As predicted, last night's Top Chef: Las Vegas premiere featured a sin-related challenge, a parade of showgirls and a bloody relay to shell clams. As usual, this season features "the most accomplished group" of chef-testants yet and we can only remember the weird-looking ones a day later. But if we've learned anything from our past Top Chef experience, it's that getting attached to any of these enterprising entrée-makers only results in heartbreak and living vicariously through a cooking show. It's already too late for us.
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Though rumors abound of Paula Abdul's eventual return to American Idol, her manager David Sonenberg is now administering acid to our eyes with a Super Soaker. Sonenberg gave an interview to Los Angeles Times in which he's defused speculation that Abdul may still helm a chair at the judges' table. Unfortunately, this is one of those somber occasions where Twitter was right.
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If it wasn't enough that Lost has already scavenged Deadwood of Kim Dickens, Paula Malcomson, William Sanderson, and Robin Weigert, this latest casting should pretty much tear it. THR is reporting that Deadwood's John Hawkes is joining Lost's final season as scruffy spokesperson "Lennon," though take that with a grain of salt, as Lost producers often like to come up with cover names and alternate character descriptions while casting. Hey, Kings is off the air now -- can we add Ian McShane as the black smoke's dad? [THR]
In the buttery light of Mad Men's Sterling Cooper offices, Mother-Jonesing upstart Peggy Olson holds a clue to an upcoming episode's foray into the increasingly happenin' 1963. Is it a sexy-lady fountain pen that calls to mind the indefatigable derriere of Joan Holloway? Or maybe a Gene Pitney-themed lollipop, one that reinforces Peggy's relative infancy and inability to cope with the British Invasion? A Chinese finger-trap? The teensy testicles of Roger Sterling? Thanks to spoiler photos posted today on ONTD, the telltale object, as well as Peggy's warlord grip, are revealed after the jump.
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Stationing the sixth season of television's classiest food competition series in Las Vegas seems like a genius marketing move: take advantage of the city's Hangover afterglow, give Padma Lakshmi a reason to shake out her immaculately straightened hair and finally incorporate that C-plot in which a coke-jittered Toby Young races to each competition with a dead hooker in his trunk. But this is buttoned-up Top Chef, not Real World Chefs or Hell's Kitchen and we will rarely see the chefs outside of the studio kitchen (or the nearest Whole Foods). So buckle up for a season of carefully designed Vegas-themed challenges. Expect showgirls! Poker chips! And sin-themed quickfires!
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One day before the Lifetime network's giant premiere block of Project Runway, The Project Runway All-Star Challenge, and the spin-off series Models of the Runway, our focus shifts towards the enigmatic last entry in that list. While Lifetime will inevitably treat Project Runway with the kind of nervous care administered to Tim Gunn's pearl follicles or steam-ironing Michael Kors's face, we question the attention given to (and the validity of) a show chronicling the least interesting facet of the Runway rigmarole. After all, season two vet Zulema Griffin can only emerge in a comical burglar mask and force the ladies into a hostage-situation walk-off once.
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Like millions of my fellow Americans obsessed with Bravo's Flipping Out, basic cable's searching portrait of how a man afflicted with the crippling one-two punch of Obsessive-Compulsive and Narcissistic Personality Disorders can parlay said handicaps into a lucrative career in short-term real estate and interior design, I had been breathlessly awaiting the premiere of the new season. Indeed, Jeff Lewis -- its star, its all-consuming center, its creator and destroyer of harmonious living environments -- haunted my dreams to such a degree that I often awoke in the middle of the night, tape measure in hand, to make sure I hadn't accidentally nudged the coffee table an inch too far away from the couch; failure to do so meant another night of Lewis's voice passive-aggressively hissing, "Well, if you want the entire room to be totally out of whack, I'm not gonna stop you. But I wouldn't be able to live like that. Like an animal, really," through a fresh nightmare.
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The Nadya "Octomom" Suleman story should be deader than Laurence Olivier, but there haven't been enough obnoxious celebrity scandals this year to displace her from the gossip pages or late night monologue jokes. It's hardly surprising that Fox won the bidding war for La Ochomadre's "unseen footage" and it makes us wistful for the days when Fox needed sensationalism to get any attention (now it's just Fox News).
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Television news is the way it is today -- or, at least the way it was, before it was crowded out by satire and the carnival atmosphere of cable bloviating -- because of Don Hewitt. The newsman died today at 86 after a long career that included production of the Nixon/Kennedy debates for television, behind-the-scenes direction of Walter Cronkite and Edgar R. Murrow, the pioneering of methods that would lead to the TelePrompTer, and the creation of 60 Minutes. I know you're taking a moment to appreciate all those achievements while simultaneously wondering, "Which one was he in The Insider?" so let me answer that, too.
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ABC released a photo from the upcoming season premiere of Grey's Anatomy today, perhaps to remind America that its breakout nude video star and the reigning queen of public complaints aren't just tabloid commodities - they also act in a Shonda Rhimes joint that will return to television on September 24. It might take more than a staged set photo to tear McSteamy-fans away from watching Eric Dane remember his childhood dog Cocaine in the buff though, so TV Guide Magazine offered up some spoilers, after the jump.
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NBC's slow and steady build-up to September's unveiling of The Jay Leno Show has created little anticipation for the desk-free, car-racing, correspondent-heavy Tonight Show derivative. In fact, Movieline pretty much declared the primetime experiment to be dead on arrival. Earlier today though, The Hollywood Reporter detected a faint pulse on TJLS with the discovery of a dark promo in which Jay and Fred Armisen commit vehicular homicide in one of Leno's vintage cars.
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The basketball player known as Shaquille O'Neal may not have too many seasons left in the tank, but the media personality known as Shaq is just warming up. His last televised challenge was taking on childhood obesity, but now he ventures to far-flung locales like Pittsburgh to compete against fellow athlete luminaries in their chosen sports. Does it matter if he beats them? Not really. Does Shaq need to do another show to prove that he has the most charisma of any living athlete? Definitely not.
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When ABC announced a string of C-List celebrity contestants to ring in Who Wants To Be a Millionaire's 10th anniversary, we expected producers to throw together a series of topics usually featured in magazines found on an airplane. Proving us all wrong, Reeg served Patricia Heaton a currency conversion question last night that quickly sent the Everybody Loves Raymond co-star into a disastrous podium meltdown reminiscent of SNL's most excruciating Celebrity Jeopardy skit.
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Of the many not-particularly-interesting things about Jay Leno, his exotic car collection is arguably the very least interesting -- a rich man's hobby that offers the viewer little by way of entertainment or relatability, no matter how enthusiastically he lays on the "Dixie"-playing horn of his WWI-era, high-speed touring roadster outside a crowded Fuddruckers in Burbank. Still, among members of that exclusive club of breakthrough comedians who earn a gazillion dollars per year or more, autophilia is an extremely popular practice, with lengthy provisions woven into their pre-nups that retain all cars upon divorce, and, in some extreme cases, permit for instances of extramarital sex, so long as it is conducted upon a chrome exhaust pipe.
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Looks like Sal wasn't the only one to receive a surprise happy ending: Mad Men's third season opener got the best ratings in the show's history. 2.8 million viewers tuned in, an audience 34% larger than the one that watched last season's premiere. Over the course of its repeat airings, it drew a total of 4 million viewers. That's a lot of serviceable bellboys! [LA Times]
