Women's Murder Club on ABC 10/12/07

Women's Murder Club is based on James Patterson's best selling novels, and is a new one-hour drama series about four successful working women in San Francisco: Homicide Inspector Lindsay Boxer (Angie Harmon), Medical Examiner Claire Washburn (Paula Newsome), Assistant D.A. Jill Bernhardt (Laura Harris) and crime reporter Cindy Thomas (Aubrey Dollar), who use their expertise, their close friendship and their instincts to solve murder cases. Each a success in her own field, they work together to uncover clues to the city's most grisly homicides.

I've read the books and found them really fast paced and interesting, and the new series on ABC is no different.
I thoroughly enjoyed the season premier, the interactions between the characters, and the story lines, and a terrific cast.
I'll definitely be tuning in again every Friday night at 9pm eastern.

Desperate Housewives 10/8/07

Smiles of a Summer Night

Lynette kicks Tom out of her chemotherapy sessions, Susan is mistaken for a stripper and Bree attempts to steal a prize winning recipe.

Edie tries to get Carlos to spend some of the money he has stored off shore.
Then Carlos meets up with a "friend" to help get rid of Edie.

Bree is out shown by Catherine's lemon pie, and tries to steal the secret recipe, but discoveres that Catherine is keeping a secret bigger than pie.

Lynette and Gabby share a special moment of friendship, after Gabby does everything she can to get out of staying with Lynnette during chemo.

Susan and Mike have a new problem, parenting Julie.
Speaking of Julie, she encourages Dylan to try and get the truth out of her mother Catherine, over her father and where he is, and why her mother has been lying to her all these years.

ANTM 10/3/07

Tonight, the girls went rock climbing.

There were many excellent pictures taken, some of these girls have an amazing look to them, but one of them just doesn't have it at all.

Tonights vote off, Kimberly.

Desperate Housewives season 4 premier 9/30/07

Tonights episode is titled:
"Now You Know"

The neighborhood is shocked when news about Edie spreads though Fairview, Lynette battles with the effects of chemotherapy, and a new family moves to Wisteria Lane, on the Season Premiere of Desperate Housewives.

I have been waiting all summer for this show to come back, and it didn't disappoint.
So many things have happened, we got all caught up, were introduced to new neighbors, and some secrets almost got spilled.

Big time spoilers below. Click at your own risk.

The Story Never Ends �

Dirty Sexy Money 9/26/07

Last night was the television premier of the new show, Dirty Sexy Money on ABC.

Synopsis;

When his father dies in a mysterious plane crash, lawyer Nick George reluctantly accepts an offer from billionaire Tripp Darling to take over Nick's father's job as chief counsel for the obscenely wealthy and influential Darling family. In the course of his hectic first day as the Darlings' personal lawyer, Nick discovers some of the various legal and illegal needs of the Darling family's five adult children.

The show has some pretty big named stars cast in the roles of the Darling family, and supporting cast.
They are;
Peter Krause, Donald Sutherland as the patriarch, William Baldwin, Natalie Zea, Glen Fitzgerald, Samaire Armstrong, Seth Gabel, Zoe McLellan, and Jill Clayburgh as the matriarch of the Darlings.

I really enjoyed this show.
It had drama, some comedy, backstabbing, family dysfunction, a lot of great characters with a lot of problems, and you just know that as much as Nick wants and needs this money, he's not really keen on working for this family with a lot of legal issues, not to mention a family history he's just discovering.
Some are just standard legal issues of the very wealthy, but this family has their hands in some illegal stuff as well.
Nick learns at the end of the first episode, that his father had a 20 year long affair with Letitia Darling (Clayburgh), the matriarch and wife of Tripp (Sutherland).
I'm curious to see how this show goes, so I'll be tuning in again next week, 10/3/07, for the second episode titled "Lions", and perhaps this show will become the next great guilty pleasure on ABC's great fall tv lineup.

