What’s coming out of the idiot box.
American Idol keeps happening and I seem powerless to prevent it. It has become an eternal force of torment in my life, like gravity and speed humps. I try to extricate myself from its clutches but it drags me down again and again. It has happened for three hours so …
Hello again, hopeless Idol junkies! We’ve finally reached the brutal and systematic destruction of the human spirit that is the Hollywood round, which means that soon, praise be to Allah, I will only be recapping this show once per week. I know there’s the results show to contend with, but …
It’s the last audition round before we move on to Hollywood, and thank God for it. Speaking of God, this evening’s show comes to us from Oklahoma City, where Texas goes to die; the hopefuls are lined up by 5:18 AM, because there is nothing else to do there. The …
Oh, boy! Tonight is the San Antonio episode, and because I have psychic powers, I predict: (a) Alamo (b) Riverwalk (c) those giant boots at North Star Mall (d) cracks about how everything is bigger in Texas, possibly accompanying footage of a fat guy. Sure enough, all these things come …
This evening poised quite a theological conundrum. On the one hand, American Idol is only an hour long, which seems to be evidence that God loves me and wants me to be happy. On the other hand, the reason American Idol is only an hour long is that Glee is …
Tonight promises to be a volatile episode of American Idol, if that combination of words makes sense in the English language, because this is the infamous Nicki Minaj Meltdown audition. Yes, we’re stranded in Charlotte-town, North Kakalaka, home of the North American Car Racing Car Sports Car Association. You can …
Last night’s Idol premiere took place in New York, and for me, it didn’t illicit much in the way of sympathy. It was filmed too long ago to get any endearing post-Sandy sob stories, so my overall impression was one of schadenfreude whenever someone would get sent packing: yeah! Take …
Oh, my dearests. If I told you how excited I was about the season premiere of American Idol, would you think less of me? If I told you that I plan on blogging about it for the rest of the season, would you stop reading this site? If I said …
On July 12 of 1990, an hour-long comedy-drama created by Josh Brand and John Falsey debuted on CBS. Entitled Northern Exposure, it followed the humorous fish-out-of-water encounters with rural Alaskan culture of New York doctor Joel Fleischmann, as portrayed by Rob Morrow at the beginning and the end of a promising …
The recent cultural fisticuffs over Amanda Palmer’s initial decision to hire local musicians to play for her in exchange for the non-negotiable instruments of “beer and hugs” has rippled far beyond Palmer herself, becoming a talking point in a larger conversation about what it means to be an artist in …
It’s a new fall season on the television machine, and thanks to exciting new advances in Internet technology and desperate marketing ploys, we’re now able to see the new offerings from the networks weeks before they air. And that’s good, because it means if you plan your time wisely like …
The Booth at the End is a lonely little animal, tucked away in Hulu’s menagerie of “search all” television along with Korean retail soap operas, low-rent British dramas too crass for the BBC, and reruns of American shows nobody wanted to watch in the first place. It was originally produced …
Born: 1969. The book: 1921. The movie: 1946. The music: 1984. The moment: 1871. The look: 1988. The food: 1929. The drink: 1825. The car: 1974. The drive: 1934. The show: 2002. The obsession: 1939. The game: 2000. The country: 1776. The dream: 1968. The art: 1884. The leader: 1932. …
1. Highly controversial choice meant to enrage readers, thus drawing lots of links and hits 2. Conventional but ‘artsy’ choice to prove aesthetic credentials 3. Completely ordinary choice that is actually the thing you like best, but you put it third so as not to seem obvious 4. Another completely …
It continues to amaze me every day how completely and thoroughly we fail to understand our own culture. It’s especially baffling considering that this country, really, only has pop culture going for it; having given up on the Supermanly troika of truth, justice, and the American Way, and having shipped …
