no more gosselins!

Wow, the first real post in the new spot! First of many. We’re about to get back to daily posting, aided by this new format because it allows me to save drafts of blog posts. The old one didn’t, and it looked like poop when I saved it in Word first.

The comments section is about to be added on too, hopefully by the end of this week. Until then, if you want to complain about something, feel free to drop me a line.

Tomorrow literally will be one of the biggest blog posts I’ve ever done, a full-scale slate of TV reviews since I didn’t do one in all of October and a few shows have premiered since then. At least that’s the plan right now.

Until then, some links I’ve been holding on to:

Can’t believe I’m actually dignifying this with any kind of comment — but I got stuck watching the Kate interview on Monday. Hey, it’s been a month of nothing but baseball in the house, the remote had to leave my hand at some point. The most fascinating part wasn’t Kate’s “revelations” that had all been revealed over the last couple months in newspapers and gossip columns around the world. Oh, really Kate? You’ll always love Jon? Thanks for the heads up! No, the truly magical part was the hard-hitting journalism of Natalie Morales, who peppered Kate with questions the way she apparently dreams of questioning Obama. Lighten up, Natalie! It’s not that important! It looked more like her audition tape for 60 Minutes than the ratings grab it was meant to be.

In the interest of equal time, Jon Gosselin. Now let us never mention any of this ever again in the hopes we hear the name “Stalin” before we ever hear “Gosselin” again. I doubt that will go as planned.

The biggest thing that’s happened this year in movies is something some people don’t even know about — there will be 10 Best Picture nominees at the Oscars this year. At some point, I’ll take a look back over the last few years and see what would have happened if there were 10 picks each year. but with Awards Season kicking off now, it’s time to start thinking about what the Oscars are going to look like with 10 nominees for Best Picture. It looks like a bad year to do that since there really hasn’t been anything outstanding yet, with the possible exception of Inglourious Basterds.

Steve Martin, OK. But Alec Baldwin? You lost me. The first time they joke about how many times they’ve hosted Saturday Night Live, forget it, I’m gone. At least Baldwin realizes what a weird choice it is.

More hosting news: Mario Lopez is staying with Miss America. Who would have known our little AC Slater would have come this far? But isn’t the Miss America contest all about wholesomeness? Perhaps we should send them a tape of last week’s Nip/Tuck when Lopez dressed in women’s lingerie.

ahhh, gwendolyn pierce. she knows charles in charge was an awesome theme song.

Talk about a tough first round for GenX! In one brutally relentless swoop, the theme songs for Fresh Prince, X-Files, The Golden Girls, The Sopranos, Greatest American Hero, Friends and Facts of Life all went down. The only show that even existed in the 90s to make it into the second round of the latest arbitrary ranking of TV theme songs was Cheers, one of the most overrated theme songs of all time. If this was fifth grade reading class and the teacher was trying to explain ratios, she could safely say Where Everybody Knows Your Name is to TV themes as Take on Me by A-ha is to 80s music. Always remembered but stupid. The fact that the most underrated TV theme of all time — Charles in Charge — was another first-round casualty just goes to show whatever their system is for trying to figure out the best song sucks.

The rules are the same as last year. If you have DirecTV and you’re going to be watching Friday Night Lights, keep your effing mouth shut to the rest of us who don’t have DirecTV and won’t be watching until NBC decides it’s a good time to air these episodes. You know, it’s current schedule being so crowded with crowd-pleasing, critic-loving fare right now. It’s still a minor miracle I got through last year without knowing one spoiler other than at some point, Riggins and Street went to New York City. I expect to enter into next season the same way. I didn’t know how anything could be better than season 3 of FNL until this season of Mad Men came along. Now I’m torn.

Keep quiet on this season of Dexter too, can’t see that until the DVD comes out next summer. But I’m legitimately jazzed to see John Lithgow taking on the new role of serial killer when I do get to it. One of my favorite movie villains of all time was Lithgow as Blake in Ricochet, so he’s probably knocking the Dexter foil out of the park.

If you think you need a scorecard to keep up with the newest late-night talk shows, take a number. At some point this year, I’m just going to take a night and watch all these shows, switching back-and-forth all night. I don’t expect to keep up with the banter in any way, and I think that will make it better.

This is one of the few times it’s going to happen. It’s the exception, not the rule, we’ve talked about this before. But Southland, which got kicked off the NBC schedule before it started this year, has been picked up by TNT. We already knew this, or at least we had a really good idea it was going to happen. So that’s old news. Now we’re wondering — what’s the future of the show? TNT will air the seven episodes from last season and the six more that are in the can that were supposed to be aired this year on NBC and call it season 1. After that, no one seems to know. But it seems like a good fit on TNT, especially since the beeping over the cursing was annoying on NBC.

go ahead and stroke your beard all you want. we don't care, and we probably never will.

There have been approximately 5,836,823 million characters in seven seasons of 24. Most of them have been killed off, but that hasn’t stopped them from coming back. There’s even people we thought  were dead who have come back, like Secretary Heller. It’s a big list, too, full of people we want to see come back — but President Logan isn’t on that list for me. I’d be fine if we never heard his name again, but we’re apparently too late for that since he’ll be back this year for season 8. Hey, 24 writers! Instead of getting this dork back, figure out some way to get David Palmer alive again!

This is why A&Edumped decent scripted stuff like The Cleaner and The Beast? For shame. Kirstie Alley is a shell of herself.