If you missed this show, you can watch the full episode on ABC.com's media player.
This is also a useful media player to have installed in case you miss any episode of any of your favorite ABC prime time shows.

America's Next Top Model vote offs begin.

I'll be crossing off the models as they get voted off by our celebrity judges, Twiggy, Nigel Barker, J. Alexander, Jay Manuel and Tyra, so here's my chart, click for bigger.

I'm not a fan of the futuristic image we have going on here, but eh, it will do until they put up a better image of all the girls. The one they use at the end of the show would be nice.
But on to who got voted off.

This is week 2, week 1 being the premier episode which got us down to this group of 13 girls.
This episode is titled, The Models Go Green.
Tonight's vote off was perfect in my opinion, I couldn't stand Mila!

Mila is a very pretty girl, but she's empty, she appears dumber than a box of rocks.
Even as she was getting voted off, her expression didn't change. She's cold, and blank.
In her photoshoot, she was laughing when they made her up as a cancer victim who was losing all their hair, like it was a big joke, but amazingly, that part of the shoot looked good.
But her normal shoot where she had to look glamorous, she was stiff and her gaze was blank.

I found her stiff and blank during the vote off too. She just stood there, expressionless, the other girls are crying and upset that she's been voted off, and she's just blah.
While they taped her packing to leave, her voice over was the same.
"I really wanted to win, but oh well, I just shrug off the negatives and go on."
While that is a great attitude to have, if she had shown more personality, more enthusiasm and control, she may have been handed the last picture instead of Ebony.

Family Guy season premier

In case you missed the Family Guy season premier on Sunday night, (9/23/07) it was a Star wars episode and it rocked.
If you missed it, you can see it on Family Guy Now.com.

So here is the season 6 premier episode of Family Guy.

ANTM Cycle 9.

I admit that ANTM is one of my guilty pleasures.
I love watching all the catty, bitchy stuff that goes down, I love how absolutely nuts Tyra Banks is.
You know she is, don't lie. That girl is whacked!

I love Victoria's look. She has a classic beauty to her.
I also think that Lisa is stunning and she wants this badly. Second round of vote offs, and the girl is crying and shaking from desiring it so much.
I think it's amazing that Heather has Asperger's and is going for this.
And Janet, wow, look at that gaze in her eyes pure fire.

Anyway, much to my son's disgust, I will be watching cycle 9 of ANTM, and the girls listed above are my faves.
I'm not a betting woman, but I think these 4 girls are going to last awhile.
At least I hope they do.

Passions on Direct TV only, sucks.

NBC canceled the soap Passions, it's last episode will air on broadcast tv on September 16th.
Fans tried so hard to save the show, and they did save it, but now Passions will only be available on Direct TV starting September 17th 2007.

For fans like me, this sucks.
I do not have Direct TV, and have no plans on getting it.
It costs too much.
Yes I know the site says it's only $29.99 per month, but my local Direct TV people make you go through a credit check and also pay for a years worth of service in advance.
That means I cannot afford to get Direct TV, and I will never see my fave show again.

I have been watching the show since the very first episode, it really is my fave daytime soap.
It's querky and odd, it has magic and spells, and demons and witches. It's like no other soap.
There's the usual sex and murder stories like all soaps, but it has all that extra stuff that just makes it so much fun to watch.

I'm very disappointed in NBC. They want the Today show to run for an extra hour every day. It's already 3 hours long and the last hour, is dull and boring, it sucks.
Instead of removing some other show, they decided to dump Passions.
Get rid of Rachel Ray, her show sucks.

It's just super sad that I will never get to see the show again.
There will be no on line episodes like NBC currently does.
At 9pm every night, NBC posts the full days episode on line.
Direct TV will not be doing that.
I can only hope that some super devoted fan sets up a website and records and posts the episodes for those of us who cannot afford to get Direct TV.

