Television Shows And Schedules 2014 & 2013

Fall 2014 TV Scorecard: Which Shows Are Returning? Which Aren't?

(By TV Guide News, 24 February 2014)

Will your favorite shows be back next year? Check out our breakdown below and check back often for the latest renewal/cancellation news.

RENEWED FOR 2014-2015 SEASON

American Dad (moving to TBS)
Arrow (CW)
The Blacklist (NBC)
Bob's Burgers (Fox)
Bones (Fox)
Family Guy (Fox)
Glee (Fox)
Masterchef Junior (Fox)
The Originals (CW)
The Simpsons (Fox)
Reign (CW)
Sleepy Hollow (Fox)
So You Think You Can Dance (Fox)
Supernatural (CW)
The Vampire Diaries (CW)

LOOKING GOOD
2 Broke Girls (CBS)
The Amazing Race  (CBS)
American Idol (Fox)
America's Next Top Model (CW)
The Bachelor (ABC)
The Bachelorette (ABC)
The Biggest Loser (NBC)
Blue Bloods (CBS)
The Big Bang Theory (CBS)
Brooklyn Nine-Nine (Fox)
Castle (ABC)
Chicago Fire (NBC)
Chicago PD (NBC)
Community (NBC)
CSI (CBS)
The Crazy Ones (CBS)
Dancing With the Stars (ABC)
Criminal Minds (CBS)
The Goldbergs (ABC)
Elementary (CBS)
The Following (Fox)
The Good Wife (CBS)
Grey's Anatomy (ABC)
Grimm (NBC)
Hawaii Five-0 (CBS)
Kitchen Nightmares (Fox)
Last Man Standing (ABC)
Law & Order: SVU (NBC)
Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (ABC)
The Middle (ABC)
Mike & Molly (CBS)
The Millers (CBS)
The Mindy Project (Fox)
Modern Family (ABC)
NCIS (CBS)
NCIS: Los Angeles (CBS)
New Girl (Fox)
Once Upon a Time (ABC)
Parks and Recreation (NBC)
Parenthood (NBC)
Person of Interest (CBS)
Revenge (ABC)
Scandal (ABC)
Shark Tank (ABC)
Suburgatory (ABC)
Survivor (CBS)
Undercover Boss (CBS)
The Voice (NBC)

LOOKING NOT  SO GOOD

Almost Human (Fox)
Beauty and the Beast (CW)
Betrayal (ABC)
The Carrie Diaries (CW)
Dads (Fox)
Dracula (NBC)
Enlisted (Fox)
Hart of Dixie (CW)
Hostages (CBS)
Intelligence (CBS)
The Mentalist (CBS)
Mom (CBS)
Nashville (ABC)
The Neighbors (ABC)
Once Upon a Time in Wonderland (ABC)
Raising Hope (Fox)
Rake (Fox)
Revolution (NBC)
Super Fun Night  (ABC)
The Tomorrow People (CW)
Trophy Wife (ABC)
Two and a Half Men (CBS)
Us & Them (Fox)

TOO SOON TO TELL/NOT YET PREMIERED

The 100 (CW)
About a Boy (NBC)
American Dream Builders (NBC)
Believe (NBC)
Crisis (NBC)
Friends with Better Lives (CBS)
Gang Related (Fox)
Growing Up Fisher (NBC)
Hannibal (NBC)
Mind Games (ABC)
Mixology (ABC)
Night Shift  (NBC)
Reckless (CBS)
Resurrection (ABC)
Star-Crossed (CW)
Surviving Jack (Fox)
Undateable (NBC)

CANCELED/ENDING

The Assets (ABC)
Back in the Game (ABC)
How I Met Your Mother (CBS)
Ironside (NBC)
Killer Women (ABC)
Lucky 7 (ABC)
The Michael J. Fox Show (NBC)
Nikita (CW)
Sean Saves the World (NBC)
We Are Men (CBS)
Welcome to the Family (NBC)
The X Factor (Fox)

 http://www.tvguide.com/News/Fall-TV-Schedule-1005618.aspx?et=watchlist-notification&lt=news

 

The 2013 Fall TV season is rolling in right now, way too early since I was enjoying the chance to catch up on several things that have slipped through the cracks in my pop culture focus.  I got into several web series (The Guild, Burning Love, Walking Dead- Cold Storage) some TV series that I never got to when I first heard of them (The League. Longmire) and a BBC series that got some love at Comic Con (Orphan Black). 

 

Now I have 30 new series vying for my attention and I still haven't gotten a chance to watch the final season of Burn Notice.  I didn't have enough time in the day to do everything I needed or wanted to do during the summer so imagine what it will be like now.  On the plus side though, The Walking Dead will soon be back and Agents Of SHIELD is now on.  Below is my TV grid- green means watching in real time or first priority on the VCR and yellow means I'll watch later, on-demand, or when the main show has a rerun or preemption. If you don't see a show listed here, that means I have no plans to watch it (i.e. Dads, Revenge, NCIS Los Angeles, The Originals, Dracula, The Neighbors- how did that get renewed?) 

 

 

 

 

Fall TV 2013: Reviews Of All The New Shows

(By Hank Stuever, Washington Post, 13 September 2013)

Masters of Sex

Sunday, Sept. 29, 10 p.m., Showtime

Liberally adapted from Thomas Maier’s thorough 2009 biography of the pioneering sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson, Showtime’s provocative new drama has no problems whatsoever grabbing attention and whatever else that wants to get grabbed. The setting is the prim American ’50s, where well-respected St. Louis gynecologist Masters (Michael Sheen) is secretly exploring the greater mysteries of human sexuality, mainly by convincing prostitutes to let him spy on them through peepholes while they do their work.

What Masters doesn’t know about women could (and eventually does) fill several books, but things get interesting when a new secretary at his hospital applies to be his research assistant. She is, of course, Virginia Johnson (played by Lizzy Caplan), a single mother with a forward-thinking sensibility about her own sex life. As a science project, “Masters of Sex” is an early success; Sheen seems to relish playing the uptight doctor who is beginning to understand the way his world restricts women (in and out of the bedroom) and Caplan is instantly perfect as the woman who will both teach and enchant him.

But none of that is happening too fast. “Masters of Sex” masters the restrained narrative equivalent of seduction and foreplay, building its story in a controlled and stylish (and, yes, frankly adult-oriented) manner. This TV season has failed to arouse me, but if there’s one show that might hit the right spot on the Sunday DVR queue, it’s this one. Grade: B+

Trophy Wife

Tuesday, Sept. 24, 9:30 p.m., ABC

Co-creator Sarah Haskins based this appealingly manic sitcom on her own experiences after marrying a man 20 years older who has kids from a previous marriage. Malin Ackerman stars as Kate, who has married Pete (“The West Wing’s” Bradley Whitford) and, a year later, is still trying to navigate her role as a stepmom to Pete’s four children from his previous marriages (yes, plural) to Diane (Marcia Gay Harden) and Jackie (“Enlightened’s” Michaela Watkins).

“Trophy Wife” is the only new sitcom that clears the double hurdles of cast chemistry and story pacing in the pilot episode. That’s mostly because the premise isn’t wielded like a frying pan to the head and the grown-ups in “Trophy Wife” are entertaining to watch and believably flawed; the kids are a common TV assortment of precociousness, but they’re also talented wiseacres. “Trophy Wife” is no “Modern Family,” but it’s as close as we’ll hope to see this season. (And, in the tradition of “Cougar Town,” the show has been given a title that is far less worthy of its aim.) Grade: B

Lucky 7

Tuesday, Sept. 24, 10 p.m., ABC

Based on the British drama “The Syndicate” and sent through the Hollywood tweaking machine, this drama is about eight employees at a Queens gas station whose lives change after they win the state lottery.

Each week the gang at Gold Star Gas N’ Shop pools its money to bet the same lottery numbers. Just as things are getting desperate for Matt (Matt Long) and his ex-con brother Nicky (Stephen Louis Grush), the winning numbers miraculously come through. The group has won $45 million to split, but there’s immediate upset, since one of the workers didn’t put his money in the pool. This is just the beginning of a sequence of mo’-money problems that will form “Lucky 7’s” overall story arc, as each winner faces her or his own crises and demons.

I’m immediately impressed with “Lucky 7’s” ensemble cast and how quickly the story drew me in and hinted at some further mysteries. Part of that has to do with my relief at watching any drama that isn’t a crime procedural, yet “Lucky 7” also has some moral rumination and complexity to it. It’s basically a caper disguised as a drama, and we could use a caper on prime-time TV. Grade: B

Ironside

Wednesday, Oct. 2, 10 p.m., NBC

A slick and even satisfying revamp of one of those crime shows my parents watched in the ’70s (what’s next — “The Streets of San Francisco”?), this time with Blair Underwood as shrewd New York police sergeant Robert Ironside, who heads up a team of detectives (including “Orange Is the New Black’s” Pablo Schreiber) assigned to crack tough cases and crack heads when necessary.  Everything’s changed since Raymond Burr, the original “Ironside,” rolled up in his wheelchair, even wheelchairs. Taking its cues from a generation that prizes the overcoming of adversity as a prevailing narrative, this “Ironside” preoccupies itself with emphasizing its main character’s strength, physicality and virility, a task the 49-year-old Underwood handles well. Sgt. Ironside’s key advantage is his handicapability; when a fellow detective asks how he spotted a clue no one else sees, Ironside says: “I’ve got a different view of the world down here.”

But “Ironside” is also interested in the ways its protagonist copes with and resents his confinement, retracing the events that paralyzed him from the waist down, as well as the ways his partner (“The Killing’s” Brent Sexton) blames himself for what happened that night. There’s an interesting psychological drama to explore here, if “Ironside’s” writers and its seasoned cast can resist the easy, repetitive lure of cop-show pro-forma.  Grade: B

Brooklyn Nine-Nine

Tuesday, Sept. 17, 8:30 p.m., Fox

“Saturday Night Live” alum Andy Samberg stars as Jake Peralta, a smart but slacking detective who doesn’t have much use for rules or procedure; his un­or­tho­dox behavior is tolerated mainly because he solves cases. Jake’s world is upended slightly when a tough new captain (Andre Braugher) takes over the 99th precinct. The two men play well off one another, and a skilled supporting cast (Joe Lo Truglio, Terry Crews, Chelsea Peretti, Stephanie Beatriz) ensures that “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” doesn’t devolve into Samberg overload.  Long ago, actual police officers were purported to have said that the 1970s sitcom “Barney Miller” showed a far more accurate depiction of their lives than the cop dramas. No one will accuse “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” of too much authenticity, but it does have a confident breeziness in its banter that almost immediately locates a “Miller”-esque balance in the more absurd aspects of law enforcement. Grade: B-

Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Tuesday, Sept. 24, 8 p.m., ABC

Co-created by geek idol Joss Whedon (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer”), this hyperactive series plucked from the Marvel comic-book canon is an epilogue to Whedon’s big-screen “Avengers” adaptation, in which the U.S. government grapples with the existence of mutant superheroes and aliens.  Clark Gregg reprises his role from the big-screen “Iron Man” and “Avengers” films as the newly resurrected Agent Coulson, who assembles an international team of agents who all work for the mysterious S.H.I.E.L.D. (Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division, with all those annoying periods intact) whose mission is to . . . start a list, I guess? Jetting the globe in their tricked-out jet, the agents hunt for everyday people with superpowers, hoping to find them before a sinister group known as Rising Tide gets to them first.

“Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” launches with a plucky, adventuresome and remarkably non-pretentious pilot episode, but if you haven’t been reading Marvel Comics lately (or at all — Stan Lee first dreamed up a S.H.I.E.L.D. story line in 1965), then the show can feel somewhat exclusionary and, frankly, a little too cornball and cutesy about its own geekiness. There’s an opportunity here to riff on the contemporary issue of government intrusion and Wikileaks paranoia, but, in its first episode at least, “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” seems more like a Comic-Con afterparty in which not enough people came dressed as superheroes. Grade: B-

The Crazy Ones

Thursday, Sept. 26, 9 p.m., CBS

From David E. Kelley (“Ally McBeal,” “Boston Legal”), “The Crazy Ones” heralds Robin Williams’s return to TV (where we first met him as Mork from Ork 36 years ago), but, more interestingly, it represents a tonal shift for CBS in terms of comedy that includes “We Are Men.”  Williams plays the hyperactive-but-brilliant founder of a successful of Chicago-based ad agency; Sarah Michelle Gellar plays his daughter, who tries to keep the agency solvent and sane. There’s a lot of energy to cram into a half-hour episode, not all of it coming from Williams; a real standout is the increasingly interesting James Wolk (Bob Benson from “Mad Men”). The first episode is uneven as the pieces and pace don’t quite cohere, but it leaves you wanting more. For my longer review, see Page 13. Grade: B-

Dracula

Friday, Oct. 25, 10 p.m., NBC

A tip of the top hat to NBC for taking on a period drama — a lavish and risky proposition even in the best of times. Loosely derived from Bram Stoker’s novel, this “Dracula” stars Jonathan Rhys Meyers (“The Tudors”) as a revivified Vlad the Impaler, brought back from ossified, subterranean exile by an unlikely ally to wage battle against an age-old Order of the Dragon that has ensconced itself in Victorian-era upper society.  Disguising himself as an American entrepreneur named Alexander Grayson, Dracula arrives on the London scene in 1896 and sets about undermining (and frequently snacking on) the ruling class, hoping to exact his revenge on the Order for what their forbears did to him centuries ago.  “Dracula” shows a lot of skill when it comes to launching a swift-paced series and weaving together several taut story lines and characters; at times it even finds an undiscovered sweet spot between “Downton Abbey” and Bela Lugosi. Rhys Meyers is an adequately creepy vampire and there is sex, style, mystery and ad­ven­ture all around. Only one crucial piece is missing: “Dracula” isn’t scary. Grade: B-

Derek

Available now for streaming on Netflix

Ricky Gervais writes, directs and stars in this tenderhearted ensemble mockumentary about an enthusiastic employee at the Broad Hill retirement home. The show is a risk for Gervais, who combs his hair over and juts his jaw into an underbite in order to play the title character; we are to understand that Derek is not quite right but none of the words for it seem apt. (Simple? Special? Mentally disabled? Autistic?)  It’s ingenious that “Derek” is less preoccupied with a diagnosis and more focused on the minuscule but meaningful ways that Derek interacts with his elderly charges. The only problem is an overall feeling of hesi­ta­tion — on Gervais’s part, but also on his audience’s. You’re so braced for something to snap, for the comedy to stray into no-no land, that it’s hard to relax and appreciate “Derek’s” emotional intent.

A strong supporting cast (including Kerry Godliman as the facility’s overworked manager and Karl Pilkington as the handyman) does what it can, but after a few episodes, “Derek” becomes less absorbing; it’s more of a character sketch than a fully realized story. Grade: C+

Mom

Monday, Sept. 23, 9:30 p.m., CBS

Chuck Lorre, CBS’s resident sitcom rainmaker, returns with “Mom,” in which Anna Faris plays Christy, a recovering alcoholic raising two children and working as a waitress at a fancy restaurant. At an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, she runs into her newly sober mother (Allison Janney) and the two attempt to repair their testy relationship. “Some mothers teach their daughters how to bake,” Christy tells her AA group. “Mine taught me how to beat a cavity search and still look like a lady.”

“Mom” has a dismissive, certainly blunt, Charlie Sheen-like snarkitude about relationships, dysfunction, drug use, promiscuity, teen sex, deadbeat dads and whatever else comes it way. Some examples: At the restaurant, the snooty chef (French Stewart) tells an employee to “Beat those egg whites gently, as if they were a small, annoying child.” At another moment, Christy’s young son Roscoe (Blake Garrett Rosenthal) excitedly discovers a video game where “If you hit the hooker enough times, she gives you your money back!” And when Christy’s teenage daughter (Sadie Calvano) swears she isn’t having sex, Christy replies: “Don’t lie to the woman who washes your sheets.”  Janney and Faris seem to have fun, even when the material in the pilot episode is a tad too seedy and even off-puttingly icy. If “Mom” could dial it down a notch, it would find a better balance between bawdy and snide. Grade: C+

Hostages

Monday, Sept. 23, 10 p.m., CBS

With its big red PREMISE ALERT flashing like crazy, CBS’s experimental new drama is this season’s most alluring act of derring-do; it’s also the show that’s hardest to swallow. Toni Collette stars as a top-notch surgeon who will perform a tricky life-saving operation on the U.S. president. But the night before the surgery, a group of masked men (led by a rogue FBI agent played by Dylan McDermott) breaks into her house and takes her family hostage. If she doesn’t agree to secretly assassinate the president, it’s curtains for her family.

Throughout the pilot, you’ll wonder why this couldn’t all be handled in a mediocre two-hour action movie, mainly so that Collette will be free to keep searching for work more befitting her talent. Is there really a series here? Yes, the producers assure us — the relationship between the hostages and their captors will evolve as facts emerge and conspiracies take over. “Hostages” is based on an Israeli series (just like “Homeland” was, with the same frantic baseline addiction to the terror milieu), and it exudes the kind of taut confidence that CBS likes in its dramas. It’s handsomely made and yet patently ridiculous. Grade: C+

The Millers

Thursday, Oct. 3, 8:30 p.m., CBS

Beau Bridges and Emmy nominee Margo Martindale (“The Americans”) star as Tom and Carol Miller, who, after 43 years of marital bickering, decide to split up once they learn of their son’s impending divorce. Carol moves in with the son, local TV reporter Nathan Miller (“Arrested Development’s” Will Arnett, in the latest of what appear to be his limitless chances at finding a sitcom gig), while Tom moves in with Nathan’s sister (“Glee’s” Jayma Mays) and her husband (“Veep’s” Nelson Franklin) and daughter.

“The Millers,” which was still undergoing some tweaking at press time, does have its bitterly funny scenes, leaning heavily on Martindale and Bridges. When they start going at it, there’s a glimmer of something mean and magic. But the show suffers from the same banal characteristics of most paint-by-numbers network sitcoms, right down to the predictable addition of Nathan’s BBF (“Black Best Friend”) played here by “Curb Your Enthusiasm’s” J.B. Smoove.  As it tries to find its way, “The Millers” has at least locked in on a central theme, or something like it: Divorce is just hilarious, if you include enough references to elderly flatulence. Grade: C+

Reign

Thursday, Oct. 17, 9 p.m., The CW

You guyyyyys: Instead of “Stairway to Heaven” as a prom theme, how about 16th-century France? (The dresses are sooo pretty! There’s a castle! The boys can all wear tight leather pants!)  And lo, once you get past the utter silliness of the idea, “Reign” is kind of a kick. Adelaide Kane stars as Mary, Teen Queen of Scots, who has been living a sheltered life in a country convent, betrothed to Prince Francis (Toby Regbo), the heir to the French throne. After a thwarted assassination attempt, the nuns decide Mary will be safer in the royal court. A coterie of childhood friends arrives from Scotland to keep her company and pretty soon “Reign” becomes a parade of interchangeable paper dolls and swoony romance pageantry, with plenty of inter-palace intrigue.

In a way, “Reign” is only trying to partake in the same fashionable fun that filmmaker Sofia Coppola had at Versailles with her 2006 take on “Marie Antoinette,” replete with contemporary pop songs; it’s not feloniously inaccurate and at least it’s not vampires. Someone is always trying to kill Mary, whom a younger, hotter Nostradamus (I mean, really) has ominously predicted will bring disaster to the palace power structure.  That thud you just heard was a history professor who passed out. Grade: C+

Sleepy Hollow

Monday, Sept. 16, 9 p.m., Fox

A minimally engaging update of Washington Irving’s 1820 horror story, in which American revolutionary soldier Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison) wakes from an underground, 240-year coma/nap, emerging into daylight in modern-day New England, where it seems the fearsome Redcoat he beheaded in battle has also returned to exact a complicated revenge on the locals. It isn’t long before a bewildered Ichabod (hipster baby-name alert!) is arrested on suspicion of murder and then partners up with a dubious deputy (Nicole Beharie), who helps him hunt for the Headless Horseman.  Deliberate and thoughtful is not an option here. Rather than observe the ways a man from the 1770s might grapple with the realities of 2013, “Sleepy Hollow” seems mainly concerned with quickly launching a “Grimm”-like romp through folklore and episodic crime-solving. It’s layered with hints of unfolding conspiracies — time-travel and secret brotherhoods and what-not. It’s all done with a cold efficiency and a gloomy, disinterested tone. Grade: C

The Blacklist

Monday, Sept. 23, 10 p.m., NBC

A shaved-headed James Spader (“Boston Legal”) transforms into yet another of TV’s manipulative criminal masterminds who sits in confinement and yet, with a Lecter-like ingenuity and coyness, manages to unleash havoc for the poor agents who must defuse, decode and otherwise debase themselves in order to interpret the mastermind’s clues.  Spader plays Red Reddington, a traitorous U.S. agent who aided dozens of international criminals and terrorists. After decades on the most-wanted list, he surrenders to the FBI, offering to help them catch the remaining members of the list, but under certain conditions — among them that he will only work with a fresh-out-of-Quantico agent named Elizabeth Keen (Megan Boone).  Her torment is only beginning as Reddington sends her in several different directions at once. Spader seems to relish the character’s oozy pretentiousness and obnoxiousness; the only actor who would enjoy it more, perhaps, is Kevin Spacey. The pilot episode is stylish and swiftly paced, but that’s all it is, and despite some intriguing plot twists, there’s not a lot of motivation to keep coming back. Grade: C

Hello Ladies

Sunday, Sept. 29, 10:30 p.m., HBO

A friend once told me it’s possible to become cool in L.A. simply by osmosis, but it’s not soaking in for poor Stuart (Stephen Merchant), a lonely British bachelor trying to find love (or just sex) in a town without pity. This eight-episode HBO series is more of a riff on the kind of awkward hubris and guaranteed humiliation that has become a defining feature of 21st-century situation comedy. Future television and movie historians will know us mainly by our enjoyment of stories about sad sacks who further their own misery by trying to impress those around them.

