chef service
Anyone else get a sense that they had the chefs serving as a benefit for the diners? $100/plate benefit for foodies, people like to see the chefs.

He didn't have a spare set of keys because it wasn't his car. He was leasing/renting/borrowing it for the Grammy weekend. (ugh, the details one remembers)

So no one should make movies of book series? Or they should try to cram thousands of pages into one movie? Because I'm not sure anyone would have been happy with LotR in one movie.

leonard part VI
But shouldn't we be differentiating between sequels that are parts of a continuing story and those that aren't? Is the Harry Potter movie really a sequel when it's made from a different book? Or the third Lord of the Rings movie? Or heck, even the second and third Bourne movies?

I honestly think that what USA show you prefer has more to do with your own personal bulletproof kinks than the actual relative quality of any of the shows. I love White Collar, my roommate loves Burn Notice, friends love Psych or Covert Affairs and it seems to be all about what scratches your itch.

i feel prescient now
ha, VanDerWerff, no wonder you were defending PBS in the other thread. You mention something I really love about PBS: the embrace of the internet. They stream a ton of stuff, probably at least in part because they don't have a lot of control over when their affiliates air the shows. And the…

unsurprised
I caught the "Game Show" ep of this on the digital cable PBS station that shows nothing but docs and Nova, and it was truly terrible. Sped right past the 50s scandals without giving any context or even pausing long enough to talk about them—and since most of those people are dead I'm not sure why they…

oh google ads
On my Googlereader this article was accompanied by a video ad for the Church of Scientology! So Haggis, foiled already!

That was the best interpretive dance on the Oscars, ever. And that's saying a lot.

I know, right? Other years they've had token nonwhite folks among the crowd, but they always get kicked off before the end anyway. All of the bachelors and bachelorettes have been white, but given the recent pattern of taking a popular but losing contestant and making them the next season's bachelor/bachelorette I…

And I think the reason Trista and Ryan stayed together is that Trista didn't go for a TV career, but moved off to Aspen.

not all the good xmas songs are religious
The other big treasure trove of Christmas songs were written just before or during WWII and they all have that melancholy at the heart of them. White Christmas can get treacly, but the verse is all about being far from home, hence the dreaming. I'll Be Home for Christmas,…

I think it's Ted's dad's wedding. I doubt that either Barney or Robin would have "To every thing there is a season" on a church for their wedding; I'm not sure they'd even get married in a church. But Ted's dad totally would. Also the ep was about Marshall and his dad and then Lily got Barney talking about his own…

mystery boxes and nice girls
The Masters challenge might have been the inspiration but it was hugely different. They each shopped for someone else's box, got the box all at once, and then that was the elimination challenge. I remember thinking as they showed it that they could never do the challenge that way for…

but the riff raff pays the bills
Isn't boxing actually a bigger subscription driver for HBO than any of the series? That's what I'd always heard, anyway. It is higher rated, though live v constantly replayed on several different channels and also available ondemand isn't a fair comparison.

I'm thinking my love of Lampkin, for he was one of the very few characters I did love, is just another bit of proof that BSG was basically the opposite of everything I want in a television show.

totally CBS
The Good Wife is actually a pretty solid show, so it isn't that so much as this kind of bullshit has Les Moonves written all over it.

yay it's back!
I don't think that every show needs to have recaps here, personally. There really isn't a lot to White Collar, which is one of the reasons I like it. Plenty of other shows on TV are perfectly willing to artfully rip my heart out and keep me anxious about who's going to die this week. Shows like White…

out of order
I wish it was more widely known that the last two episodes were supposed to be switched, and that Fox decided they wanted the Gaga episode to appear (1) during sweeps and (2) after the American Idol final performances. That's a large part of why this week felt so weird and why the story arc feels…

I'm pretty sure Dominick Dunne was in last year's reel.