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  • Lipstick Jungle Axed – Anyone Surprised?

    NBC - Lipstick Jungle
    NBC – Lipstick Jungle

    Early this morning, word spread that NBC had axed Lipstick Jungle and My Own Worst Enemy due to poor ratings. As a female who enjoyed seeing other females make the dough and get the guy, I was disappointed about Lipstick Jungle. My Own Worst Enemy? I never bothered to tune in for, even having had a HUGE crush on Christian Slater as a little girl.

    But apparently, I’m one of the few who showed up each week to find out if Victory Ford would finally hook up with Joe or if Wendy’s marriage would survive that little kiss she had. And then there was Nico the cougar with her hot little waiter, Kirby.

    So – what about you? Did you bother watching either of those shows? Surprised at the news? Any other shows you fear might ‘get the ax’?

  • House Keeps Us Coming Back

    Sure People magazine called Hugh Laurie one of the world’s sexiest men. And yes, millions of women tune in each week to catch a glimpse of the smoldering curmudgeon. But Fox Network’s House is a delight for the eyes in more ways than watching beautiful doctors heal the sick and play god. One of my favorite reasons to watch House is the artistic camera shots and special effects, making it more than just a TV show, elevating it to the artful.

    Last night’s episode (#507, The Itch) opened with the weaving and bobbing of the camera, which persisted on and off throughout the show, depicting the confusion, inner turmoil and disorientation of the agoraphobic patient that forced House to move his surgical team offsite. This move to an offsite location is yet another way the writers try to shake things up for viewers. We know the basic formula for every House show. Patient gets sick with some mysterious disease. House and Co. make a few erroneous guesses and the patient alternates between getting better and getting worse. Then, finally inspiration hits House. He pieces together the mystery, the patient is cured and House saves the day. If, week in and week out this was all to be enjoyed in House, things would get boring quick. But House is driven by its characters and our desire to see him interact with his staff, Cuddy and Wilson, not to see a patient cured each week.

    In this, the producers, directors and writers get it right. Mix up the basic formula but pull us in each week to see House struggle with his own demons, terrorize and abuse people and conflict with his inner teddy bear. And it doesn’t hurt that he is so darn adorable to watch struggling, either.

  • 30 Rock: Missed opportunities

    30 Rock came back last week but felt a bit off. It was madcap and witty, clever and bright, but I thought too much of the episode was bookkeeping, trying to get everything back into balance. With Jack’s departure from GE at the end of last season, the world was shaken up. The writers could have pretended it never happened and started out this season back at status quo, but made the more interesting choice.

    Then they spent all of one episode resolving it.

    Why, why put Jack at the bottom of the ladder if the writers weren’t going to do anything with it?

    What I would have liked to have seen, and what I believe would have been a richer vein of comedy for Jack, is a three-episode B-story arc seeing Jack’s meteoric rise from mail room to boardroom. Something a little like this…

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  • Pushing Daisies: “Dim Sum Lose Some”

    Barack Obama secured the votes of every fan of Pushing Daisies the moment he declined ABC’s offer of airtime for the Obama Half-Hour Flower Power Variety Hoe Down. Although I don’t know if the twenty or thirty of us still watching this marvelous little exercise in quirkiness are enough for him to be picking china patterns just yet. Speaking of china patterns…

    One of the small pleasures of this show is seeing how the vivid palettes are manifested in costume and set decisions. I normally wouldn’t gush about a cowboy shirt or an earth tone sweater, but look in the image above how Ned’s shirt ties in the red lacquered finishes of the restaurant, Chuck’s dress, and even the fan in her hair. Note how the two-tone sweater Emerson’s wearing picks up the beige and goldleaf accents on the walls behind them and the pattern on Chuck’s dress. Think back to earlier in the episode when Chuck wore a bright red coat.

    Every detail is carefully considered, right down to the Chai Emerson’s wearing with around his neck.

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  • Homer J. is one suave bastard

    “We” love Mad Men so much around here that “we’re” going to post this bit of Simpson-y goodness for y’all. From next week’s “Treehouse of Horror XIX”.

  • Mad Men: “Meditations on an Emergency”

    Like a nautilus shell, we’ve spiraled out over 13 episodes, but finally circled back on ourselves, bigger, stronger, and more beautiful than before.

    No, let’s try this instead. Matthew Weiner is composing and conducting a symphony, each of the players his instruments. As it is a modern symphony, he is unrestrained in choosing his instrumentation. Representing tradition, Roger and Bert are his woodwind section: Roger a high, melodic, occasionally erratic oboe and Bert a reliable, confident bassoon. The junior admen – Paul, Harry, and Ken – are a chorus of brass. Sal, poor sweet Sal, picks out a simple line on the tenor sax, unaware of the world of opportunities open to him if only he were to play with soul.

    Peggy and Betty are dueling cellos. Each can be bright and lively and each can tear apart the heart of the men in their lives.

    Pete, as tone deaf and tuneless a man as ever there was, beats out a rhythm on the drums. While he lacks subtlety, his timing is solid and he pounds out a beat consistently.

    Don, he is the pianoforte. The most versatile of traditional instruments, he is percussion and string, rhythm and melody.

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  • Jon Hamm hosts SNL


    Jon Hamm hosted the old warhorse SNL last night and I didn’t know what to expect. As expected, there was a lame Mad Men sketch, made only barely palatable by the presence of Elizabeth Moss and John Slattery, but whether Hamm could do comedy or not was up in the air. Plus, with Amy Poehler on the verge of dropping Will Arnett’s love bundle…

    Oh, she dropped. ((I’ve got Saturday Night Live Poehler-Arnett in the babyname pool.)) With musical guest Coldplay, that sadly meant more faux-angsty music so gay that it makes me feel like a red-stater when I jam out to West Side Story. But they had to do something to plug up Amy’s crack.

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  • Pushing Daisies: “Frescorts”

    Sorry he was unable to write a review for the previous episode, the Blog Maker made a silent vow never to miss one again.

    Yeah, really. Sorry ’bout that. For the tens of you who come by, here’s my drive-by of last week: at first it seems incredibly bold to dispense with all the Lily-is-your-mother NUNsense in the third episode of season two, until you realize it was probably slated to go down late in the strike-shortened season one. But it’s out there and it’s now time for Olive and Chuck to figure out their friendship.

    Which, I might add, is a lot easier when you’re not stuck in a locker with someone who uses freesia hair detangler.

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  • ‘Charlie Jade’ recap: ‘Ouroboros’

    Charlie told me once, everybody breaks. But he never did. Not once. – Karl Lubinsky

    And so the story of Charlie Jade, a story one half-hour in the future, comes to a close. A bittersweet ending for sure – there was a lot of story left to tell – but a satisfying end to twenty hours of mystery and intrigue. But before we get started breaking it down, I’m going to suggest you go back and watch it again. Trust me when I tell you: even if you think you followed the episode, you didn’t. In fact, if you think you got it the first time through, you *really* didn’t. Go watch again. I’ll wait.

    There you go. Now, you should be ready for this discussion. At least I hope it all made more sense the second time through. If not, you may want to try out the episode commentary at Charliejade.net. In particular, did you notice at the halfway mark that time was bent back on itself? Every moment with Charlie takes place after he’s entered linkspace, trying to remember what it is he is supposed to do. Scenes without Charlie occur before that, in the reference frame of the other players.

    Let’s dig in.

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  • Mad Men: “The Mountain King”

    Don has nearly come through the other side of the hero’s quest. Last week’s sojourn to the desert saw him tempted by worldly pleasures which he tasted but did not succumb to. In the end, his fever broke and he sought out the one person who could guide him back onto the right path.

    Turns out everyone was right guessing who Don called. It was a former wife (sort of) and it was the Real Don Draper’s™ wife. It was the woman in the used car dealership and it was another pretty blond. It was his savior and his mother.

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