It’s a threadbare shtick, but Merchant, whose most notable work was done in collaboration with Ricky Gervais, has mastered it. Stuart is too unctuous and aggressive to gain the right sort of viewer empathy, but that burdensome feeling is balanced out a tad by Merchant’s co-stars (Christine Woods as his apartment tenant Jessica; and Nate Torrence as his friend Wade). We wincingly follow along as Stuart tries to get into exclusive clubs and then makes all the wrong moves on cruelly indifferent women. It’s as if “Entourage” had a nightmare. Grade: C

We Are Men

Monday, Sept. 30, 8:30 p.m., CBS

Taken lightly, “We Are Men” is a nimble little exercise in macho liberation, as four men who live at a furnished-apartment complex in Tarzana quell their emotional sorrows with carbohydrates and casual sex. Give it too much thought, however, and it’s easy to become astonished at the zealously regressive sense of humor displayed here, which leans much too heavily on the same-old “Mars/Venus”-style jokes about the gender gap.

After his fiancee leaves him at the altar, “Graduate”-style, Carter (Chris Smith) moves into the apartment complex, where, poolside, he befriends the quadruply-divorced Frank (Tony Shalhoub) as well as Stuart (Jerry O’Connell), an OB/GYN going through a bitter divorce and Gil (Kal Penn), whose wife kicked him out after she discovered him having an affair. The men take on the mission of re-acclimating Carter to the freedoms of manhood and, because it’s a pilot episode, the jokes are all delivered with the nuance of a car bomb. The cast is certainly talented enough to overcome “We Are Men’s” shortcomings, if the writing improves. Grade: C

Sean Saves the World

Thursday, Oct. 3, 9 p.m., NBC

“Will & Grace’s” Sean Hayes waltzes back onto NBC’s Thursday-night schedule fairly effortlessly in this new sitcom, in which he plays a gay single dad to a sullen teenage daughter (Sami Isler), with occasional meddling from his outspoken mother (Linda Lavin).  Hayes plays it all so dutifully that even his pratfalls have an on-point, pro-athlete precision to them, giving his show a very rote approach; it’s Lavin who seems more delighted to have the chance to nibble on the scenery a bit. “Reno 911’s” Thomas Lennon plays the new owner of the design firm where Sean works — one of those exposed-brick workplaces that approximates the feel and mood of what TV writers think office work must be like. They’ve even given him a standard-issue Black Best Friend at work (Echo Kellum). And, plucked from the ruins of “Smash,” Broadway actress Megan Hilty has been added to the cast since the initial pilot was screened by critics this summer.  Nothing about “Sean Saves the World” is off-putting, but not much about it is welcoming either. But when Hayes is going full blast, it’s nice to reconnect with some hints of the hilarity and snarky mania he made his own back in the late ’90s. Grade: C

Once Upon a Time in Wonderland

Thursday, Oct. 10, 8 p.m., ABC

ABC did not release a full pilot episode by press time of its new “Once Upon a Time” spinoff, in which Victorian-era teenager Alice (Sophie Lowe) must persuade her doctors at an insane asylum that she really did follow a talking rabbit down a hole, where she met and fell in love with a genie and got into all sorts of trouble. A 20-minute preview of “Wonderland” shown to critics looks to be similar in tone to the first show, but with more special-effects razzmatazz. Really, I think this is a way for Disney (ABC’s parent company) to remind us that it owns nearly every character there is. As Alice rushes around, you half-expect the Muppets and Darth Vader to make cameo appearances. No grade yet.

Witches of East End

Sunday, Oct. 6, 10 p.m., Lifetime

Julia Ormond stars as Joanna, a witch in a seaside town who is cursed to lose her daughters, Freya and Ingrid (Jenna Dewan-Tatum, Rachel Boston), over and over- giving birth to them again each time they die. She decides to break the curse by casting a spell over her girls so that they won’t dabble in witchcraft or know their true nature. Now they’re grown and fate has come calling on the night of Freya’s engagement party: Spells are cast, gloom and agony are foretold and, when Freya starts making out with her fiance’s brother, a vase of roses bursts into flames.  If that stirs you (and if your fingers need a break from typing all your erotic fan-fiction), then “Witches of East End” isn’t the worst you could do. The show has a sincerity about its silliness and light spookiness; for a moment there, it’s almost as if “True Blood” tried to conceive a demon baby with “Bunheads.” It didn’t turn out quite right, but that’s why we keep all those Mason jars in the basement. Grade: C

The Tomorrow People

Wednesday, Oct. 9, 9 p.m., The CW

Stephen (Robbie Amell) is one of those teenagers who goes to an urban school in The CW district where everyone looks like they’re 25 and even the ostracized kids are pretty. He’s on anti-psychosis meds to quell the voices he hears and he suffers from a weird sleepwalking problem where he wakes up in other people’s houses.  Turns out he’s been teleporting short distances and the voices are a group of specially gifted humans called the Tomorrow People, who make contact with Steven and tell him that his father was their last best hope for eluding the Ultras, who are trying to snuff out their kind. As he learns to use his powers of telekinesis, telepathy and teleportation, Steven has to decide if the Tomorrow People are what they seem, or if the Ultras (including his uncle, played by “Lost’s” Mark Pellegrino) are in fact the good guys. Sounds confusing, but it’s actually too simple — based on a British show, but derivative of sci-fi and superhuman dramas we’ve seen plenty of times before, up to and including the slo-mo “Matrix” bullets flying out of a gun. Grade: C

Enlisted

Friday, Nov. 8, 9:30 p.m., Fox

In the combined years the United States has spent fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve never had the “M*A*S*H*”-like companion comedy (or even a “Gomer Pyle: USMC”-like companion comedy) on network TV that could sound a lighthearted bugle bleat to the drums of war.  “Enlisted” would seemingly like to be that show, but it gets off to a clumsy start that lacks just the right edge. Geoff Stults stars as Pete, an Army sergeant who is reassigned to rear-detachment base duty after a meltdown in Afghanistan. At the bases, he is reunited with his doofus brothers (Chris Lowell and Parker Young), a corporal and a private. Soon enough, the show feels like a series of yellowed “Beetle Bailey” comic strips found in an old footlocker, with enough sex jokes thrown in to remind you that it really is set in 2013. Grade: C-

The Goldbergs

Tuesday, Sept. 24, 9 p.m., ABC

In theory I love the idea: Creator Adam F. Goldberg delves into the actual home videos he shot as a child of his argumentative, suburban Jewish family in the mid-1980s and uses those tapes as the basis for this sitcom three decades later.  The result, unfortunately, is a dopey pilot episode that succumbs to the trap of portraying the ’80s only in obvious ways — bring out the pastel leg warmers and geometric Cosby sweaters — and it rapidly turns into a prolonged, nearly laughless sketch about domestic life in the Pac-Man era. If the old videos were so funny, why not just show them instead? Grade: D+

The Michael J. Fox Show

Thursday, Sept. 26, 9 p.m., NBC

Who wants to be the one to tell Michael J. Fox that his new show, which is built entirely around the nobility of his real-life travails and triumphs with Parkinson’s (the word “disease” seems to have been dropped from all references), just isn’t that entertaining? Here, the ’80s star of the small and silver screens leaps back into series comedy, playing a Manhattan TV reporter who went on hiatus to manage his illness.  Having recovered his confidence and grown bored out of his gourd as a stereotypical husband and stay-at-home dad to three children, Fox goes back to the local NBC affiliate for a ballyhooed return cooked up by his producer (“Treme’s” Wendell Pierce). The first episode is rife with cross-promotional NBC references, making it difficult to notice if there’s a show on or if it’s just ads. For more of my thoughts, see Page 13. Grade: D+

The Originals

Thursday, Oct. 3, 9 p.m., The CW

This spinoff from “The Vampire Diaries” follows Elijah’s brother Klaus (Joseph Morgan) — an “original” thousand-year-old vampire who also happens to be part werewolf — to his old stomping grounds in the French Quarter of New Orleans. (In all that time, no one has told Klaus that a self-respecting vampire would never call the town New Orleeenz.) Once there, he discovers his ancient frenemy Marcel (Charles Michael Davis) heads up a gang of party-hearty, night-and-day vampires while somehow keeping a mysterious control over the local witches.  The biting, the brooding, the smoldering — it all continues to press safe-but-slightly-naughty buttons for today’s paranormally obsessed teen market. Like “Vampire Diaries” (and so much else), “The Originals” lacks a sharp wit, preferring the heavy-velvet drapery of self-seriousness and pretend passion. You would think the kids have had their fill by now. Grade: D+

Betrayal

Sunday, Sept. 29, 10 p.m., ABC

A sleek but forgettable addition to ABC’s undying belief in the nighttime soap — rounding out a trio of one-word emotional pitfalls that include scandal (“Scandal”) and revenge (“Revenge”).  Adapted from a Dutch TV drama, “Betrayal” isn’t like ”Scandal” or “Revenge,” nor does it have “Nashville’s” heat-seeking instincts. A photographer named Sara (Hannah Ware) is ambivalent about her marriage to an ambitious Chicago prosecutor (Chris Johnson); she meets handsome stranger, Jack (Stuart Townsend), at a gallery show and tentatively begins an emotional, then physical, affair. Only too late does Sara discover that Jack is an attorney for his father-in-law (played by “American Horror Story” and “Six Feet Under’s” James Cromwell), a crime boss who is the target of an investigation headed by — you guessed it — Sara’s husband.  So far, there’s not much here you don’t see coming from many miles away, and there’s barely enough chemistry between Ware and Townsend to make things bubble. If “Betrayal” wants to stick around, it better have some real surprises in store. Grade: D-

Dads

Tuesday, Sept. 17, 8 p.m., Fox

Seth MacFarlane’s camp has coughed up this embarrassingly anachronistic attempt to have its way with the multi-camera, studio-audience sitcom format, in which Seth Green and Giovanni Ribisi star as entrepreneurial game designers who have troubled relationships with their clingy, financially fraught fathers, played by Peter Riegert and Martin Mull.  The pilot episode has already been pummeled by some critics, mostly for its relentless attempts at the sort of racially and sexually frank humor that, for mainly intangible reasons, works better in MacFarlane’s animated shows (“Family Guy,” etc.) or his big-screen film “Ted.”  

Off-color and offensive humor is not a terrible strategy, as we all know — it worked out just fine for CBS’s “2 Broke Girls.” What’s galling is the utter absence of originality, spirit or even new jokes: When “Dads” wants to make fun of Asians, it dresses a character up as a Harajuku schoolgirl; when it wants to make fun of Latinas, well, here comes the sassy housekeeper; when it’s gays, Mull snaps “You go, girl.” The poor actors look like they’re serving mandatory sentences for the creators’ crimes of laziness. Grade: F

Back in the Game

Wednesday, Sept. 25, 8:30 p.m., ABC

Maggie Lawson plays Terry, a single mom who has moved in with her ill-tempered father, whose nickname is the Cannon (James Caan), a former baseball player who projected his athletic and personal failings on his daughter, giving her the TV version of feelings of inadequacy and resentment. When her son (Griffin Gluck) fails to make the baseball team, Terry, who harbors bad memories of how the Cannon forced her into sports, challenges the iron-fist rule of the alpha-dog coach (Ben Koldyke) by volunteering to coach a team of misfits, “Bad News Bears”-style.

Producers persist with this post-recessionary fixation on adult children who fall on hard times and move back in with a parent or two; it’s both the worst and funniest premise that marginally employed sitcom writers can currently conceive. And so far, it’s worked mainly as an indicator of quick cancellation. Grade: F

Super Fun Night

Wednesday, Oct. 2, 9:30 p.m., ABC

Australian comedy star Rebel Wilson (“Pitch Perfect”) bizarrely opts for an American accent in this comedy she writes and produces, in which three Manhattan women prefer to cocoon themselves on Fridays (a.k.a. “fun night”) with binge-eating and board games in their shared apartment. “We have indoor faces and bodies,” Kimmie Boubier (Wilson) tells Helen Alice (Liza Lapira) and Marika (Lauren Ash) at a particularly down moment. “Let’s just leave the going-out to the pretty and popular people.”

Once more we plunge into the unsettling, split-personality narrative of today’s post-feminist young women, whose theme song may as well be “You Are 27 Going on 12.” I get part of the act: they want to be seen as sexy and complicated girls (or “Girls”), until the precise moment they briefly reclaim their sense of maturity and pride as women. “Super Fun Night” reaches for the stylings of Mindy Kaling and Kristen Wiig, replaying over and over the lesson that self-assertiveness somehow erases humiliation.

Kimmie is both loser and winner, an attorney who just got a promotion and yet lives beneath a cloud of self-effacing humor and off-key “Wicked” ballads, which is more pathetic than evocative. To impress a handsome co-worker (Kevin Bishop), she pours her extra-full figure into a sausage-casing dress and drags her friends along to his nightclub party. The “struggle bus” crashes when a wardrobe malfunction leaves Kimmie nearly naked (Spanx and all), exposing her LED-lighted heart panties and bra, which blink out unanswered distress signals to Lucille Ball and Mary Tyler Moore about the sad state of comedy we’re in. Grade: F

Welcome to the Family

Thursday, Oct. 3, 8:30 p.m., NBC

My nominee for quickest and most punitive cancellation goes to this facile dramedy about two 40-something couples who must learn to get along because their teenage children — a boy who is a Stanford-bound valedictorian and a girl who is an unfortunate iteration of the clueless blonde stereotype — are suddenly expecting a baby and have decided to keep it.  Or perhaps they’re being forced to keep it, because they live in some parallel America in which Roe v. Wade has been fully reversed, thus reducing at least one obvious solution to the dilemma. (Which would, of course, cut the premise off right there; I understand that the point of the show is the pregnancy.) The truth is, these kids do live in a parallel America, the imaginary land of network television, which hasn’t found a way to talk frankly about abortion in the half-hour comedy format since, I don’t know, “Maude”?

I’m not at all opposed to the personal choices made by the characters in “Welcome to the Family,” I just wish they’d had the choice to make.  The foregone conclusion in the pilot is galling, especially in the scene where the teenagers’ combative fathers (“Glee’s” Mike O’Malley and “Desperate Housewives’s” Ricardo A. Chavira) are seen chasing after the girl, believing she’s about to get on a rollercoaster. The metaphor is quite blunt: Save the fetus at all costs! (And forget Stanford!)  That’s my editorial carp, but here’s my review: What a limp and unfunny show; it’s just more Thursday-night clutter. Grade: F

Almost Human

Monday, Nov. 4, 9 p.m., Fox

Another dull example of the manufacturing of sci-fi factory goods with the (increasingly devalued) J.J. Abrams label slapped on. Less a homage and more like a bad knockoff, “Almost Human” lifts elements of “Blade Runner,” “Minority Report,” “I, Robot” and “Robocop” for this police drama set in 2048, where a cop (Karl Urban, who played Dr. McCoy in Abrams’s updated “Star Trek” films) is forced to work with a synthetic partner (Michael Ealy), even though he doesn’t like or trust the new technology.  I hope that when “Almost Human” airs in November it will be slicker than the junky pilot episode shown to critics, but I’m afraid that it needs more than just a CGI juicing to get over the fact that it’s dull as a box of broken toys. Grade: F

 

Premiere dates for returning fall shows

“2 Broke Girls” (CBS at 9) Monday, Sept. 23

“The Amazing Race” (CBS at 8) Sunday, Sept. 29

“American Dad” (Fox at 9:30) Sunday, Sept. 29

“American Horror Story” (FX at 10) Wednesday, Oct. 9

“Arrow” (CW at 8) Wednesday, Oct. 9

“Awkward” (MTV at 10:30) Tuesday, Oct. 22

“Beauty and the Beast” (CW at 9) Monday, Oct. 7

“The Big Bang Theory” (CBS at 8) Thursday, Sept. 26

“The Biggest Loser” (NBC at 8) Tuesday, Oct. 8

“Blue Bloods” (CBS at 10) Friday, Sept. 27

“Bob’s Burgers” (Fox at 8:30) Sunday, Sept. 29

“Bones” (Fox at 8) Monday, Sept. 16

“The Carrie Diaries” (CW at 8) Friday, Oct. 25

“Castle” (ABC at 10) Monday, Sept. 23

“Chicago Fire” (NBC at 10): Tuesday, Sept. 24

“Covert Affairs” (USA at 10) Thursday, Oct. 17

“Criminal Minds” (CBS at 9) Wednesday, Sept. 25

“CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” (CBS at 10): Wednesday, Sept. 25

“Dancing With the Stars” (ABC at 8) Monday, Sept. 16

“Eastbound & Down” (HBO at 9) Sunday, Sept. 29

“Elementary” (CBS at 10) Thursday, Sept. 26

“Family Guy” (Fox at 9): Sunday, Sept. 29

“Glee” (Fox at 9) Thursday, Sept. 26

“The Good Wife” (CBS at 9) Sunday, Sept. 29

“Grey’s Anatomy” (ABC at 9) Thursday, Sept. 26

“Grimm” (NBC at 9) Friday, Oct. 25

“Hart of Dixie” (CW at 8) Monday, Oct. 7

“Hawaii Five-0” (CBS at 9) Friday, Sept. 27

“Homeland” (Showtime at 10) Sunday, Sept. 29

“How I Met Your Mother” (CBS at 8) Monday, Sept. 23

“Key & Peele” (Comedy Central at 10:30) Wednesday, Sept. 18

“Last Man Standing” (ABC at 8) Friday, Sept. 20

“Law & Order: SVU” (NBC at 9) Wednesday, Sept. 25

“The Mentalist” (CBS at 10) Sunday, Sept. 29

“The Middle” (ABC at 8) Wednesday, Sept. 25

“The Mindy Project” (Fox at 9:30) Tuesday, Sept. 17

“Modern Family” (ABC at 9) Wednesday, Sept. 25

“Nashville” (ABC at 10) Wednesday, Sept. 25

“NCIS” (CBS at 8): Tuesday, Sept. 24

“NCIS: Los Angeles” (CBS at 9) Tuesday, Sept. 24

“The Neighbors” (ABC at 8:30) Friday, Sept. 20

“New Girl” (Fox at 9) Tuesday, Sept. 17

“Once Upon a Time” (ABC at 8) Sunday, Sept. 29

“Parenthood” (NBC at 10) Thursday, Sept. 26

“Parks and Recreation” (NBC at 8) Thursday, Sept. 26

“Person of Interest” (CBS at 10) Tuesday, Sept. 24

“Project Runway All Stars” (Lifetime at 9) Thursday, Oct. 24

“Raising Hope” (Fox at 9) Friday, Nov. 8

“Revenge” (ABC at 9) Sunday, Sept. 29

“Revolution” (NBC at 8) Wednesday, Sept. 25

“Scandal” (ABC at 10) Thursday, Oct. 3

“Shark Tank” (ABC at 9) Friday, Sept. 20

“The Simpsons”(Fox at 8) Sunday, Sept. 29

“South Park” (Comedy Central at 10) Wednesday, Sept. 25

“Survivor” (CBS at 8) Wednesday, Sept. 18

“Supernatural” (CW at 9): Tuesday, Oct. 8

“Treme” (HBO at 9) Sunday, Dec. 1

“Two and a Half Men” (CBS at 9:30) Thursday, Sept. 26

“Undercover Boss” (CBS at 8) Friday, Sept. 27

“The Vampire Diaries” (CW at 8) Thursday, Oct. 3

“The Voice” (NBC at 8) Monday, Sept. 23

“The Walking Dead” (AMC at 10) Sunday, Oct. 13

“White Collar” (USA at 9) Thursday, Oct. 17

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/fall-tv-2013-reviews-of-all-the-new-shows/2013/09/12/1d765e92-11bc-11e3-b4cb-fd7ce041d814_story.html

CBS, NBC, ABC Make Decisions On A Slew Of Shows: What’s Ordered And What's Gone?

