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The Vicky Mendoza Diagonal

I’ve been complaining that the show this season has kind of lost its feel (actually I seem to be complaining about that for every show these days). Well, if there were ever an episode that felt like vintage HIMYM, it would have to have been this one. You got your flashbacks, you got your Barneyisms, you got your light romantic drama between characters, you have your sandwiches — all in all a perfect storm of awesomeness. More after the jump…

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The good thing about Survivor is that just when you begin to get bored with how the season is playing out, they change it up on you. Now this episodes turnabout was no surprise, they gave it all away in the previews. But it’s still nice to know that even a season that was turning out to be semi-predictable could still become exciting again. More after the jump…

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UPDATE: In news that is surprising to absolutely no one, Viva Laughlin has been cancelled making it the first true victim of the 2007-2008 television season (Nashville was pulled and Online Nation was cancelled, but those shows weren’t scripted). I’m going to walk out into the newsroom and start singing about this. READ MORE

Tonight at 10:00pm CBS is previewing Viva Laughlin their new casino, musical train wreck which will be moved to Sundays before its ultimate cancellation. Here’s the deal: there has not been a show this bad in years. No, not even Cavemen. Cavemen fails because it’s completely uninspired. Viva Laughlin fails because the inspiration was completely misappropriated. It’s such a bizarre concoction of genres and nonsense it is absolutely worth checking out (at least once). Let’s just put it this way, at one point in the pilot Melanie Griffith breaks out into the worst rendition of Blondie’s “One Way Or Another” ever captured on a motion-based medium. It’s astoundingly awful, and funny… really funny. Watch it, at least for a while. You have to know what you’re missing.

I guess I’d call this an improvement over last week, though the problems are more or less the same. The show is going to have a real problem if it can’t find a way for Ted and Robin to inhabit more of the same storylines. Unlike the previous episode, this week I felt Robin’s story was the stronger of the two — though a lot of that could be from my never ending appreciation of adults saying inappropriate things to children. More after the jump…

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Ding Dong, The Dick is Dead!

Alright, so I’m writing this a little late, so I’m going to keep the recap part out (if you don’t know by now . . . you don’t really care).

After last week’s episode, I had a horrible vision. I could imagine very clearly, all done up in too much makeup, Dave sitting in the top 3 at the final tribal council. I don’t know what it was, but the image was all too easy to conjur up. Well, now I don’t have to worry about that any more! More after the jump…

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The gang finds god.

I think Homer Simpson said it best this summer as he frantically flipped through the Bible saying, “This book doesn’t have any answers!” Perhaps the Bible should have been written more like the Bonanza City Journal, as that book seems chalk full of suggestions kids are more than willing to go along with. In short, they were told that the kids needed to find god and that perhaps they should hold a service — because in the history of modern civilizations, religion has never complicated things. More after the jump…

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Cooper, Mosby, Kelly

I was out having dinner tonight when I received a series of panicked phone calls from a good friend. The first of which has no baring on this conversation, but for those interested apparently Blade Runner is showing Tuesday night at the Ziegfeld here in Manhattan. The second call, however, told me — rather, screamed at me — that Winnie Cooper was on How I Met Your Mother and that she was still, in fact, hot (she’s also, apparently, a math genius). The last of the calls, which were all made in a period of about 7 minutes, said the following:

Dude! Now f–king Kim Kelly is on How I Met Your Mother! Winnie Cooper and Kim Kelly both on the same episode looking incredibly attractive. This is truly a moment for the ages. I’m only five minutes in but it’s totally blowing my mind. You need to get home as soon as you can and watch this, then I can comment on your blog about it. It’ll be awesome!

Well, sir, the ball is in your court (more after the jump…).

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This season’s Survivor might as well be called Survivor: Smackdown. Another episode of down and dirty, man-on-man (and woman-on-woman) combat leads me to believe that they thought WWE Diva Ashley was going to stick around a lot longer than two episodes. More after the jump.

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Ha, ha! Everyone hates yous!

We’re eight days in and all the kids seem to still be alive. Jared is still phrasing things like he’s in a curse-free David Milch series, Taylor is still too precious, and council is still getting all of their information from a book that was apparently written by pioneers back in the 19th century. If this is true, those pioneers were idiots and wrote in a suspiciously perfect calligraphy. More after the jump…

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West Orange?

This isn’t a real HIMYM post. This is a “I was up until five in the morning yesterday working on lord-knows-what and thus never got around to writing-up the episode” post. Here’s the short of it: Ted and Barney pretend to be from out of town to hook up with ladies, but are ultimately thwarted when the realize the two girls that have been showing them around aren’t from New York, like they said, but from New Jersey. Marshall and Lily write letters to one another that are suppose to be opened after the other dies. Marshall pours his heart out (with a hilarious over-the-shoulder angel), Lily tells him to cancel her Vogue subscription. Robin realized the new post-Argentina version of herself wasn’t nearly as interesting as the old Robin. She then kicks out a group of a traveling drum-circlers.

In short, another solid episode. I’m endless amazed at this series ability to deliver the goods while consistently being under the radar.

 

Here we go again, another season of Survivor. Luckily, we had some time to rest this go-round before they threw another cast at us (what was the hiatus between Cook Islands and Fiji, like two weeks?). Last week’s episode was alright as far as intro shows go. Much more after the jump…

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MURDERER! MURDERER!

Well, those crazy kids are at it again, and the book (the book!) not so gracefully guided them to a life and death decision — for a chicken. The kids, fed up eating mush for a week a straight, were told (by that damn book) it would be OK if they maybe wanted to kinda sorta kill one of their many chickens… to eat. Cue: PETA press-releases. More after the jump…

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My dear, you look absolutely perplexed.

It just doesn’t seem to end, does it? Tonight three new shows are premiering, along with new episodes from a couple gems from last week… and Top Chef. It’s OK. Sleep is overrated.

Bionic Woman — NBC 9:00pm
A so-so remake of a cheesy show about a robot-woman not called Small Wonder, though I haven’t seen the reworked pilot. I can guarantee lots of robot-woman fighting, if that’s your thing.

Life — NBC 10:00pm
Honestly, I know very little of this show. I know it’s about a guy who was wrongly imprisoned and then joins the police force. I’ve also heard the pilot is quite good.

Private Practice — ABC 9:00pm
It’s the Grey’s Anatomy spinoff. I won’t be watching (thank god!), though I assume many will. Let me know how it is.

Dirty Sexy Money — ABC 10:00pm
I really liked this show. It’s funny, has the always awesome Peter Krause, is briskly paced and kind of reminds me of a dramatic version of Arrested Development. That being said most the hour is dedicated to exposition, so who knows where it goes. Still, it’s the most interesting hour of the night.

Let’s also not forget we have new episodes of the awesome Kid Nation (8:00pm CBS) and Gossip Girl (9:00pm CW) as well as the (pen?)ultimate Top Chef.

Good luck!

There are very few aspect of Cane I dislike. It’s a good premise, a wealthy Cuban family decides if it wants to abandon its sugar business in favor of the more glamorous rum business, complete with some shady dealings, murderous intrigue, and inner circle power plays. The acting is top notch (or at least upper-notch). Jimmy Smits heads a cast of some of the best Latin-American actors working today (most notably, Frank, who was played by Nestor Carbonell — “Scott” this past season on Lost). Visually it’s quite stunning. The colors are bright and saturated — lots of greens and blues and oranges. The dialogue, while often expository in this opening episode, always seems naturalistic. The action is constantly moving forward but is never rushed. More after the jump…

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I’m not going to have time this afternoon to get full-length reviews up for Cane and Reaper which both premiere tonight, so I’ll just give you some quick reactions and let you decide what to watch.

Reaper (9:00pm on The CW) is great. It’s about a kid who is sat down by his parents on his 21st birthday and told that they sold his soul to the devil when he was born. Now the devil has come to collect in the form of hiring our hero as a bounty-hunter of escaped souls from hell. Oh, and it’s a comedy. Much hay has been made of the fact that Kevin Smith directed the pilot. While I’m sure his input was kindly accepted, this show would have worked with or without him based exclusively on the strength of the cast. There are four must-see new series this fall and Reaper is one of the top two.

Cane (10:00pm on CBS) wants to be The Godfather. I mean, really wants to be The Godfather. Unfortunately it comes up considerably short. Still, there are far worse shows premiering this week and Cane shows enough promise it could turn into a really great serial. After one episode, you wouldn’t know this. Like K-Ville, the cast and groundwork is in place for the series to grow into itself over the long haul, but it certainly gets no added boost from its pilot, which I found at times painfully slow. Still, Jimmy Smits is in it and I once read that that has to be worth something, right?