Season 5 - still on Bravo!

In news that still makes my heart weep a bit, Project Runway continues its messy move over to Lifetime in spite of a lawsuit and alleged attempts by Bravo to sabotage the show. Normally this kind of change wouldn’t even register on my radar but a switch over to Lifetime is kind of a big deal. It’d be like if Fox News got their hands on Best Week Ever except, instead of constant footage of Heidi Montag and Meghan McCain eating ice cream and talking about Jesus, it’s going to be Marie Claire instead of Elle and a set of brand new producers that may or may not be smart enough to leave the show as it is. I’m sure they’ll get Suave to take over haircare.  I mean, it’s entirely possible that there will be no changes and that I’m completely overreacting – but it seems to me that the Weinstein Brothers are more interested in making a profit on what’s left of the popular reality series.

Lifetime’s Andrea Wong had this to say about the switch: “Having watercooler movies, dramas and reality shows like ‘Project Runway’ is what Lifetime Television is all about.” You know, because their movies and dramas aren’t already a complete joke. Yeah, please add one of my favorite shows to that list of garbage! Maybe instead of mentoring the designers, Tim Gunn can steal their identities and Heidi will find out that one of the contestants is really her long lost transexual brother!

Now, Bravo has so far been top notch with the shows they’ve put out so far. Top Chef and Shear Genius are both a lot of fun to watch and provide for a completely different viewing experience than most of the crap we’re force-fed these days because they all add that extra step of requiring their contestants to already be good at something. On the plus side, Sarah Jessica Parker has apparently come up with a show of her own called “American Artist” that may end up replacing Project Runway and it doesn’t sound bad at all (so long as she isn’t hosting it. Sorry, I just can’t stand to watch that woman). Hopefully it will be half as interesting as it sounds, for Bravo’s sake

As irritated by this as I am and as petty as I can be, I’ll continue to give Project Runway a chance after the move. Really, at this point, it’s just not sounding like a good idea. Maybe I’m wrong and maybe it’ll be the same show I’ve been obsessed with all these years. Still, if they kick up the drama too much, I’m gonna get mad.

Source: Variety.com

After sitting through the unbearable Bonekickers (and writing its equally boring review), I went ahead and caught up on the first season of Mad Men, probably one of the best TV shows I’ve seen to date. Mad Men takes place in the 1960’s at the fictional Sterling Cooper ad agency and mostly follows Don Draper, a ruggedly handsome advertising executive with a mysterious past. Backing him is his pretty and dutiful wife, Betty Draper, a few of his (far more interesting) mistresses, and a few of the good-old boys who are in business with him.

There isn’t much to be said about Don Draper without spoilers, so I’ll make it quick: he’s good looking, smart, has a dubious past, and I’m totally in love with him even though he cheats on his wife all the time. Like, somehow they’ve worked some sort of voodoo magic where it’s fine if he does it and sleazy when everyone else does. The real star of the show is Christina Hendricks, who plays the ridiculously sexy Joan Holloway. She is Sterling Cooper’s office manager and I’d be perfectly happy watching her read a book if it meant she got more air time. After so many years of watching Hollywood’s most beautiful women nip and tuck their inviduality away, it’s refreshing to see a woman like this on my TV screen again. Also, I’m totally going to learn how to do my hair like this before I die.

The rest of the cast is mostly comprised of a bunch of pretty average-looking fellows who are really supposed to represent the typical 1960’s American man. Unlike most of the other period dramas that I’ve seen, Mad Men is very forthcoming with the misogyny of the time without pointing it out all the time. The women mostly do their best to behave like machines and the boys are genuinely surprised (and occasionally threatened) if one of them appears to be capable of any real original thought. Visually, it is stunning. I sincerely doubt there’s a single critic out there that could possibly have a bad thing to say about it on that front. Also, there’s more drinking, smoking, and sex in one episode of the show than in my typical night out at the bar, but the show manages to pull it off without making it feel like a late-night cinemax special or The Sopranos. If I had to make one complaint, it’d be that they light up every five seconds and, as any smoker knows, that means I had to light up every five seconds.

Anyway, if you haven’t seen it yet, check it out as soon as possible. The next season starts back up tomorrow, July 27th on AMC. Click below for a few more pictures.

I have pretty mixed feelings about Brooke Hogan most of the time. On the one hand, I think it’s unfair that she gets so much shit about her appearance. On the other, if she didn’t dress like a cheap hooker and wear so much fucking makeup, perhaps people wouldn’t constantly be calling her a tranny. She has incredibly strong features and a softer look would do her a lot of good. You know, lose the fake tan, let her natural hair color come in a little. This whole bleach blonde bimbo thing isn’t for most people but it definitely isn’t for her.

But anyway, none of that is really important. What’s important is that she’s kind of an idiot. On her new show, “Brooke Knows Best,” Brooke gives Miss Teen South Carolina a run for her money when she tried to talk about something she knows very little about – politics. Watch the video for the real reason Hillary Clinton would have made a bad president. (Hint: It has nothing to do with her healthcare plan.)

Seeing as how this is hot on the heels of Heidi Montag endorsing John McCain, I just can’t wait to see who’ll throw in their two cents next. Kim Kardashian? Paris Hilton? Maybe Tila Tequila will surprise us all by writing a deep poem about how she really wanted to vote for Kucinich but she was betrayed yet again.

Bonekickers is a brand new BBC drama about a team of archaeologists that apparently live on some alternate universe where people care enough about what they do that they constantly want to kill them. Don’t get me wrong – I find anthropology fascinating. Still, it’s a far stretch to turn a fairly boring job into a major crime drama.

Seriously, as much as I hated “The Da Vinci Code,” even Dan Brown could have come up with better story lines. This is my first post on this blog and I’m bored to tears just writing about this stupid show. In the first episode (the only one I could stand to watch), our heroes are chased around by crazy evangelical Christians who want to rid England of non-believers and get their hands on various religious artifacts to gain the power to do so.

Now, there have been some pretty awful shows that I’ve continued to watch (October Road, anyone?) for whatever reason. I get bored and mostly I just need something to be compelling about a show for me to stick around. There is not, however, one single positive thing about Bonekickers. The writing is boring, the characters are one-dimensional, and I couldn’t really care less about any of the little mysteries and side-stories they were trying to hook me with. Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who plays “Viv,” is the absolute worst, as she’s literally just a pretty face. I’m not even sure what her job description is because they initially made it seem as if she barely had the qualifications to exist. It looked to me like the girl had never even been on a dig site before, but she still ends up being crucial to their discoveries mostly out of pure luck. There is one scene where she’s staring at something-or-other (I think it was a piece of metal or maybe the coin. I really don’t remember.), and she suddenly knows where to dig!!

From what I can tell, ratings are dropping drastically and the critics have ripped the show into a festering, bloody mess. Still, it made it through several episodes already and they haven’t shut it down yet. I’m not familiar enough with British TV to understand this, but it seems absurd to me that they’ve yet to make more episodes of the immensely popular Being Human (BBC 3), but they’ve got an entire season of this bullshit.