(By Lisa de Moraes, WashingtonPost, May 11, 2013)
Careening toward Monday’s start of Broadcast Upfront Week 2013, the TV industry was atwitter about news that Fox would try to bring back “24” as a “limited series” (that’s Hollywood for “13 episodes”) and that NBC was mowing down virtually its entire comedy lineup (while also putting newsmag “Rock Center” and let’s-make-a-musical drama “Smash” out of our misery).  But ad execs, to whom the week of network dog-and-pony shows is geared, may be most eager to see the sizzle reel for CBS’s new David E. Kelley comedy series “Crazy Ones,” in which Robin Williams plays — a brilliant ad exec.   CBS also has ordered big-ticket drama, “Hostages,” from its go-to drama guy Jerry Bruckheimer, in which Toni Collette plays a brilliant Washington, D.C. surgeon selected to operate on POTUS, which gets complicated when her husband and kids are kidnapped.  This is not to be confused with NBC’s new drama, “Crisis,” in which POTUS’s son is kidnapped during a school field trip. Adding to that confusion, Dylan McDermott stars with Collette in “Hostages,” while Dermot Mulroney stars in “Crisis.”

 

Marg Helgenberger’s back on CBS, as part of the cast of the new drama “Intelligence,” about an agent at US Cyber Command who has a microchip implanted in his brain that allows him to access the entire electromagnetic spectrum.  Attempting to fill the big shoes left by “Rules of Engagement” is Rob Greenberg’s new “We are Men,” in which Chris Smith plays a young guy learning the ropes from the older guys he meets in a short-term rental complex — including Kal Penn, Tony Shalhoub and Jerry O’Connell.  And if “WaM” can’t fill the shoes, maybe Greg Garcia’s new “The Millers” can; its’ star Will Arnett plays a recently divorced guy whose life gets more complicated when his parents have marital problems.

Late Friday afternoon, CBS said goodbye to “Vegas,” “CSI: NY,” “Golden Boy” and the network’s inexplicably long-lived utility player “Rules of Engagement.”  Meanwhile, by Friday night, NBC comedies “Go On,” “Whitney,” “Up All Night,” “Guys With Kids,” “The New Normal,” and “1600 Penn” had been tossed in the tumbril to join “30 Rock,” “The Office” and “Animal Practice” in the NBC comedy graveyard. The only NBC comedies to escape the executioner were “Parks and Recreation” and “Community.”  NBC was said to have canceled almost all of its comedies because network suits were so happy with their new-comedy development. On Friday, NBC added to its new-comedy list a Bill Lawrence series about a slacker who takes in his new roomie’s “Undateable” pals, and a multi-ethnic rom-com “Welcome to the Family.”

On the drama side, NBC picked up an “Ironside” reboot starring Blair Underwood, a Dick Wolf cop drama called “Chicago PD,” and “Blacklist,” in which the world’s most wanted criminal turns himself in, starring James Spader.  At their presentation, ABC execs will celebrate the renewals of “Modern Family,” “Once Upon a Time,” “Revenge,” “Suburgatory,” “Scandal,” “Nashville,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Castle,” “The Neighbors,” “Last Man Standing” and “The Middle.” They won’t mention canceled “Malibu Country,” “Body of Proof,” “Happy Endings,” “How to Live With Your Parents (For the Rest of Your Life),” “Family Tools” and “Red Widow.”

They will instead direct advertisers’ attention to their new comedies: Adam Goldberg’s semi-autobiographical “The Goldbergs”; Rebel Wilson and her BFF’s in “Super Fun Night”; James Caan as a loudmouthed lout with a recently divorced daughter in “Back in the Game”; and Bradley Whitford as a guy on his third wife in “Trophy Wife,” and a Manhattan bar comedy called “Mixology.”  ABC execs also will tout the new dramas, including “Resurrection” about the town of Arcadia, Missouri in which deceased loved ones suddenly start to return. This project formerly was called “The Returned” and was set in a town called Aurora, until someone cut off the creators’ Stupid Pills.
Also on ABC’s new-drama roster: A “Once Upon a Time” spinoff set it Alice’s Wonderland; Joss Whedon’s horribly named “Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D,” based on the Marvel comic books and “The Avengers” flick; “Mind Games,” about a con man (Christian Slater) and a bi-polar genius (Steve Zahn) who are brothers; “Lucky 7,” about gas station employees sharing a winning lottery tickets; “Betrayal” about a woman who cheats on prosecutor husband with another lawyer; and “Killer Woman” about the only female member of the Texas Rangers.  Fox on Friday was trying to seal deals to resuscitate “24” after killing star Kiefer Sutherland’s more recent action series, “Touch.” Fox’s lips have been sealed about the talks since word leaked out late in the week, but former exec producer David Fury tweeted late Thursday he would be “pulling double duty” on the “24” reboot and new FX drama “Tyrant,” adding, “Whoo & Hoo!”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/tv-column/post/cbs-picks-up-robin-williams-comedy-scraps-rules-of-engagement-vegas-csi-ny-and-golden-boy/2013/05/10/650a8db8-b9ca-11e2-92f3-f291801936b8_blog.html?wpisrc=nl_cuzheads
 

Two Non-Surprises: Fox Orders Another Gordon Ramsay Show, CBS Renews ‘Criminal Minds’

(By Lisa de Moraes, WashingtonPost, May 11, 2013)

Which Broadcast TV Upfront walk-up announcement surprised you less:

* Fox has ordered yet another Gordon Ramsay cooking show.
* CBS has ordered another season of “Criminal Minds”?

Fox announced Friday it has picked up “Junior Masterchef,” a new culinary competition series for wanna-be chefs between the ages of eight and 13.  It was part of a deal in which Fox also ordered one more season of Ramsay’s “Hell’s Kitchen,” which will bring its total to 13 seasons – and two more of Ramsay’s “Masterchef,” which keeps that one on the network through at least a sixth season.  Fox is now in bed with Ramsay to the tune of five series:  “Masterchef,” “Hell’s Kitchen,” “Hotel Hell,” “Kitchen Nightmares,” and now “Junior.”

“Junior Masterchef” gives two budding cooks the opportunity to showcase their talent…blah, blah, blah, series of challenges and cook-offs, blah, blah, blah, Ramsay one of the judges. It’s based on a UK format.  Meanwhile, the on-camera gang at CBS’s “Criminal Minds” finally signed new two-year deals (the showrunner Erica Messer had signed a new deal before that) and next season will be “Criminal Minds’s” ninth.  It’s CBS’s 20^th series to be renewed for next year. 
 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/tv-column/post/two-non-surprises-fox-orders-another-gordon-ramsay-show-cbs-renews-criminal-minds/2013/05/10/e1578eb4-b990-11e2-92f3-f291801936b8_blog.html?wpisrc=nl_cuzheads

CBS Renews ‘Two And Half Men’; Angus T. Jones Won’t Be A Regular

(By Lisa de Moraes, WashingtonPost, Apr 26, 2013)

The same day CW announced it had picked up “Hart of Dixie,” ”Beauty and the Beast,” and a “Vampire Diaries” spinoff for next season, and NBC revealed it had greenlit a new season for “Parenthood,” “Revolution,” “Grimm,” “Chicago Fire,” and “Law & Order: SVU,” CBS said it had renewed “Two and a Half Men” for and 11th season.  Ashton Kutcher and Jon Cryer will be back as regulars. But Angus T. Jones, who nearly derailed his lucrative (a reported $300,000 per episode) “Men” career last November when he recorded a testimonial for a church urging us to stop watching the show and filling our heads ”with filth,” is not going to be a regular character on the show next season. He’ll be recurring — industry-speak for “some episodes but not all.” The actor is attending college, in real life.

This TV season, “Men” has played an important role in CBS’s effort to own comedy on Thursday nights, paired with “The Big Bang Theory.” Both are Chuck Lorre comedies.  “Men” joins the slew of series CBS had already picked up early for next season. They include comedies “2 Broke Girls,”  “Mike & Molly,” “How I Met Your Mother” and, of course, “The Big Bang Theory.”  Drama-wise, CBS has already greenlit next season on “The Good Wife,” “Blue Bloods,” Person of Interest,” “NCIS: Los Angeles,” “Elementary,” “Hawaii Five-O,” and “The Mentalist.”  The network’s newsmags “60 Minutes” and “48 Hours” are coming back, as are reality series “The Amazing Race,” “Survivor,” and “Undercover Boss.”

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/tv-column/post/cbs-renews-two-and-half-men-angus-t-jones-wont-be-a-regular/2013/04/26/7fb11278-aeca-11e2-8bf6-e70cb6ae066e_blog.html?wpisrc=nl_cuzheads

 

 

NBC Renews ‘Parenthood,’ ‘Revolution,’ ‘Grimm,’ ‘Chicago Fire,’ ‘Law & Order: SVU’

(By Emily Yahr, WashingtonPost, Apr 26, 2013)

About three weeks before NBC releases its official fall schedule at the upfronts, the network has announced early pick-ups for five of its drama series: “Parenthood” and “Grimm,” along with newcomers “Revolution” and “Chicago Fire” and veteran “Law & Order: SVU.” All five shows received 22-episode orders.  Given that the viewers-plagued network has seen disappointments with new dramas such “Do No Harm” and “Deception,” as well as the re-tooled “Smash,” renewals for the two new drama series — which have done much better in the ratings — are not quite surprising. J.J. Abrams’ “Revolution,” about a post-apocolyptic world without power, is the top-rated drama series among all broadcast networks in 18-to-49-year-old category.  “Chicago Fire,” produced by “L&O” king Dick Wolf, has pleased NBC so much that the network is already contemplating a spin-off for next season. 

Meanwhile, critically-beloved but low-rated “Parenthood” was less than a sure thing, but has been given a 22-episode fifth season order for the first time since its second season — last year, it only produced 15.  In its second season, “Grimm” has been a solid performer for NBC on Friday nights, though it will get a chance to shine on Tuesdays starting next week, replacing the network’s latest reality flop, ”Ready for Love.”  And Wolf’s remaining “Law & Order” franchise, “SVU,” will march into its 15th season.  No word yet on the fate of NBC’s comedies currently on the bubble, including “Parks and Recreation,” “Community,” “Whitney, “Go On” and “The New Normal.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/tv-column/post/nbc-renews-parenthood-revolution-grimm-chicago-fire-law-and-order-svu/2013/04/26/618ac1dc-aea1-11e2-8bf6-e70cb6ae066e_blog.html?wpisrc=nl_cuzheads

 

Seth Meyers Will Move To NBC ‘Late Night’ As Jimmy Fallon’s Successor

(By Lisa de Moraes, Washington Post, May 13, 2013)

NBC has confirmed that “Saturday Night Live” long-timer Seth Meyers will take over as host of the network’s “Late Night” next year, when Jimmy Fallon takes “The Tonight Show” from Jay Leno.  NBC waited until Sunday afternoon — just a few hours before releasing its new prime-time schedule to the news media — to confirm months of speculation about Meyers. With the announcement, the network hoped Monday’s chatter would be about late-night TV — which NBC still dominates — rather than prime time, where the network has collapsed whenever Sunday football and “The Voice” take breathers.

