By Steve Rhodes

I don’t know which was more depressing, watching the hopelessly far-gone alcoholic on Intervention hiding huge bottles of discount mouth wash all over her house while babbling nonsensically to her poor husband and children, or Chris Matthews actually officially projecting Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee based on all the information available to Hardball despite the fact that a single vote has yet to be cast in a single primary. Earliest Projection Ever.
Not that I don’t have compassion for one of the subjects of my TV viewing last night: The drunk.

Read More

Posted on November 6, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Life’s tough when you’re an amnesiac. Your family and friends are complete strangers, you have no idea whether you’re one of those people who get along well with a bottle of Goldschlager, or even if you like to top off a good meal with a nut log from Stuckey’s. It’s even tougher, though, when you’re an amnesiac who begins to discover you’re a shallow, vain, pitiful excuse for a human being. But you’re pretty hot, so that kind of takes the edge off people not liking you behind your back.
That was the situation in Monday night’s premiere of Samantha Who? on ABC. It’s one of those sitcoms that’s smarter than a sitcom reasonably should be, which is why critics or viewers more accustomed to getting a pie in the face might find this show troublesome, or not even funny. In fact, I’m not sure Samantha sven ought to be called a sitcom. A fitting alternate title might be Amnesiac In The City because it shares essentially the same mood and atmosphere as a once-popular show about four women who end up spending more time talking about sex in the city than actually getting any.

Read More

Posted on October 17, 2007

By Scott Buckner

As any happily married couple or unhappily divorced single will tell you – if we actually bothered to listen anyone’s advice – the most fulfilling relationships are those where two people enjoy doing things together. Men, if you’re looking for a way to get your woman to watch Man TV with you, you may find this interesting, if not useful. Women, if you’re looking for a way to get your man to cut down on at least a half-hour of ESPN once a week, you may find this interesting, too.
Or maybe not. As Confucius might say, “Advice: Wise men don’t need it and fools don’t heed it.” Although I forgot who said it, that’s all I’ve got to say about that.
I’m not much on televised sports. So why in the world did I end up spending three hours of my Wednesday night at Coach’s Corner Tavern and Grill – indisputably the best drinking/sports-watching establishment along the Kennedy Avenue alcohol corridor in Hammond, Indiana’s Hessville neighborhood – to come up with material for this column instead of staying home and being bored shitless with rancid programs like Life and Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares?

Read More

Posted on October 11, 2007

By The Beachwood Cubs & Cormorants Affairs Desk

Apparently a slew of Cub fans are upset with the so-called bias of the TBS broadcast crew. I have one word for them: Waaaaaaaaaah! Stop crying. What you are experiencing is an actual objective call of the game, not the hometown boosterism that hides the ugly truth from your virgin ears. Isn’t that what we all used to love about Steve Stone? Not just his prescience, but his truth-telling? And you know what, even he didn’t tell you everything he knew because he was employed by the Cubs. Would you like your sportswriters to be employed by the team as well? This is an ethical farce.

Read More

Posted on October 5, 2007

By Scott Buckner

Typically, my love of televised sports doesn’t go much further than rooting for the underdog on ESPN’s The Ocho if it had an Ocho (“Yo! Last call for the “World’s Strongest Man” competition! Ten-to-one and a free bag of chips on the Eastern European with the least amount of consonants in his last name!”). However, like any other city native with an employer fairly tolerant of employees working on 45 minutes of sleep as long as they’re not in charge of heavy machinery beyond pressing an elevator button, I watched the Cubs get outclassed by the Arizona Diamondbacks last night because all in all, it was just the right thing to do.

