Last night's Big Brother marked the calm after the storms wrought by Hurricane Ka-Chima and emotional drinker Lydia. Suddenly lacking houseguests that will destroy microphones or engage in angry steroid sex, the Big Brother editors worked overtime to assemble a shirtless Jeff montage and manipulate a no-stakes poker game into a strangely anticlimactic fight. To tie these heavily butchered sequences together and keep viewers from switching the channel, producers tapped the only charismatic player left in the house for an episode-long commentary full of snaps, tone inflections and dramatic eye rolls.
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Join us, if you will, for another leisurely stroll around the Sterling Cooper offices to see who's up, who's down, and who's running in place, pausing occasionally to chat with the gals in the secretarial pool or to press a highball glass against a closed door to get some insight into what's actually going on. Without further ado, your Mad Men Power Rankings for Week Two:
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It usually takes years before an "artist" (the term may be used with unprecedented looseness throughout this article) steals from a peer -- Christina Aguilera waited almost half a decade to mime Madonna's "Frozen" video with the costuming in her "Fighter" clip, and Madonna waited 15 years to plagiarize a Bangladeshi composer for the instrumental to "Frozen." Heidi Montag, screw the nay-sayers, is ahead of the curve! The Hills star's debut performance during last night's Miss Universe Pageant ripped off pop culture history and nearly hampered the winning amble of Miss Venezuela.
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After an ambitious season opener promised a slick, season-long tapestry of exciting new story threads, Mad Men made a bit of a mess last night squeezing a few more plots and subplots into episode two. On one hand, yes, everyone knew Peggy Olson would not spend the rest of the season at the bottom of Movieline's Mad Men power rankings. On the other hand, wait and see if the phrase "Betty's dad" doesn't catch on a popular new euphemism for "fast forward, please." And as for everything we found in between?
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Saturday Night Live just announced the host of its 35th season premiere, and it's not an unfunny basketball player (Lebron James, season 33) or an unfunny Olympian (Michael Phelps, season 34). Nope, it's Megan Fox, the star of daily Maxim photo spreads and over one movie. Mind you, Fox hasn't landed enough marquees to prove herself either funny or unfunny. I imagine she's nervous ahead of her primetime debut, and so I've penned five pitches for the young actress.
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Bill Maher's once-a-week HBO talk show practically screams "DVR Me So You Can Skim This Over the Weekend," but he deserves better. Heavy political comedy from a host who usually seems a bit stoned should be savored, not rushed. Maher's not quite a fine wine, but at least he can say anything he wants without offending advertisers (or Sarah Palin).
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Sure, you didn't see it advertised on any of channels you watch, but Lifetime actually managed to set a huge record with its premiere of Project Runway's new season last night. How big were the ratings?
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Ever yearned for a high-production value porndaptation of your favorite Tina Fey joint, complete with Black to the Future sketches, vibrating toy jokes and an exceptionally libidinous Jenna Maroney surrogate? Consider your wait over, because New Sensations, the adult studio behind XXX parodies of The Office, Scrubs and Seinfeld, has released an X-rated 30 Rock. Take a look at what's in store for Limon, Jake, Trey Jordan and Ken after the jump.
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Well. After 210 minutes of Runway-branded television last night, you'd think we'd come away from things with an associate's degree in design, whiny confessional skills, and leggings. Instead we got the following: commericals assuring us that Sandra Bullock will have orange hair in an awkward upcoming movie, and confirmation during the All-Star Challenge that Daniel Vosovic has always been Nina Garcia's favorite (Uli was robbed! I am always right.). We also learned that zany-eyed designers who "don't sketch" their designs ahead of time always get cut -- this time, in the first episode.
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This morning, FX announced two new half-hour series, The League and Louie, bringing the network's comedy count to a record high of four. They join Archer and FX veteran, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia which returns September 17 for its fifth season. In a recently released Sunny season preview, it looks like everybody's favorite Philadelphia bar gang will entangle themselves in messes with surrogacy, Ponzi schemes, long-distance dating, wrestling and even kitten mittens. Take a look at the the preview after the jump.
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NBC announced its latest pack of Biggest Loser contestants today, 16 individuals with "big personalities," who are willing to drop the shame-eating for three Subway meals a day. The eighth season, premiering September 15, will have a second chances theme and use a single-contestant format instead of the team format used in recent seasons. Take a look at the roster after the jump.
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If you fell asleep after drinking an entire bottle of Quickfire Cabernet Sauvignon as Rick Bayless prepared his Top Chef Masters-winning 20 ingredient mole and completely missed Octomom: The Incredible Unseen Footage, despair not. The Fox freak show would have totally killed your buzz and sunk you deeper into depression knowing that somewhere, fourteen kids were wailing as their mother preened for the cameras, dissed Kate Gosselin, got an angel tattoo and chattered about her house being haunted.
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Lifetime kicks off 210 minutes of Project Runway-related premieres, specials, and spinoffs tonight with the Project Runway All-Stars Challenge, a one-time competition between eight of the show's glossy veterans. One lucky seamster walks away from tonight's Nicole Kidman-graced festivities with $100,000 and whatever anklets they filch from the Bluefly/Macy's/Limited Too Accessory Wall, and some of these combatants clearly deserve the title (and the shears of a beauty school sophomore; ahem, Sebelia) more than others. Let's run down the odds, starting with the scrubbiest vet and working our way toward the soundbite-spewing tailor with the greatest chance of receiving Heidi's garbled congratulations. So, who ranks where?
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It's still a few more weeks before the rebooted Melrose Place premieres, but at least we know its creators can deliver a potent cocktail of "They said what?" shock value. In fact, they've already gotten started themselves, if some of executive producer Todd Slavkin's statements to E! are any indication.
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Much was made over the Project Runway network shift and no one can say that Lifetime isn't taking advantage of the attention. There are three-plus hours of fashion forward viewing tonight so even the most insatiable PR fan will probably be hungover tomorrow from all of that fabric purchasing and sewing.
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