July 16, 2008 1:37

TV Tonight: Project Runway Retur—Hey, Look at This Shiny Object!

A dandified Austin Scarlett and Tim Gunn launch (shhh!) PR's fifth season. / Bravo Photo: Barbara Nitke

Tonight, Project Runway fans welcome back the fashion reality show despite the underwhelming publicity efforts of Bravo, which no one can prove had anything to do with the fact that next season, the series will belong to Lifetime. Production schedules, the network said, were the reason no advance screeners were sent to critics this time around, and that Bravo didn't even announce this season's contestants until two days before the show debuted.

Now today, just coincidentally, comes word that Bravo has managed to scrape together a list of participants in the next season of Top Design, which doesn't debut until September. Details after the jump. (Have you forgotten about Project Runway yet? No? What if I tell you I have pictures of Brangelina's babies? Would that do it?)

July 16, 2008 10:45

Dr. Horrible: This Is So Going In My Blog!

I finally managed to pay my $3.99 on iTunes to subscribe to the three parts of Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, and I have just one question: $howmuch.99 would we have to pay to get Whedon and company to keep making this show forever?

I'm as big a Whedon fan as anyone (OK, probably not strictly true), but I went into part 1 of Dr. Horrible with modest expectations. Instead, I'm delighted and heartbroken: delighted because this is the funniest thing I expect to see on any video screen this year, heartbroken because, between Neil Patrick Harris' commitment to HIMYM and Whedon's to Dollhouse, it's unlikely this will be anything more than a one-off.

July 16, 2008 9:45

JibJab: Meet the Real Enemy

With all the noise this week about offensive political satire, and the dearth thereof, we should not lose sight of the worst satire of all: pointless, middle-of-the-road, lowest-common-denominator, little-something-for-everybody skewering. Fortunately, we have JibJab to remind us of that, as Mark Russell's Internet little siblings have released another song parody that's not quite edgy enough for an NPR pledge drive:

JibJab - Time for Some Campaignin'

The daring message of the video: There's an election going on! Beyond that, well... McCain is old, Obama talks about "Change" a lot—and there's a 1998 surplus Clinton cigar joke thrown in for nostalgia's sake. (Although I will admit that the Obama rainbows-and-unicorns visual is pretty clever.)

These are the stakes in this election. Never forget it!

July 16, 2008 8:57

TCA Roundup: Far-Reaching FX

* Fox turns over its remaining time on the TCA stage to sibling network FX, which announces that Nip/Tuck will end after an even 100 episodes, while It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia will be on long after Philadelphia is run by the cockroaches. And it introduces human-lab-rat comedy Testees. Pronounced just like you think.

* Fox chief Peter Liguori gets sci-fi with Maureen Ryan, talking Dollhouse, Ron Moore's Virtuality project and other matters geek.

* However, Fox News neglected to mention in its session the other day that Brit Hume is stepping down after the election, leaving a vacancy at the evening anchor desk. Shep-ard Smith! Shep-ard Smith!

July 15, 2008 4:58

Yes, I Am Aware

...that Joss Whedon's online musical / keep-busy-during-the-strike project, Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog, has launched. And at some point if it ever manages to load on my computer, I may even write about it at some point. In the meantime, feel free to check out the YouTube channel, check its availability on iTunes, or just keep hitting Refresh like me.

July 15, 2008 4:37

TV Tonight: The Cleaner

On deadline today, so I haven't had time to write up A&E;'s The Cleaner, with Benjamin Bratt. But trust me, the less I write about this baby the happier everyone will be. An overwrought drama about a man who helps addicts get straight as part of a deal with God, it's part Intervention, part Saving Grace, part every basic-cable summer drama that's not quite dark enough to be interesting. (Actually, I don't want to insult Intervention, a gripping reality show which is much more worth your A&E; time. Saving Grace I care less about insulting, though I have not yet gotten around to seeing if Grace busted a cap in that dirty old priest on the season 2 premiere.) Bratt's entire performance seems to involve putting on and taking off dark glasses, acting dark and tortured and generally sounding as if he thinks he's in a Western.