Read More

Posted on October 4, 2007

By Scott Buckner

How do you throw an intervention for a guy who disappears for days because he’s off time traveling instead of losing track of time at the local crack house like everyone else? That was one of the conundrums posed by NBC’s Journeyman, an interesting but at times confusing series which premiered Monday night.
It’s like another NBC series, Quantum Leap, in that San Francisco reporter Dan Vassar (Kevin McKidd, looking somewhat similar to Anthony Michael Hall of USA Network’s The Dead Zone) leaps around time within his own lifetime righting past wrongs of complete strangers. It’s not like Quantum Leap in that 1) Reporter Dan doesn’t go leaping into the bodies of complete strangers, and 2) it takes far more effort on our part than is probably necessary to figure out what’s going on. When Sam Beckett went time traveling, you rarely sat there thinking, “What the fuck is this now?”

Read More

Posted on September 26, 2007

By Julia Gray

“Aren’t you a little fat to be a storm trooper?”
“Well stay here and rot you stuck up bitch!”
Upset that I still can’t do this pose in yoga, it became quite obvious that I needed a few big-time laughs. Especially after this pose caused a classmate to pass gas a little bit too close to yours truly. The season premiere of Family Guy helped put my yoga inabilities out of my mind for a bit. In its sixth season opener, Seth McFarlane and company outdid themselves once again by mocking episode IV of the Star Wars series. This episode was so chock-full of both obvious and obscure cultural references that I’ve decided to only touch on a few highlights.
The infamous opening crawl through space refers to Angelina Jolie kissing her brother and reminds Ms. Jolie that everyone saw it, including her dad, and that’s why they don’t talk anymore. “You can run away to Africa but you can’t run away from your problems.” Also, the viewers are strongly advised to rent the HBO film Gia, since Jolie is naked in it.

Read More

Posted on September 25, 2007

By Scott Buckner

If you were wondering what all that cheering was about Monday night, it was the sound of overjoyed wardens of Turkish prisons thankful for Fox-TV’s third season of Prison Break. That’s because Monday’s night’s season opener shifted the show’s inside-prison environs to Panama and the fictional Penitenciaria Federal de Sona That’s Sona Federal Penitentiary to us gringos.
Break is one of those shows I never got around to seeing during its first two seasons because of its miserable 7 p.m. Monday time slot, so I always forgot it was on. It’s a serial show like Lost and Rescue Me, so if you don’t catch it from the beginning, you won’t be able to follow a damn thing.
During the first season, Michael Scofield (Wentworth Miller) sent himself to prison specifically to spring his Death Row inmate brother Lincoln Burrows (Dominic Purcell), who had been framed for whacking the brother of the Vice President of the United States. A few other inmates went along for the ride, so the whole bunch spent the second season being hunted by FBI Special Agent Alexander Mahone (the somewhat creepy but always enjoyable William Fichtner). Lincoln was cleared of the charges, but now Scofield’s stuck in a Panamanian prison. And so is Agent Mahone. I’m not sure why (and it’s a new season so I probably don’t need to) they’re both there and how they got there, but there they are, and they really don’t think much of each other.

Read More

Posted on September 19, 2007

By Julia Gray

Reflections upon watching the U.S. Open this week.
I’ve been into tennis for years. My dad is a great player and my mom was until her pesky knee gave out and got a bionic one. Nowadays, she’s fights rudeness and bad behavior with her knee. It’s quite the sight. Two of my sisters, Liza and Catherine, are solid players, but we hardly ever played together because the bickering got to be too much for players on the surrounding courts. I grew up playing on green clay courts in the western ‘burbs, where one had to wear white tennis togs and the Wilson T2000 was the racquet to have. My dad had one, but ended up ditching it for a Wilson Jack Kramer. What was great about the clay is we could do awesome Bjorn Borg-esque slides, and get green clay everywhere. Those were the days.

Read More

Posted on September 6, 2007

By Julia Gray

Welcome to the dog days of summer. It’s hot and humid outside, friends are on vacation in exotic locales like Sturgeon Bay and there isn’t jack cheese on television. So, I’ve decided to make my own fun and dig into my vast DVD collection to see if anything catches my fancy. And what have we here? The 1976 cinematic tour de force Mother, Jugs & Speed – a cavalcade of comedy with an All-Star cast fit for the times.

Read More

Posted on August 23, 2007