’s no luxury of rolling over into the next week. You’ve got to keep up. We have our priorities.
And then, there’s a member of the household who if given a DVR quadruple the size of our current recorder could max it out in less than two weeks. There are movies in cold storage on the DVR that have been waiting for years to be recorded off onto the VCR, that ancient technology once held so dear and now gathering dust. As slick a set-up as we have (including a Sony PlayStation that we use to watch beautiful, vivid Blu-ray DVDs with visuals and sound even better than our beloved HD) we can’t manage to get the DVR and the VCR to communicate. I think it’s the VCR’s way of getting back at us for dumping it years ago.
So, I thought it might be fun to spin back through time to see just what’s archived on the most popular appliance in my house. This reverse chronological list clearly highlights the split personality currently residing on my DVR:

Read More

Posted on June 6, 2008

By Scott Buckner

For a brief moment Wednesday night, I thought about tuning into American Idol on Fox, but I would have just spent the hour planning an Internet petition drive supporting the euthanasia of Paula Abdul. A worthwhile project indeed, but something like that involves far more effort than I’m interested in. So I went with Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed, a show which manages to magically return from the dead from time to time on lower-budget stations like WPWR/Channel 50.
As the program demonstrated, the ingenuity involved in pulling off some of magic’s more amazing illusions can be incredibly simple, so it’s no wonder why the magician community abides by the same code of silence still held sacred by tradition-minded cops and members of organized crime. That’s why Magic’s Biggest Secrets is hosted by someone known only as The Masked Magician, an individual clad in black and a full-head latex mask to hide his (or her) true identity. What might drive a magician to the depths of personal discontent responsible for Magic’s Biggest Secrets is less a mystery than what might drive a magician to show up in a Creature from the Black Lagoon mask that even Ed Wood would consider cheap and tawdry. When Mexican lucha libre wrestlers stuffed sausage-like into spandex go investing more thought into wardrobe, there are some things even Ed Wood would be justified bitching about.
Yet, it probably hasn’t occurred to the magician community that even if Jesus Himself showed up on a rerun-heavy commercial channel like WPWR directly opposite American Idol to give away the secret of turning piss into gold, the secret would still be safe from the world. (Then again, Jesus never went around sawing women in half or skewering them with big Knights of Columbus swords without a single drop of blood turning up on the blade, so there.)

Read More

Posted on April 24, 2008