Don Herbert, 89; TV's 'Mr. Wizard' taught science to young baby boomers

Link to source

Don Herbert, who explained the wonderful world of science to millions of young baby boomers on television in the 1950s and '60s as "Mr. Wizard" and did the same for another generation of youngsters on the Nickelodeon cable TV channel in the 1980s, died Tuesday. He was 89.

Man, that's sad. I used to watch him all the time. I loved it when he blew up the toaster. That was awesome!

Herbert used basic experiments to teach scientific principles to his TV audience via an in-studio guest boy or girl who assisted in the experiments.

In explaining how he brought a sense of wonder to elementary scientific experiments, Herbert told the New York Times in 2004 that he "would perform the trick, as it were, to hook the kids, and then explain the science later.

"We thought we needed it to seem like magic to hook the audience, but then we realized that viewers would be engaged with just a simple scientific question, like, why do birds fly and not humans? A lot of scientists criticized us for using the words 'magic' and 'mystery' in the show's subtitle, but they came around eventually."

"Over the years, Don has been personally responsible for more people going into the sciences than any other single person in this country," George Tressel, a National Science Foundation official, said in 1989.

"I fully realize the number is virtually endless when I talk to scientists," he said. "They all say that Mr. Wizard taught them to think."

And that is a major life accomplishment.
He taught kids to think and use logic and reason.
May he rest in peace.

You're fired Donald Trump!

Source

Donald Trump, whose low-rated reality show “The Apprentice” was left off the new prime-time schedule unveiled this week by NBC, says the network can’t fire him — he quits.

The real estate mogul issued a statement on Friday saying he has informed the U.S. television network he is “moving on from ‘The Apprentice’ to a major new TV venture,” though he declined to elaborate.

There was no immediate comment from NBC.

“The Apprentice” debuted as a hit in 2004, averaging nearly 21 million viewers and ranking as the top-rated new TV show its first season. But the series dropped steadily in the ratings in successive years, losing nearly two-thirds of its original audience by the time it wrapped up its sixth installment last month.

The show’s future was cast into further doubt on Monday when the network announced a 2007-08 programming lineup that made no mention of Trump. But NBC executives refused then to absolutely rule out a reprieve once rival networks ABC, CBS and Fox had laid out their schedules for next season.

The statement from Trump’s organization seemed to spell a definitive end to the series.

“It looks like viewers will have to wait to see what Mr. Trump plans for the future,” the statement said. “But if Mr. Trump’s past TV success is any indication of the future, then one can anticipate that millions of ‘Apprentice’ fans will be migrating to his new venture.”

Trump and NBC still remain in the beauty pageant business together. The two announced in March a renewed deal to keep annual broadcasts of the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants, which Trump co-owns, on the General Electric Co.-controlled network through 2010.

Bionic woman to be on NBC in the fall.

Check out this one minute clip that NBC has provided.
This looks bad ass already.

Click to go to the new Bionic Woman page on NBC.com

Just when I really hated Ian,

He turns out to step out and allow Susan to be happy.
But now that she and Mike said goodbye, is it too late?
He packed in the middle of the night and left.
She lost both men.
Crap.

And what the freaking hell is Lynette doing? She's got an awesome hubby in Tom, why mess around with that stupid ass Rick?
And that bitch of a stepdaughter is seriously and evil little one isn't she?

I love the Mrs. McClusky storyline.
Poor thing. I suppose I would have done the same thing as her if it came down to that sort of situation. *laugh*

So there ya have it, my non-spoiler spoiler of Desperate Housewives for April 29th, 2007.

Caveman TV?

We've all seen the commercials for Geico and love them.
The cavemen being totally pissed off about Geico's slogan, "So easy, a caveman could do it."
A few weeks ago, word slipped out to turn the cavemen into an ABC sitcom, in a half hour slot.

"Cavemen" will revolve around three pre-historic men who must battle prejudice as they attempt to live as normal thirtysomethings in modern Atlanta.

