Day 412: Spun-Off & Spun-Out (Part 2)

originally published February 15, 2013 Some topics are simply too large to be contained within a single article. A month ago I marveled at some of television’s more obscure spin-offs, but I only scratched the surface. Television networks have a habit of trying to stretch their audience’s limit of how much of a good thing […]

Day 379: Spun-Off & Spun-Out (Part 1)

originally published January 13, 2013 Everyone loves a spinoff. It’s a bankable bet for a TV network: guide viewers of a successful franchise into a new world, either featuring a character from the original or some people who are – they swear – friends of someone from the original (usually aired in what they call […]

Day 359: The Thrill Of The Impossible Hunt

originally published December 24, 2012 As a symbol of unrelenting persistence in the face of a seemingly unconquerable goal, you’d be hard-pressed to find a greater role model than Wile E. Coyote. My dad used to tell me this, and though he passed away before ever having achieved his own ultimate goal (total dominion over […]

Day 355: Stinking Up The Kessel Run – Worst TV Part 3

originally published December 20, 2012 As a child reared amid the glow of the legend of the greatest film trilogy of all time, a number of given facts about the Star Wars universe were firmly entrenched in my mind. Looking back to that hazy period in between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, here […]

Day 353: The Contest

originally published December 18, 2012 Fans of the show Seinfeld are the perfect demographic to mesh up with fans of my site. Both are really about nothing, and both (hopefully) leave their viewers with some little bit of meaninglessness they can carry through the day. For Seinfeld viewers, it might be a new term, like […]

Day 324: IPLA2WN!

originally published November 19, 2012 When I was a kid, on those glorious mornings when something – a cold, a flu, that time I walked up to the makeup counter at the Bay and ate all their lipstick – would keep me home from school, I loved to watch game shows. There was something about […]

Day 306: Scanning The Sludge – Worst TV Part 2

originally published November 1, 2012 Sometimes there’s nothing more fun than laughing at someone else’s complete and total failure. Until you realize that quite often those people got paid for their failures. In the case of these terrible television shows – all plucked from that fetid, rotting tree known as reality TV – the producers, […]

Day 304: Masters Of Darkness

originally published October 30, 2012 I have a cluttered drawer of memory from my childhood television addiction, of tuning in to some late-night monster-movie show on one of our local channels. It was hosted by Elvira, the self-proclaimed Mistress of the Dark, and as a child it always left me confused. On the one hand, […]

Day 269: The Bitter Pill Of Reality TV

originally published September 25, 2012 Everyone I know claims to despise reality television. Still, everyone I know has a single exception – some piece of scriptless drek that keeps them tuned in, despite their invested time running counter to the logic of their convictions. That’s okay, we all need a vice of mindless buffoonery. Maybe […]

Day 250: The Big Spoiler

originally published September 6, 2012 Today is the 250th day of 2012. Today is also the day I cross a quarter-million words written this year. “Official” words, anyhow – only once have I landed square on 1000 words and not gone over. I am halfway to the halfway mark, and to the 500th-Article party I […]