Check out The Cleaner if you want and report back, but it's certainly not habit-forming.

July 15, 2008 10:57

Where's the Green on This Plate?

PLANET GREEN

One of the shows I was most looking forward to on Discovery's new Planet Green network was Emeril Green. Not because I'm a huge fan of Emeril Lagasse—actually, I liked his original cooking show, The Essence of Emeril, but then Food Network turned him into a catchphrase-shouting gastrotainer. Still, the guy knows his stuff, people like to watch him, and food is the area of life in which people become most intimately involved with the environment. Through food, you literally take in the outside world, and whether you're concerned about internal effects (what pesticides are doing to your body) or external ones (what factory farming is doing to the ecosystem), eating is the perfect subject for an environmental show. You are what you eat, and you inhabit it as well.

So I watched Planet Green's marathon debut of Emeril Green to see what kind of information it would offer about food and the environment. Maybe it would explain a little something about what types of seafood are being overfished and which are more sustainable? Look at the importance of eating locally vs. eating organic food from far away? Talk about the amount of petroleum involved in big agriculture? Or the health benefits of organic veggies and grass-fed beef?

Not so much.

July 15, 2008 9:47

The Obama Comedy Deficit

If there's a single emerging slogan that sums up Campaign 2008, it would have to be: That's not funny! The much-discussed controversy over the New Yorker Obama-as-jihadi cover is only the latest example. [Update: If you can read one more take on it, I highly recommend my former Salon colleague Gary Kamiya, who nails it.] There have been controversies over Bernie Mac's jokes at an Obama event; Randi Rhodes' and Penn Jillette's jokes about Hillary Clinton; Senate candidate Al Franken's years-old Andy-Rooney-as-rapist jokes from his SNL days; John McCain's "Bomb Iran" riff. Left, right and center, the entire body politic is united in its desire to make a mountain out of a droll hill.*

Today's New York Times follows up on the Obama-cover story by asking the implicit question: why in the world did it take the freaking New Yorker to make a controversial joke about Obama? Answer: because TV comics are falling down on the job! Bill Carter surveys the landscape of late-night comedy and gets several high-profile comics to admit that they haven't really figured out how to make fun of Obama yet, and are frankly a little nervous about it. Largely for pretty much the reason you'd guess: "There has been little humor about Mr. Obama: about his age, his speaking ability, his intelligence, his family, his physique. And within a late-night landscape dominated by white hosts, white writers, and overwhelmingly white audiences, there has been almost none about his race."

Dave Chappelle, come back! Your country needs you!

* I make an exception, of course, for whichever example above offended you or your preferred candidate personally. That joke was totally beyond the pale, and it was not funny at all.

July 15, 2008 8:28

TCA Roundup: Fox Hunting

* Fox News meets the press, and things get testy. Or it's practically a lovefest. Either way, FNC trots out Karl Rove, and someone has the poor manners to ask why he's talking to TV critics and not testifying before Congress.

* Fox the entertainment channel announces that creators will have two chances a year, not just one, to pitch shows about hooking up people to lie detectors.

* Cleveland Brown, a black guy voiced by a white guy, gets a white neighbor voiced by a black guy. We have truly entered a postracial society, those of us who live in cartoons.

* Don't you wish the commercial breaks in your favorite shows were six or eight minutes shorter? If you're J.J. Abrams, you can just demand it.

July 14, 2008 4:14

JPTV: Aging Out of the Demo

Recent photograph of the author. / FOX

Age ain't nothing but a number. A number that inexorably grows larger, bringing you ever closer to your death, but a number nonetheless.

If the recent nostalgia posts about Liz Phair and the Brothers Krofft were not enough of a hint, I turned 40 over the weekend. I have therefore revised my worldview to reflect the following: