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Right off the bat Lauren tells a newly coiffed Brody that she hasn’t been on a “real date” in three weeks. Three weeks? Hey Lauren, codependent much? Not to get all Psych 101 here, but perhaps the reason none of the people on this show have any type of discernible personality is due to the fact that they simply refuse to spend time alone. Not that they should be balled up in the corner with a box of Mallomars and a shotgun, but seriously what kind of person could you possibly become when your every waking moment is spent in the company of people who also are without personality. Of course this is coming from a guy whose entire life has been built around the consumption of media so maybe I’m not the person to cast stones. WOW. This got real depressing. More after the jump!

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Let’s drink to the telephone game!

Here’s what I love about The Hills: I love that the show is built around these “moments of conflict” that are rarely all that conflicting and tend to last about fifteen seconds, only to be followed by scenes where the characters are back with their friends and talking about the aforementioned conflicts for what seems like the rest of eternity. I love this, because it’s just like real life — this is, after all, reality television. As we all have learned by now, real life is for the most part pretty boring, so it makes sense to draw out fleeting moments of emotion for as long as we possibly can in some futile attempt to ascribe meaning to something otherwise meaningless. Wow, that was depressing. How about some more after the jump?…

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Last night I tuned into The Hills hoping for something a little trashy with curiously competent cinematography, but what I got was a clip show. Clip shows certainly have their purpose. In this case they can catch someone up on a series that they might not have been following all that closely. They also give the production crew an extra week to make sure everything is coming in on time. For the hard-core viewer, however, a clip show is a detour you aren’t all that thrilled about taking. It’s like running a marathon and then half-way to the finish line getting handed a note that says, “Sorry, you were suppose to take a left back at mile-marker one,” thus explaining why you’d been running completely alone in the desert for the past two hours. At least MTV promised in the lead-in that I would be given footage I “had never seen!” so I stuck with it and refreshed myself on what had happened to our characters over the past two months. I’ll fill you in after the jump…

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Look, just because he doesn’t wash his hair or wear clean clothes or speak or…

Is it just me, or is the best part of The Hills that silly bumper music they play before the commercial breaks? It sounds like something pulled from an Ed Wood movie. And no matter the gravity of the situation on screen it makes every single character involved look like a cartoon who had just run off a cliff but has yet to notice there is no ground beneath their feet. More after the jump…

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Dude, you’re wearing girl-jeans.

About halfway through last night’s episode of The Hills there was this moment that somehow managed to encapsulate the entire series in about thirty seconds. Whitney was in charge of doing this photo shoot for the band “Red Jumpsuit Apparatus” and she needed one of the members to change from his jeans to these other jeans. He didn’t really want to. He liked his jeans. Whitney gave him the ol’, “um, OK” look that she has perfected in her two decades on this planet (or whatever planet). Just then the music started to swell with some sad indie-rock number (RJA?). Whitney walked away defeated. I swear, it might as well have been the Charlie Brown walk. It was perfect because it did precisely what the show does so well. It takes a completely meaningless exchange with very little consequence and gives it meaning. Now that’s power. More after the jump…

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You’ll have to excuse my suspiciously greasy looking forehead.

While taking notes this week (yes, I’m certainly the only person in America who takes notes on The Hills) I had written down a few things about how Whitney showed some genuine talent (or at least genuine interest) while getting that house walk-through for the party they were suppose to throw for their job. It made me think perhaps she is far brighter than for what I had given her credit. Later in the episode she said to Lauren, “Catching up on old times. Or catching up on new times.” Neither were questions, but delivered as honest statements of fact. Whitney, I realized, is from Cincinnati (as in “John From”). Then I started thinking about how (or perhaps more importantly why) she talks in Milch-speech. Of course that’s when I realized 1) no one who is watching The Hills is going to be interested in comparisons to a now-dead HBO series watched by only me and 2) no one is going to care about Whitney on Tuesday morning when we had that awesome run-in between Heidi and Spencer and Lauren and Jason. So let’s just forget about Whitney for this week and focus on the drama at Ketchup (awful name!). More after the jump…

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A genius.

Nothing makes me smile wider than the Whitney, Whaaaaat-face. The question, “What?” is uttered by people all over this planet of ours millions of times a day, and yet only Whitney seems to fully grasp the absence of answers that “What?” truly suggests. A full breakdown of Monday’s episode after the jump…

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Tonight HBO is not only premiering its new drama Tell Me You Love Me (aka, the show with all that sex in it), kicking off the sixth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, but also showing Alive Day Memories a documentary about disabled soldiers who have come back from Iraq. That is a pretty solid, if thematically jumbled, night of television.

BUT!…

All of those shows will be available On-Demand at midnight, so we might as well watch the MTV Video Music Awards: two hours of live television on a network that isn’t as culturally significant as it once was paying tribute to a medium it no longer supports. Still, Britney is using the venue to make her comeback and there’s still the slim, slim, slim chance that something really wacky could happen. Catch all the shinanagins after the jump…

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Heidi: genius.

Oh Audrina, what does Justin/Bobby/Justin-Bobby have to do to get you to realize he’s a complete disaster? Push you from his motorcycle while driving down the freeway? I swear I haven’t seen someone this delusional since that pizza guy thought “a big tip” meant a couple extra bucks at the beginning of “Suburban Slumber Sluts 8” (um… it was on cable).

This is a totally random observation, but has it struck anyone else that the exterior of the Bolthouse Offices that Heidi works at in Hollywood look striking similar to the New Zealand consulate office that Murray works at in Flight of the Conchords? Because they totally do. Moving on…

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Goooooose-chill.

Does it strike anyone else as curious that Lauren, star of The Hills, the girl who the entire series was built around, has become essentially irrelevant? In Monday night’s episode her screen time was relegated to being either the shoulder on which Audrina could cry or a girl which random dudes could mildly hit-on. Even her best moment — laughing at the sight of Brody’s thoroughly bandaged arm — was met with a cold stare by the man himself. Apparently breaking your arm isn’t particularly funny when it happens to you (though how could he not know how funny it would be to everyone else?). Yes, Lauren is now officially narrating the Heidi and Spencer show. This makes about as much sense as the idea of Heidi and Spencer themselves. It’d be like Art Garfunkel narrating a show about Paul Simon or Saddam Hussein narrating a show about George H. W. Bush. More after the jump…

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Spencer: gamer.

I was reading an Entertainment Weekly article about The Hills last night and one of the producers talked about how they saw the series as a modern Mary Tyler Moore. Half of me found this notion to be sacrilege, as MTM is one of my top ten shows of all time, though the more I thought about it I started to see what he meant: at it’s core The Hills is about a girl moving to the city trying to make it after all. The difference is in this version everyone is 23 and “hot” and Ted Baxter is replaced with Spencer Pratt. Lots more after the jump…

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Like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like.

OK. A couple things. Last summer I called this show “morally bankrupt” and while that certainly may still be true, perhaps I didn’t appreciate it for what it really was: a fascinating look at how girls (not all girls, but certainly some) interact with one another. There’s also the fact that 80% of the cast is comprised of people so incredibly stupid, it’s really hard to look away, and even harder to not get caught up in the double-underline “drama.” So I’m giving it another shot. More after the jump…

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I looked at my DVR to see what was going to be on tonight and almost startled myself into a coma. Tonight is the most jam-packed night of programming since the standard television season ended in May. It is a clear sign of things to come as the fall gets underway and sleeping patterns greatly diminish. In any case, here’s a list what I’m hoping to watch:

• My Boys (TBS, 10pm)
• No Reservations (Travel, 10pm)
• Weeds (Showtime, 10pm)
• Californication (Showtime, 10:30pm)
• The Hills (MTV, 10pm)

What’s that? Scheduling conflicts? I don’t understand. I’m just thankful I bailed on Big Love two months ago or things might have been really hairy.

Four of five of those shows will likely work themselves into the regular weekly rotation (Californication is a toss-up as early word is it sucks). The real question mark is on MTV’s The Hills, a series I watched during its first season and was more or less repulsed by. That being said, when a friend’s Gmail away message today reads “Spencer Sucks” I have to wonder if perhaps I was grading the show a bit too harshly and not savoring its “cattier” qualities — so I’m going to give it another shot.

A few weeks back Fuse, a network most people don’t know exists, started airing its brand new, cutting edge sketch show based on a New York sketch group. The show (and the group) is called The Whitest Kids U Know (yes “U”). I watched two episodes. It was moderately funny, but too often fell apart mid-sketch (like most sketch shows). It also seemed like the cast members only knew how to write scenes that involved yelling. For me, this was detrimental to the funny, but I’m no comedy writer. What the hell do I know anyway.

Last Thursday MTV, a network most people know exists (though few people admit to actually watching), started airing its brand new, cutting edge sketch show based on a New York sketch group*. The show (and the group) is called Human Giant. After months of being little more than a VH-1 drop-line, MTV finally released the series for the world to behold. Having only seen one episode I have to say, it’s pretty damn funny. It seems to succeed where TWKUK fails because it understands that most people, myself included, are completely impatient and barely able to focus our attention at a whole music video (hence MTV’s demusicifying of its schedule). In other words, the Human Giant sketches are incredibly short.

The first episode was comprised largely of bits the three had produced over the past couple years (Shutterbugs, Sh!ttiet Mix Tape), with some new stuff mixed in as well (I’m for anyone giving work to the lovely Linda Cardellini — especially when she’s pushing heavy furniture and appliances on small children). New or old, the show works.

But is that enough.

Obviously the answer is no. The problem is Human Giant is being show Thursdays at 10:30pm on MTV following something called Adventures In Hollyhood. Clearly the network is trying to rebrand itself (as it has every three years since the mid-90s), but one unique show in an otherwise completely indistinguishable line-up will not attract viewers the way it might have in years past. This isn’t 1993, and Human Giant isn’t Beavis and Butthead.

We’ll see if it makes a dent.

*Really, the group wasn’t called Human Giant before the show, but was instead just called Aziz Ansari, Rob Huebel and Paul Scheer are making videos and putting them on the internet, but I had this whole parity thing going and I didn’t want it to get broken up.

Two weeks ago, in an effort to save money, MTV’s once-upon-a-time network staple Total Request Life began taping half of its episodes. After the live shows on Monday and Wednesday the following days show’s are recorded live-to-tape.

The one-time epicenter of popular music has fallen greatly since the boy band bubble burst (take that alliteration police!) at the beginning of the decade. David Bauder of the Associate Press breaks down the numbers:

At its peak in 1999, “TRL” had 757,000 viewers a day, with 346,000 of them aged 12 to 17, according to Nielsen Media Research.

So far this year, the show - now seen at 3:30 p.m. ET - averages 351,000 viewers a day, Nielsen said. The 12-to-17-year-old audienceis only 113,000, half what it was only two years ago.

This downward trend makes perfect sense within the current climate of cool. There’s still a mainstream, but its fragmented beyond belief and the notion of kids gathering around a tube to vote for their favorite song doesn’t really apply. There’s this whole new factor… um… what’s it called? It’s on the tip of my — Oh yeah, THE INTERNET. Yeah, that kind of changed things.

It probably didn’t help matters that a few weeks earlier the network cut 250 jobs as part of a major restructuring.

So do we cry a river for the unliveness of TRL? Hell no. What’s hilarious about this story is its suggesting that Total Request Live has been on MTV as long as the network has existed. In fact, the show didn’t premiere until September 1998. Yes it was almost a decade ago… but it was also 1998.

Read the AP story via MSNBC.com