Oprah Winfrey said on today’s show she “had reservations” about interviewing Nadya Suleman and thereby joining the Octomom media coverage — until she got a letter from Suleman saying the Octomom wanted the world “to see her for who she is.”
Who she is, to my eyes after watching Oprah, is a woman with a shaky grasp on reality, READ FULL STORY »
Damages ended its season — the series? — with some many plot resolutions it had to expand to 90 minutes and still felt stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey. Not that the finale itself was a turkey; a lot of it was superb.
Finally, we got a scene between Glenn Close and Lily Tomlin that READ FULL STORY »
Kate Gosselin said that her eight kids were visiting her this week in L.A., and her performance on Monday’s Dancing With the Stars reminded me of one of her tykes — Mady or Cara, say — playing dress-up and trying READ FULL STORY »
It makes sense. You want to know how 24 ends, right? No matter how ridiculous, exhausted, or suddenly inspired that conclusion turns out to be.
This occurred to me as I approached last week’s edition of 24 as a matter of duty-not-pleasure, that the primary reason I was seeing this lousy season through to its end was that I knew I’d regret it if I didn’t — that as repetitive and predictable as 24 has become, I had to be able to say I’d seen Jack Bauer through every single hour of his (in our universe) nine-year-long agony.
Am I the only one who feels this way?
Unlike Lost, whose brilliant decision to announce the end of the series has only increased fan fervor and speculation, the 24 cancellation comes as some combination of relief, sorrow, inevitability, and tease. It was pretty clear, when this season began with Jack dandling his grandchild in New York City, that Bauer was not in the midst of a cliff-hanger, as he’d been in some seasons before. Indeed, Jack’s disconnection from his action-hero life mirrored ours. Even if you remain an enthused fan of 24, you’re now watching it less for the story itself but for the way the methods of storytelling are playing out — what variations in the formula are being introduced.
Lately, those variations are at once surprising (Chloe taking over at CTU?) and predictable (Cherry Jones has never been given much to do as president except worry, so why not bring back the most eccentric, jittery President of all, Gregory Itzen’s version?).
Shooting Renee last week deprived us of the season’s sole interesting character — what Annie Wersching was doing with Renee’s mixture of anger, vulnerability, and despair was fascinating — but it was also totally in keeping with the old Jack-cannot-ever-be-happy theme.
Now he’s — what else? — “out for revenge,” as Fox puts it. So we’ll sit through a few more weeks of watching Jack run and shoot and wrestle with the way his rage-fuelled sorrow contradicts his patriotic duty and tortures him more than any mere terrorist could. Bauer’s inner conflicts have always been compelling. It’s the repetitive procession of foreign enemies and allies, the bombs and the bureaucratic red-tape, that has become stultifying.
Plus, we know we have to stay to the bitter end because it’s not the bitter end. There’s the announced 24 feature film to ponder. How will the show leave Jack so that he can transition to the big screen?
How about you? Will you be sticking around until the show ends on May 24? Are you watching out of pleasure, habit, or both?
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Image Credit: Ethan Miller/Getty ImagesIt was a good night for you if you like Lady Antebellum, Miranda Lambert, and exposed midriffs. Not so great if you wanted to actually hear Brooks and Dunn sing. That’s the thing about the Academy of Country Music Awards show, held in Las Vegas on Sunday: It’s READ FULL STORY »
Last night’s series of mixed-martial-arts bouts on CBS’ Strikeforce served up some good action — King Mo took some heavy pummeling only to prevail; wiseguy Shinya Aoki got pasted by Gilbert Melendez — but the evening concluded with something I haven’t seen in a while on TV: a spontaneous brawl, some of it captured on camera.
After Jake Shields defeated Dan Henderson, it looked as though Jason “Mayhem” Miller may have gotten a bit too enthusiastic about calling for a rematch. Whatever set it off, the pushing, shoving, and hitting that ensued was less like modern MMA than an old-fashioned boxing match. Which I do not mean as condemnation. I hope no one was hurt. But at the same time, I can’t really get worked-up or pious about the shame — or as these things are always phrased in sports reporting, the “black eye” — that the sport now bears because of this unscripted event.
Overall, I thought there was some good action throughout the evening, some mediocre color commentary, and that free-for-all at the end. It’s always interesting to see live events that the networks have little control over.
Did you watch?
Ryan Phillippe presided over a Saturday Night Live that found the actor gamely attempting to get laughs in a lot of gamey sketches.
The show signaled its intentions starting as early as the opening monologue, which featured READ FULL STORY »
The host of Saturday Night Live this week is Ryan Phillippe. He’s co-starring in this summer’s MacGruber movie with Will Forte.
For a full recap of last night’s show, go here.
This week, when most of the high school kids in Huntington, West Virginia, were offered french fries, pizza, or chef Jamie Oliver’s “home made spaghetti sauce [with] six or seven vegetables in there,” the majority chose the veggie sauce. Oliver exclaimed, “I can’t believe it!”
Neither could I. This was the first week of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution when I thought READ FULL STORY »