In prime time, NBC has decided to give a James Spader action thriller the coveted post-”Voice” time slot. NBC also hopes that family comedies starring Sean Hayes, Mike O’Malley and Michael J. Fox can resuscitate its Thursday nights — and hopes Dracula and Blackbeard can revive its Fridays — but hasn’t made up its mind about keeping Donald Trump or Hannibal Lecter.Last Friday, NBC canceled virtually all its prime-time series in comedy — a genre in which the network was once considered the gold standard — as well as several big-ticket dramas, including “Smash,” and the newsmag “Rock Center.”

On Sunday afternoon, only “Parks and Recreation” and “Community” survived NBC’s comedy purge. Those shows were joined by just five returning dramas: “Grimm,” “Parenthood,” “Law & Order: SVU,” “Revolution” and “Chicago Fire.”  NBC said Sunday that it will decide whether to pick up another season of “Hannibal” in the next few weeks — as well as whether to order more of Trump’s “Celebrity Apprentice.” Neither program was on the prime-time slate that NBC unveiled Sunday.

As expected, “The Voice” is back, on Mondays and Tuesdays. It will be followed by “The Blacklist,” in which Spader stars as an ex-government agent who is one of the FBI’s most-wanted fugitives.  Dick Wolf’s sophomore “Chicago Fire” is being moved to Tuesdays at 10 to benefit from a “Voice” lead-in at 9; “The Voice” follows “The Biggest Loser.”  After NBC’s coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympics, Tuesday’s “The Voice” shifts back to 8, so NBC can launch two comedies off of it: a reboot of the Hugh Grant flick “About a Boy” and “The Family Guide,” about a blind dad who finally gets a guide dog.  The network really needs to rebuild its comedy brand, NBC Entertainment Chairman Bob Greenblatt acknowledged in Sunday’s announcement.  On Wednesdays, imagine “Revolution” at 8, followed by “Law & Order: SVU” at 9, leading into a reboot of “Ironside,” starring Blair Underwood in the paralyzed-cop role made famous in the ’70s by Raymond Burr. NBC will attempt to broaden its Thursday comedy audience with a family slate that’s sure to make TV critics unhappy. That lineup includes “Welcome to the Family,” starring Mike O’Malley and Mary McCormack as parents of a high-schooler who gets pregnant by a Hispanic teen, which, NBC says, upsets the guy’s parents because “they now have Caucasians in the family.”  “Family” will be followed by Hayes’s new sitcom, “Sean Saves the World,” and then “The Michael J. Fox Show,” in which the former “Family Ties” star plays a news anchor who put his career on hold to spend more time with the family after receiving a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease.

Friday is Genre Night at NBC next season, with “Grimm” airing at 9, followed by “Dracula,” starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, at 10 in the fall and, in spring, “Crossbones,” with John Malkovich as the infamous Blackbeard. The newsmagazine “Dateline” is the warm-up act, at 8.  On Saturday, NBC returns “Rerun Theatre.”  On Sunday, after football season, NBC has decided that it’s time for “big dramas again,” Greenblatt said in Sunday’s announcement.  Setting aside “Dateline” at 7 p.m. and a home-renovation reality competition show called “American Dream Builders” at 8, what Greenblatt means is that NBC will debut J.J. Abrams’s new “Believe” at 9, followed by the new “Crisis” at 10.  “Believe” is about a little orphan girl named Bo who has mastered levitation, telekinesis, forecasting and the ability to control nature. Her guardians, a.k.a. True Believers, want to safeguard her from harmful outsiders who would use her for personal gain — like the programming suits at HLN. Or Lifetime. 

 

Anyway, the True Believers decide to spring — from death row — a wrongfully convicted felon to take care of her. What could go wrong there?  “Crisis,” in which POTUS’s son is among those kidnapped during a school field trip, stars Dermot Mulroney. That is not to be confused with CBS’s new “Hostages,” whose cast includes Dylan McDermott — the show about a doctor who has to operate on POTUS, except that she gets distracted when her husband and kids get kidnapped.  In conclusion, Greenblatt said: “This is the most robust and highest-testing slate of new shows we have had in years.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/seth-meyers-will-move-to-nbc-late-night-as-jimmy-fallons-successor/2013/05/12/887df2c6-bb50-11e2-9b09-1638acc3942e_story.html?wpisrc=nl_lunchln

 

 

 



8 Moments You Will Have In College

(By Laura Manzano- Class of 2014, William & Mary Blogs, September 11, 2013)

1: There will be a night, when you are lonely and a freshman, that you walk down the hall and find others like you, so you awkwardly rally together and talk about your favorite movies and SAT scores on the gross furniture in the lounge of your dorm on a humid Saturday night in September, and all of the sudden you forget to care about all the college parties you were so excited to attend. Three years later, approaching graduation, you may find yourself doing the same thing with the same people, but only this time you’re doing it because you want to, and because these awkward freshmen have somehow become your family. Only now there may or may not be alcohol involved.
 
2: Being apart from your parents for the first time in your life will help you see them as real people. They are no longer the superheroes of your childhood, but they fall and they bleed and they may need your help, sometimes. This is not necessarily a change on their part, but a greater realization on yours, and it is not at all a bad thing. You’re becoming an adult, and in observing this new adult world through a more realistic lens, it seems only appropriate to begin with the most idealized aspect of the past eighteen years. Don’t be afraid of it – embracing an individual’s complexities can be the hardest part of relating with another human being. But remember that you are a part of each other. Your mom and dad will be your mom and dad for the rest of your life.
 
3: Someone close to you will disappoint you. It will hurt more than many other things because friendship is stronger and less drastic than romance, and in theory should last until ties have gradually faded, and not because they have been decisively cut. If talking about it or thinking about it months later still makes you mad or sad, reach out to them. In life, just like in literature or in film, no significant character leaves in a dramatic fashion without coming back at some point down the road.
 
4: There will be a moment, or rather, a seemingly perpetual series of moments in which you approach a realization that you don’t, in fact, know what you want to do with the rest of your life. After graduation, the proverbial path is unpaved and on an incline and it may even be hot outside. College will get you there, but you may feel it hasn’t taught you how to walk on it. Do I really want to do math for the rest of my life? Is law school the right choice for me? Here’s something no one will tell you: you’re not supposed to know how the rest of your life should unfold when you’ve barely emerged through a quarter of it. Take a deep breath. And by deep breath, I mean a year off. Give yourself time to live outside of school. Travel, meet people. For a little while, get a job just to have a job, and remember that job is not going to be your career. In college, there may be a moment when you see George Saunders speak to a room full of people just like you, and then one of the greatest and well-decorated contemporary writers will tell you that he originally got his degree in geophysical engineering, and worked for an engineering firm for seven years. Realize that no one is meant to be settled and established and have it all figured out by the time they’re twenty-four, unless they want to be completely bored for the next seventy years.
 
5: You will trip over a brick on this campus. You will hear this everywhere, and that is because the only thing more certain in life than tripping on a brick is that by the end of it, you will be dead. You will trip on a brick not once, not twice, not seven times, but probably somewhere in the neighborhood of eighty-eight or eighty-nine times.
 
6: There will be a lot of moments when you are rejected. By a professor, by a job, by an application, by a girl, by a boy. It’s likely that multiple rejections will happen in a short span of time, and they will make you never want to get out of bed again, even for warm Caf cookies. In these moments, you will undoubtedly feel the opposite of what you should feel, because in reality, the courage that has compelled you to put yourself out there in the first place is greater than many people can claim. College may teach you that everyone needs to be broken down to nothing before they can become something. You are not a great anything until you’ve thought to yourself at some point that you are the worst anything that has ever lived.
 
7: If you’re lucky enough, you’ll experience love, and if it’s real, you’ll be scared to call it that just yet. You may not be anxious or excited. You won’t lose your appetite, because that seems to indicate that to remain in love with someone forever means you will never eat again. That to desire a hamburger means to have fallen out of love. The thought of him or her won’t make your heart race. By that point, if you’ve sat on it long enough, your heart will have adopted him or her as an integral cog in the regular mechanics of your circulatory system. They say that love is selfless. And you’ll have a moment when you realize that part is true. Their happiness will become your happiness – a scientific, economical, reliable correlation. And that feeling, unlike Hallmark love, will be unascribable to any one color, unless that color is black, simply because, of course, black is a combination of all the colors – those both beautiful and less beautiful, but nonetheless necessary to paint an honest world. If you find yourself feeling this way, or even at the very least think you feel this way: congratulations. It requires a brave person to put their own heart in this position, no matter how involuntary it may seem.
 
8: Finally, you’ll visit Washington D.C. for the first time on any given weekend, and fit in as much sight-seeing one could do in about 30 short hours: the magnificence of the Capitol building, the grandeur that is the Lincoln Memorial, but most especially – the beautiful stillness of Arlington Cemetery. The sky will be cloudy and you may be tired. You’ll inexplicably cry at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, as you watch the guard walk across the horizon with a reverent ferocity. You’ll say a quick prayer for anyone who has ever sacrificed anything for your sake. You’ll smear away the tears that have somehow snuck into your eyes, and turn to pan across the landscape: tens of thousands of tombstones, extending farther than you will be able to see. The names will mean nothing to you and everything to you at the same time, because those unrecognizable names and their sacrifice are the reason you’re able to stand where you’re standing. The most important and essential moment you will have, at any point in your life, is the one in which you understand that you are not in this alone – that we need to be good to each other in order to survive.
 

http://blogs.wm.edu/2013/09/11/8-moments-you-will-have-in-college/

Library Book Dumping

Parts of this strategic plan I can agree with but why on earth would you throw out a quarter of a million library books instead of reselling them to raise additional funds since the system is facing a declining budget?  At the very least, donate them to charity or give them away to people who want them. 

Fairfax Library Board Puts Its Strategic Plan To Revamp System On Hold

(By Tom Jackman, Washington Post, September 11, 2013)

Fairfax Supervisor Linda Smyth in her office last week with some of the books she pulled from a library Dumpster, while volunteer Friends of the Library groups were pleading for discarded books to sell or redistribute. A county library board member told the supervisors Tuesday night that the library’s “strategic plan” is now on hold. (Tom Jackman/The Washington Post)

At a Fairfax County Board of Supervisors meeting to discuss the outcry over proposed changes to the county library system, the vice-chair of the Fairfax library Board of Trustees said Tuesday night that “the entire matter of these changes will be put on hold” until the library board can get more input from library staff and customers.  The board this summer adopted a “Strategic Plan” to revamp the library system in order to deal with declining budgets and advancing technology. But the plan called for reducing staff in the branches, eliminating masters of library science degrees as a requirement for branch managers, eliminating bachelors degrees as a requirement for library assistants, and requiring children’s librarians to spend most of their time devising reading programs instead of working in the library, all of which brought criticism from employees and patrons.