The commercials started rather blandly in 2004, with a beautiful on screen personna reciting the words, "So easy a caveman can do it", and from off screen, we hear the word "What?"
When the camera pans over, it's a caveman who is working as the boom mic operator, he drops it to the floor and huffs off view and set, saying, "Not cool."

That was it, the cavemen were launched and the next ad we saw, had two cavemen being treated to an elegant dinner by someone from Geico, who is trying desperately to apologize.
One of the cavemen orders the roast duck with mango salsa, and the other one says he has lost his appetite.
The cavemen want people to know they are just like us, not the chest beating, grunting, stereotypical cavemen we've all read about.

The commercials just keep coming, at the therapists office discussing his feelings over the ads, on a news talk show defending his right not to be stereotyped, at the airport being pissed off about yet another poster with the slogan, carrying a wooden tennis racket in a canvas bag.
The music is catchy, he's dressed modern, you can see how this would upset him.

At CavemensCrib.com, we learn a bit more about these guys, their music tastes, as we flip through their ipod, their computer where they are into blogging, we can even read some of their emails.
They have poetry magnets on their fridge in Esperanto, they read Tolstoy, they practice yoga and like Paddy Chayefsky movies.

But is all this funny enough for a half hour sitcom?
Other super high concept sitcoms have worked, Third Rock from the Sun, about aliens who live on earth and can't tell anyone they are aliens, Small Wonder, where their daughter was a robot.
And other ad icons have worked in the past, been able to cross over from 30 second spots to feature length movies and tv specials. Just take Ernest, who started off pushing milk. That character has had much success with movies like Ernest saves Christmas and Ernest goes to jail.
It launched the pitchman, Jim Varney, into a very good career, he's been in many successful films outside of the Ernest fame, like The Beverly Hillbillies, and as a voice work actor in films like Toy Story and Toy Story 2 (as Slinky Dog).

I think the cavemen have potential, but the show can't continuously be about them being victims, being stereotyped as brutish Neanderthals. They will need to branch out from the shtick, and find a way to make these guys appeal to every one in order to last through the first 5 shows.

geicocavemen

Desperate Housewives for 3/4/2007

What a great episode!
So many different things taking place.
Ok, let's get to it.

This episode is titled "My Husband the Pig".

Edie had a visitor from an old friend and couldn't find a sitter, so she left Travis, who's 8, at home alone.
Carlos was right in the middle of a hot date when he noticed Travis outside playing alone. Being the guy who has always wanted a kid, his paternal instincts kicked in and he took care of Travis for the night foregoing really hot sex.
When Edie came home, she was wasted and Carlos wouldn't let her take her son home till morning.
I see this little side story going a bit further. Something just tells me that Carlos is going to do something about Edie doing this.

Meanwhile, Danielle, Bree's daughter, finds out she's been knocked up by Edie's nephew, Austin.
Austin had been trying to win back Susan's daughter, Julie.
After Danielle's brother Andrew gets done talking to him, he decides to leave town. He tells Julie that he doesn't know when he'll be back riding off on his motorcycle.

Gabrielle is being hit on and pursued by a very wealthy man running for mayor. She's going to give him quite the chase.

Mike finds out that Ian knew he was going to propose to Susan the night he was hit by Orson and ended up in the coma.
While returning the ring to the jewelers, Susan comes in to get her engagement ring from Ian resized. They have a moment together where you just know they still love each other.
Later that night while playing poker with the guys at Tom's new pizza place, Ian and Mike wager a bet on telling Susan everything.
Mike loses but is not going to give up.

Lynette and Tom argued over how to spend their 9th wedding anniversary , and when a mix up in communication happens, Lynette is left standing in a beautiful gown on the side of the road for over 2 hours.
Tom apologizes like crazy, Lynette apologizes as well, and they celebrate at the pizza place with a drink.
They may have some issues, but this is the only couple in the whole show who has their relationship mostly together.