by Fred Topel
“You can still be direct without being a total douchebag”
– Jon Hamm
AMC’s hit series Mad Men turned the channel into a legitimate network for original programming. Their previous claim to fame was simply showing old films, as their title American Movie Classics indicated. Harkening back to a more “classic” era, Mad Men takes place in the world of 1960s advertising. The smoldering period piece stars Jon Hamm as Don Draper, the top ad man at Sterling Cooper. The world of the office features lots of smoking, suits and pre-sexual harassment sexism.
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by Fred Topel
““There will be an end when it comes.”
-Michael C. Hall
The first season of Dexter was pretty much based on the book, Darkly Dreaming Dexter. There weren’t spoilers so much as there were dramatizations of the novel. Season two went off with an original story, though still resolving some issues from season one. Now entering its third season, everything is fair game on Dexter.
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by Brad Warner
A couple weeks ago when I was in Durham, my friend Catie showed me an episode of the TV show Family Guy called “Brian Writes a Bestseller.” Hulu has the full episode up so you can take a look for yourself by clicking on the link at the very end of this article.
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by Brett Warner
It’s not easy being the only smartass, largely uninformed Social Democrat in a family of complacent, church-going conservatives – but somebody’s got to do it. In the debut installment of my new SG column Armchair Politics, I’ll be taking a half-assed gander at the week’s political news with the un-researched perspective of an underpaid know-it-all college graduate with a twenty year-old car and $160 thousand dollars in student loan debt. Why does my opinion matter? Because it’s on the internet, duh.
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by Carrie Borzillo
“If you fuck with me then that’s it.”
– Sharon Osbourne
Sharon Osbourne has been a lot of things over the years. She’s been a tough-as-nails manager, a famed rock wife, a concert promoter, a cancer survivor, a mother of three complex children (and leader of a pack of sometimes unruly dogs), a television personality with multiple shows, and now she’s added the title of headmistress to her bag of tricks.
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by Edward Kelly
I pride myself on knowing quite a bit about TV. Sure, the shows I have backed this season have been canceled (Lone Star and Terriers) and sometimes I tend to read far too much into the more trashy fare (Jersey Shore) but, hey, that’s part of being a fan of America’s most populist art form. Sometimes you just make some bad calls.
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by Brett Warner
Throughout the course of human history, men and women have done a lot of crazy things for love. Orlando Bloom caused the Trojan War, Cleopatra and Latin music sensation Marc Anthony both committed suicide, and I’ve sat through at least three episodes of my girlfriend’s favorite reality show, Jersey Shore.
The ongoing misadventures of carrot people Snooki, Pauly D, JWoww, The Situation, Vinny, Ronnie, and Sammi (my spell check just lost its friggin’ mind typing all of that) broke MTV records to become the highest viewed program in the cable network’s decreasingly illustrious history with 8.45 million viewers. Still, watching these unfathomably successful people preoccupy themselves with fighting, fucking, hot-tubbing, and other asinine, “who gives a shit?” circumstances that reality television twists into a botched, Frankenstein version of what the Greeks used to call drama always seems to engage that part of the brain that’ll start flashing sirens when you smoke a cigarette, huff a tube of industrial glue, or take a nap with your head inside the oven – I know this is really bad for me, but I’m going to do it anyway.
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