In addition, the library moved to a “floating collection” system this year and for seven months stopped providing discarded books to volunteer Friends of the Library groups for resale or distribution to the needy. About 3,000 books have since been provided to Friends groups, but about 250,000 books, many in good shape, were destroyed, county officials said. Supervisor Linda Smyth (D-Providence) held up some of the library books she rescued from a Dumpster in late August and said, “These should not have been in the Dumpster. And I don’t want to see that again. I don’t think anybody in Fairfax County does.”  The supervisors on Tuesday night were considering a resolution to ask the library board to stop the new Strategic Plan, and revisit the policy for disposing of books, when Vice-Chair Charles Fegan of Annandale was recognized. “I really do appreciate what you’ve uncovered,” Fegan told Smyth. “I’m a taxpayer too. I was quite concerned; I learned of it through the papers.”

Fegan said the library board was aware of the concerns raised about the strategic plan, and that “the library board will decide tomorrow, it’s been informally passed around, that as of tomorrow the entire matter of these changes will be put on hold.” Fegan said the board would hold a “staff day” where library employees can provide their input. “I’m very pleased the community concerns itself so much.” He said the library board had a target date of Nov. 15 to complete a revision of the strategic plan and report back to the Board of Supervisors.

Smyth asked, and the board agreed, for the library to review its policy on dealing with discarded materials. Supervisor Jeff McKay (D-Lee) pointed out that the policy should not be left to the library board, that all Fairfax agencies should have a consistent policy on how to discard taxpayer-purchased assets. Fegan said the library board was going to consider putting together an ad hoc committee to “review any policy that is currently on the books for disposition of an asset.”  Though Fegan said the library board was going to put a hold on the new library plan, the board proceeded with its motion to ask the board to do so, and also to review the policy on disposition of books.

Supervisor Pat Herrity (R-Springfield) was the only dissenting vote, saying that “we’re setting a dangerous precedent” by intervening in the library process. He said a pilot project at Burke Center library was already proceeding smoothly, and that “we’re in a difficult environment, we’re asking [staff directors] to be creative, and we step in the way…I personally would commend [library] Director Sam Clay for his leadership.”

The supervisors’ motion then passed shortly after 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, near the end of a lengthy day of business.  The library board of trustees is still scheduled to hold a meeting to consider the strategic plan on Wednesday night at 7 p.m. at George Mason Regional Library.  The issue of discarded books began angering local Friends of the Library groups earlier this year when they were told they could not salvage books from their branch’s discard pile, and instead had to wait until they were sent to the technical operations center in Chantilly. In April and May, Tysons-Pimmit Friends volunteer Tresa Schlecht took photos of piles of books in the Chantilly Dumpster, and in late August, Smyth took some shots of her own.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/local/wp/2013/09/11/fairfax-library-board-to-put-its-strategic-plan-to-revamp-system-on-hold-vice-chair-says/?wpisrc=nl_buzz

Dancing With The Stars 2013

There are so many trainwrecks-in-waiting this cycle that I can't help but to start watching once again, after missing the last two seasons.  Plus, I'm kind of interested in seeing how Amber Riley and Leah Remini do.  Plus, there is the small hope that Elizabeth Berkley will forget she is on TV and start busting out her "Showgirls" moves.

 

 

Dancing With The Stars 2013: Valerie Harper, Leah Remini, Elizabeth Berkley, Snooki

(By Emily Yahr, Washington Post, 04 September 2013)

Reality stars, actors looking to make a comeback, one inspirational feel-good story – yes, it’s the cast of the upcoming season of “Dancing With the Stars.”  The big story of the year is actress Valerie Harper, who was diagnosed earlier this year with terminal cancer, but revealed Wednesday on “Good Morning America’s” casting announcement that doctors cleared her to dance in the competition.  “The brain scans you get every two months are looking better and better and better,” said Harper, adding that her doctors are “delighted” she’s moving in the right direction.  Other big names include recent Scientology-denouncing actress Leah Remini, who looked exhausted appearing via satellite from ABC’s Los Angeles bureau; Elizabeth Berkley, of “Saved by the Bell” and “Showgirls” fame; reality star Jack Osbourne, whose sister, Kelly, previously danced on the show; and, the “Jersey Shore” reign continues with Snooki joining the cast. Plus, a handful of Disney family stars, such as “Pretty Little Liars” actor Brant Daugherty (Noel Kahn) and former “High School Musical” singer/dancer Corbin Bleu.

Meanwhile, the biggest surprise? Children’s TV host Bill Nye the Science Guy, whose show had the catchiest theme song of all time.  Dancing is “all physics, it’s all the study of motion,” he explained to the “GMA” hosts, about why he might have an advantage in the competition.  Here’s the entire cast, along with their professional dance partners; Season 17 of “Dancing With the Stars” debuts Sept. 23.

 

Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, of “Jersey Shore” (Sasha Farber)

Valerie Harper, actress from “Mary Tyler Moore Show” (Tristan MacManus)

Keyshawn Johnson, NFL wide receiver (Sharna Burgess)

Brant Daugherty, actor of ABC Family’s “Pretty Little Liars” (Peta Murgatroyd)

Christina Milian, actress/singer/songwriter (Mark Ballas)

Bill Nye the Science Guy, children’s TV show host (Tyne Stecklein)

Elizabeth Berkley, actress from “Saved by the Bell” and “Showgirls” (Val Cherkovskiy)

Corbin Bleu, actor from “High School Musical” (Karina Smirnoff)

Amber Riley, actress/singer from “Glee” (Derek Hough)

Bill Engvall, comedian (Emma Slater)

Jack Osbourne, reality star (Cheryl Burke)

Leah Remini, actress from “King of Queens” (Tony Dovolani)

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/style-blog/wp/2013/09/04/dancing-with-the-stars-2013-valerie-harper-leah-remini-elizabeth-berkley-bill-nye/?wpisrc=nl_cuzheads

A Brief History Of Twerking & Miley's VMA Disaster

(By Joe Lynch, Fuse, August 28, 2013)

Two decades after its birth, Miley Cyrus discovered the booty-shaking craze and shoved it down our throats. Now it's in the dictionary. Here's what happened.

It started in the 1990s, got name-checked by Beyonce and Justin Timberlake over the years and then exploded into the stratosphere this week when Miley Cyrus did it all over Robin Thicke's crotch at the 2013 VMAs. Yep, we're talking about twerking.  Thanks to Ms. Cyrus, that particular dance move—squatting down, sticking your ass out and shaking it up and down—has officially super-saturated our culture. But while twerking might be new to many, it's actually been around since 1993 and has a storied history. So from its birth in New Orleans (as a combination of the words "twist," "twitch," "work" and "jerk") to its recent inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary, here's the Definitive History of Twerking.

1993: Twerking was born out of New Orleans' bounce music scene, a hip hop sub-genre centered around call-and-response vocals and the endlessly sampled Triggaman beat. The first reference to twerking in a song is DJ Jubilee's "Do the Jubilee All" in 1993, which features him telling the crowd to, "Twerk baby, twerk baby, twerk, twerk, twerk." Much like twerking, the bounce music scene has been getting more national attention over the last few years. No small thanks due to bounce music's Queen Diva Big Freedia, whose reality show Big Freedia: Queen of Bounce debuts October 2 on Fuse.

1995: New Orleans femcee Cheeky Blakk dropped the track "Twerk Something," another bounce music track centered around the Triggaman beat.

1997: DJ Jubilee returns to the world of twerking with "Get Ready, Ready," which finds him commanding the listener to "twerk it!"

2000: Atlanta rap duo Ying Yang Twins' debut single "Whistle While You Twurk" described the act of twerking in (far too much) detail in its NSFW chorus: "Whistle while you twurk / Go head and start and make that p—sy fart / And whistle while you twurk."

2001: Bubba Sparxxx's debut album features a Timbaland collabo called "Twerk a Little."

2003: The first definition of twerking is submitted to Urban Dictionary: "To work one's body, as in dancing, especially the rear end."

2005: Beyonce's No. 1 hit "Check On It" features the line "Dip it, pop it, twerk it, stop it, check on me tonight" in the chorus.

2006: Justin Timberlake's No. 1 hit "SexyBack" features the line, "Let me see what ya twerkin' with."

2009: The Twerk Team—three teenage girls from Atlanta—upload a video of themselves twerking to Soulja Boy's "Donk." It receives over a million views in one week.

2010: Miley Cyrus goes to New Orleans to film the direct-to-video movie So Undercover and learns how to twerk.

2011: Waka Flocka Flame and Drake's "Round of Applause" references YouTube stars the Twerk Team: "Bounce that ass, shake that ass like the Twerk Team."

March 2012: Diplo & Nicky Da B's "Express Yourself" video helps the dance continue its ascent to ubiquity by featuring a seemingly endless parade of dancers twerking, including people facing a wall and twerking upside down.

June 2012: French Montana's "Pop That" with Lil Wayne, Drake and Rick Ross features the hook, "What you twerkin' with / Work, work, work, work, bounce."

September 2012: Juicy J's "Bandz A Make Her Dance" features the line, "Start twerking when she hear her song / Stripper pole her income."

March 2013: Video of Miley Cyrus twerking in a unicorn onesie to J. Dash & Flo Rida's "Wop" goes viral.

May 2013: 33 San Diego high school students are suspended for filming themselves twerking with school camcorders.

June 2013: Miley Cyrus twerks at Juicy J's L.A. concert. Video of her first public twerk session goes viral.

July 2013: Jay Z's Magna Carta…Holy Grail track "Somewhereinamerica" features the line, "Feds still lurking / They see I'm still putting work in / Cause somewhere in America / Miley Cyrus is still twerkin.'"

August 2013: Miley Cyrus twerks at the VMAs during her duet with Robin Thicke. It's the most talked about moment of the night, although many decry it as an appropriation of black culture and/or morally offensive. 

- The Oxford English Dictionary adds twerking to its vocabulary. 

- Lil Twist teases his Miley/Justin Bieber collabo, "Twerk."

- Diplo announces his intention to set the "world record of having the most people twerking at the same time." The DJ will line up a human wall of twerkers (i.e., the Great Wall of 'Gina) at New York's Electric Zoo fest over Labor Day Weekend.

