Author Archives: Allison Lips
Cool TV Video of the Day: Jimmy Fallon’s Rom Bomb Video Vlog Blog
The Rom Bomb Video Vlog Blog is a fantastic parody of an out of touch person trying to sound hip, which in this case is Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. In the video, Jimmy Fallon shows off his ability to do great impressions.
Weekly TV Update: September 3
Seth MacFarlane
Why was Jersey Shore canceled? Entertainment Weekly has the lowdown.
Randy Jackson, who is American Idol‘s only original judge left, may have his role reduced to mentor.
After Utah’s NBC affiliate refused to air The New Normal, KUCW, the state’s CW affiliate, agreed to pick up the show.
FX orders 90 more episodes of Charlie Sheen’s Anger Management.
Seth MacFarlane will host the 38th season premiere of Saturday Night Live.
“The New Normal” Embraces Stereotypes
This review is not meant to incite a political debate. It is based solely on the quality of the show, not on the politics behind it.
Depending on your point of view, The New Normal is either novel or controversial, which is to be expected since the show features a surrogate mother having a gay couple’s child. However, novelty and controversy cannot carry a show that lacks quality. If the rest of the series is like the pilot, The New Normal will get old fast because the show embraces the stereotypes its creators, Ryan Murphy and Ali Adler, intend to dispel.
The New Normal‘s pilot episode opens with Bryan Collins making a video for his unborn child. A few seconds into the video, Bryan realizes he is getting ahead of himself, since no one knows how he came to the decision to have a child with his partner, David Murray. The majority of the pilot is spent providing the audience backstory through a flashback.
Cool TV Video of the Day: Late Night with Conan O’Brien’s “You Have Wronged Me!”
Conan O’Brien doesn’t realize the injustice his breakfast has done to a man dressed like Edgar Allan Poe. You can watch the absurd situation below.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqA6ph2aNv8%5DCool TV Video of the Day: Kimmel Mocks Leno To His Face
It’s no secret that Jimmy Kimmel hates Jay Leno. Kimmel takes every opportunity he gets to crack jokes about Leno, which surely will not change now that Kimmel will be in direct competition with the Tonight Show. Since Kimmel has been talking about Leno a lot lately, let’s take a look at Jimmy Kimmel on The Jay Leno Show segment “10 at 10”.
Cool TV Video of the Day: Max Headroom Incident
Warning: Today’s video is more like Creepy TV Video of the Day. Despite 25 years passing, The Max Headroom incident is still very unsettling.
In 1987, someone dressed as the 80s television character Max Headroom hijacked the signal of two Chicago television stations, WGN and WTTW. The first incident took place during the sports segment of WGN’s The Nine O’Clock News. WGN’s engineers were able to cut the hijacker’s broadcast short by switching the stations signal to a backup transmitter. A few hours later, the hijackers successfully took over WTTW’s signal for 90 seconds. The PBS affiliate’s engineers tried to stop the intrusion into the Doctor Who episode “Horror of Fang Rock,” but the hijacker’s broadcast was over by the time they started looking into it.
The video below is from the second hijacking.
The Cliched “Ben and Kate”
Ben and Kate is one of those shows that has been done in one form or another a million times. Kate is the responsible sister and single mother, who has settled down with her daughter to live as normal a life as possible. Ben is her annoying brother, who has never grown up and always arrives at Kate’s house unannounced with a problem. The dynamic is not original, but that does not mean the show has to be completely clichéd. The pilot episode seems to forget that even unoriginal concepts can be done in an original way. Anyone who has ever sat through more than one sitcom will be able to spot the obvious jokes before they come out of the characters’ mouths.
The pilot of Ben and Kate starts with a prologue from Kate’s point of view. It basically says what the audience picks up in the first 5 minutes: Kate grew up too fast because she got pregnant at a young age, whereas her brother never grew up and always ruins anything remotely adult. There are times when Ben acts less mature than Kate’s 5-year-old daughter, Maddie.
Kate and her British female friend, BJ, work at Buddy’s Bar & Grill, which is also the place Ben and his friend Tommy hang out. The bar seems to exist solely as a place to set up overdone jokes. Kate walks around wearing a fanny pack, which the guys and BJ hate. This results in a nasty, yet playful, exchange of insults between BJ and Kate. BJ asks her friend, “Do you know what fanny means in my country?” Kate retorts, “Do you know what BJ means in my country?” To which BJ just responds, “Very well, very well, indeed.” Once the girls are away from the boys, Kate refers to her desire to have sex with her boyfriend George as having “the sex” and says guys want to do her all the time. Of course, BJ feels the need to point out they are not going to have sex if Kate keeps on calling it “the sex.”
Weekly TV Update: August 27
NBC’s Utah affliate KSL refuses to carry The New Normal.
Last Thursday, Jerry Nelson died at 78 years old. He was the voice of the Count on Sesame Street.
Dancing With the Stars viewers have chosen Sabrina Bryan to be the 13th contestant on that show’s all-star season.
Anthony Bourdain, host of the Travel Channel’s No Reservations, will take his show to CNN after its upcoming season is over.
The former voice of Dora the Explorer, Caitlin Sanchez, attempts to sue Nickelodeon again because she says her lawyer committed fraud. In the original lawsuit, Sanchez claims she was fired for hitting puberty.
More Tribune Stations Go Dark on Cablevison
WGN America and Fox affiliate WTIC in Hartford, Connecticut, two channels previously unaffected by Tribune’s dispute with Cablevision, have gone dark. With the addition of WGN America and WTIC, Cablevision has now lost a total of 6 Tribune stations.
According to Cablevision, 50,000 Cablevision customers’ sole source of Fox programming was WTIC. However, the majority of Connecticut customers still receive New York City’s Fox affliate, WNYW.
Since August 17, Cablevision customers in various parts of the country have been unable to watch WPIX in New York, WPHL in Philadelphia, KWGN in Denver, and WCCT in Connecticut. The former two stations are My Network affiliates, while the latter two are affiliates of the CW. In addition to the main channels, Cablevision customers in the New York City and Philadelphia areas lost Antenna TV.
Cool TV Video of the Day: The Theme to the Poor Man’s Gilligan’s Island
No one thinks Gilligan’s Island was a brilliant television show, so it may come as a surprise that it has a sister show called It’s About Time. Sherwood Schwartz created and produced both shows. The two shows also share similar fish out of water scenarios and expository theme songs. However, It’s About Time lasted only 26 episodes and was soon forgotten because it was repetitive and hard to watch, whereas Gilligan went on to become iconic. Instead of explaining the premise of It’s About Time, since it is all right their in the show’s lyrics, I’ll just let you have a listen.
The lyrics are after the jump.
Wait! What's A Dial? 