...more recent posts
metropolis on tcm at 1215am tonight.
sustenance or tv jamboree?
Saw the season opener to Top Chef. They sort of had a "compulsories" section. Two contestants had a soufflé-off, two had a chicken picata showdown, two had lasagna mano a mano, etc., etc.
So the soufflé folks didn't really know how to make them. One said he hadn't done one in twenty years. He at least understood the magnitude of his failure. When his vaguely mexican inspired creation failed, he said "My nachos just didn't cut it".
Over in the crab-cake fisticuffs, one of the guys didn't know the recipe for mayo. WTF? How can you go into a Top Chef contest lacking such a fundamental building block of making sauces? It's like not knowing how to deglaze a pan.
I guess I haven't seen the early elimination rounds in previous years. I think they need to cut the field in half pretty quickly.
The best college game in the history of the world?
that doc about kenny shopsin is on ifc tonight at 930.
Watching the 2007 Top Chef finale. This phrase gets me every time ... "rack of lamb poached in duck fat".
"saving grace" is in the middle of a three-night condensed recap on TNT HD prior to starting the second season. the four episodes last night were pretty good. holly hunter's character has more depth than a typical tv character.
hillary is on the daily show tonight.
pre-code night on tcm tonight including a new documentary, Thou Shalt Not Sin . will tivo if not watch norma shearers oscar winning turn in The Divorcee.
things to do when you cant sleep.
Her abrupt and public exit from “Gilmore Girls” in the spring of 2006 over a contract dispute could have left her stigmatized as unmanageable, but her abilities proved too much of a draw. Weeks after her departure was announced, she was working on “Jezebel James,” which Fox has scheduled for a March 14 debut.
For Ms. Sherman-Palladino, the show represents more than the opportunity to put the contentious history of “Gilmore Girls” behind her, to prove that she was right to butt heads, bruise egos and burn bridges to gain the creative latitude she required. Now that she has sold Fox on herself and her methodology, she can demonstrate that she still makes the kind of emotionally engaging television that is worth fighting over.
As Ms. Sherman-Palladino put it, “I don’t want to sit there and go, ‘Ucch, if I had just gone with my instinct, if I had just cast this person, or fought them on this.’ You don’t want to fail not having really put up a fight.”
These sides of Ms. Sherman-Palladino were already in evidence in 1999 when she began developing the series that became “Gilmore Girls.” At the time she was an Emmy Award-nominated former writer from “Roseanne” — one who had both struggled and thrived under that show’s notoriously temperamental star — with an idea for a series about the kinship between a young mother and her precocious teenage daughter.