And that brings us up to present day. If you're sick to death of twerking, Fuse News' Elaine Moran hears you and has crafted the perfect anti-twerk anthem. And to see what legitimate twerking looks like from a dancer who knows what they're doing, read our Miley-slamming interview with the Queen of Bounce Big Freedia and watch her upcoming reality show, Big Freedia: Queen of Bounce, when it debuts October 2 at 11/10c on Fuse.

 

http://www.fuse.tv/2013/08/brief-history-of-twerking?fb_comment_id=fbc_559560890758474_5353729_559949194052977#f2bd733327dda72


Richard's comments:

The thing I don't get about the Miley Cyrus VMA controversy/disaster is how everyone is making it about race instead of offensive behavior.  Much of the racial comments are pointed at Miley Cyrus's appropriation of black culture and black dance moves.  Commentators and notable black culture icons are saying that it was wrong of her to utilize dance moves that are associated with black culture.  That sounds to me like they are saying that white people should not adopt and integrate things that originated within black culture, that the two should be mutually exclusive and completely separate. 

You can see what this argument implies if you take it to the logical conclusion.  You cannot claim that there are still racial barriers and also get upset when other races  integrate your culture and behaviors.  What everyone should be condemning is twerking itself.  The dance move is basically a barely disguised sexual act being perpetrated in public and should not be accepted as proper social behavior.  Dancing should be a metaphor for sex, not a demonstration of it.

Miley Cyrus Matters

(By Brandon Soderberg, Spin.com, August 29 2013)

Even if you're suffering from think-piece fatigue, the post-racial nightmare that was "We Can't Stop" at the MTV Video Music Awards deserves your attention

The Miley Cyrus twerktastrophe is important shit, man. Yes, it's important even at this exact moment, when it looks like we're about to start another war with another country, and your Facebook feed is full of condescending suggestions that we've got bigger problems than Billy Ray Cyrus' daughter (dressed in flesh-colored underpants) grinding up against Alan Thicke's son (dressed like Beetlejuice). We do have bigger problems, it's true. But we can compartmentalize, and not entirely ignore this one.

This is a knotty, vital issue, spanning from racial appropriation to feminist concerns over the ugly, casual rhetoric of slut-shaming. And however you feel about Miley's wildly problematic MTV VMA's performance — a symphony of twerking, tongue-wagging, crotch-rubbing, and butt-slapping — it has already inspired a lot of great writing, including New York Magazine critic Jody Rosen's charge (and subsequent Twitter defense of that charge) that at its worst, the debacle tilted over into minstrelsy, as when Miley slapped the ass of a black dancer, reducing the woman to a symbol — something a provocative (and white) pop star can stand near and fondle and strip-mine for authenticity.

But it's worth noting also that the Artist Formerly Known as Hannah Montana's uncomfortable relationship with black culture has been fermenting for a while. Miley's rollout as a hip-hop-skewing pop star began in March, when she uploaded a video of her twerking to J. Dash's "Wop," sending a two-year-old song to the Billboard Hot 100). In June came future VMA showstopper "We Can't Stop" itself, an appropriately Disney-esque party song with just enough daring to make it seem mature, its video replete with American Apparel-style decadence (and a number of black women). Since then, Miley has stepped in it multiple times in interviews, explaining that she was taking more of a "black" approach (which to her is synonymous with strip-club anthems), further boasting that while she may be "a hillbilly," she can still "twerk." She even showed up in the clip for Big Sean's "Fire," trying on the video-girl persona for a few minutes. Her new album, Bangerz, is out in October. 

But this exchange works both ways: "Miley Cyrus" has also become a meme in hip-hop. The once-clever crack-rap trope where rappers would refer to cocaine as "white girl" has shifted to naming all white drugs after specific white female celebs: Atlanta trap trio Migos, for example, have a song called  "Hannah Montana." ("I got molly / I got white / I've been trapping, trapping, trapping all damn night.") Meek Mill: "Got a bad bitch in my Chevy / She's selling Miley Cyrus." Lil Wayne: "I wish we were single, like a couple of dollars / And when we get together, she be on that Miley Cyrus." Jay Z, even: "Somewhere in America / Miley Cyrus is still twerking." 

That's a funny, mock-poetic Jay line, actually. It exists to get people talking, of course, but there's a biting edge to it, a bemusement with the racial politics of 2013 even as it perpetuates this sense of a "post-racial America" — enabled in part, Jay believes, by his own rise to superstardom. It's also part of a song about how "you can't teach racism when your child is connected to the culture," as he told Elliott Wilson. That betrays a deeply naïve understanding of how racism is internalized, and/or the twists and turns racists' brains make to accept blackness while also rejecting it. But it's also instructive: Jay's perpetuation of the post-racial myth is integral to the marketing of mainstream music now. Even Mylie's.

This is all part of our current egregious pop moment, when the removal of black voices seems persistent and calculated. So much of the criticism of this year's VMA's has centered on the relentless whiteness, from Macklemore's filibuster of an acceptance speech to Justin Timberlake's epic victory lap. And for me, it recalled another terrible awards show: the 2011 Grammys. Remember that? Gang Starr's Guru left out of the "In Memoriam" montage; the Best Rap Album nod going to past-his-prime Eminem's Recovery; Lady Antebellum paying tribute to Teddy Pendergrass; Mick Jagger singing Solomon Burke songs; and Cee-Lo singing "Fuck You" (or "Forget You," or whatever) with Gwyneth Paltrow, who also sang it on Glee. 

At the time, I called the show a "great whitewash"; The Fader's Naomi Zeichner just said the very same thing about the 2013 VMA's. (Perhaps the shock here is that we assumed MTV to be a bit hipper than the Grammys.) That 2011 disaster sure felt like a terrible and significant event: At the precise moment when hip-hop was fully integrated into pop (not hip-hop as pop, but rapping as but one more signifier in every pop-music song), blackness was shoved into the background. Since then, the charts have grown yet whiter, and hip-hop too is suffering a whitewash: Mac Miller is being given a great deal of credit for aping the bugged-out qualities of MF Doom and other eccentric underground hip-hop, while Macklemore is not only presented as a valid rapper, but as a socially aware alternative to mainstream rap's excess. This is how Miley Cyrus happened.

As for this week's raging Miley debate, it often has the odd effect of pitting feminism (combating the clowns whose primary reaction to the VMA's was to make fun of Miley's ass) against racism; Jezebel wisely addressed this issue, offering a woman's perspective that didn't ignore the "incredible racist nature" of her performance. (There's been lots of great writing this week about the way white people objectify black bodies, too.) You can't govern what people — even clueless white people like Miley Cyrus (and the machine behind her, which by the way, knows exactly what it is doing) — get out of hip-hop. She deserves criticism for reducing rap culture to its basest, most sexually depraved instincts, but those who merely slut-shame her in response should invite ridicule, too.

It's outrageous, by the way, that Robin Thicke has shouldered none of the responsibility for the VMA's performance; he didn't exactly comport himself with any more dignity. And don't forget that Miley's father, Billy Ray, gained wider success by objectifying himself, too — within the world of country music, at least, shaking his butt in tight jeans and courting a roughneck, working-class appeal.  Cyrus' story in and of itself is unimpressive and boilerplate: Young white artist looking for edge and controversy, ill-informed about the world bigger than her dumb little Los-Angeles-by-way-of-Nashville privileged bubble, grafts elements of hip-hop culture onto herself in an attempt to appear "down," and winds up talking about "hood" culture and serving up "black is an attitude" nonsense as a result. What's shocking about this is that she's getting away with it, that people are indulging her, and that the interplay between white artists and black artists seems like it is actually growing more one-sided.

http://www.spin.com/articles/miley-cyrus-MTV-VMAs-twerking/?utm_source=em&utm_medium=dailynl&utm_campaign=090113&utm_content=article5

 

Your Flip-Flops Are Grossing Me Out

(By Dana Stevens, Slate.com, July 3, 2013)

“Some slow week in summer, I should write a tirade against flip-flops,” I unwisely remarked to my editor one disgusting August afternoon a few years back, as we walked back from lunch behind a woman whose street-blackened soles could be glimpsed anew with each schlapp!-ing step. Now, during an early-July lull between big summer movie releases, he’s gone and called my bluff. And the truth is, I’m not really one for composing tirades. I’m a live-and-let-live sort when it comes to personal grooming and style, and whatever qualities I’m remembered for at my funeral, I’m fairly certain neither hygiene nor chic will top the list. But the increasing prevalence of all-day urban flip-flop wear during the summer months is something we need to talk about as a culture.

I won’t deny that this ancient shoe design, which can be seen in Egyptian murals dating back to 4000 B.C. (the British Museum owns a 1,500-year-old pair made of papyrus) has its situational utility. On the beach, by the pool, showering at the gym, taking out the garbage, making a quick run to the Laundromat—all these are moments in which the advantages of lightweight, easy-to-don-and-doff footwear are self-evident (even if personally, as a non-fan of the feeling of rigid objects wedged between my toes, I’d prefer an across-the-foot “slide” in those moments). I understand, too, that there are parts of the world where the inexpensive, mass-produced flip-flop is widely worn for reasons other than aesthetic choice; in many circumstances, it may be the only shoe that’s both available and affordable. But we are not here to discuss the footwear choices of impoverished villagers, just-showered athletes, or Jimmy Buffett strumming his six-string on his front porch in Margaritaville. We’re talking about grown adults in affluent societies—people presumably in possession of at least one pair of actual shoes—who see fit to navigate the grimy sidewalks of large cities shod only in a loosely flapping, half-inch-thick slip of rubber. Those people—you, if you’re among them—need to face the reality that you are, in essence, going barefoot, and it’s grossing the rest of us out.

From what angle to approach the wrongness first? The crux of the flip-flop problem, for me, lies in the decoupling of footwear from foot with each step—and the attendant decoupling of the wearer’s behavior from the social contract. Extended flip-flop use seems to transport people across some sort of etiquette Rubicon where the distinction between public and private, inside and outside, shod and barefoot, breaks down entirely. I’ve witnessed flip-flop wearers on the New York City subway slip their “shoes” off altogether and cross their feet on the train-car floor with a contented sigh, as though they were already home and kicking back in front of a DVR’d Cheers marathon. We would all look askance at a person who removed his socks and sneakers on the train before ostentatiously propping his naked dogs in plain sight. Why do people get a break just because they happen to be wearing footgear that takes them 90 percent of the way there?

Then there’s the lack of support and protection the flip-flop offers its wearer’s foot. Of course, the same might be said of any flat, thin-soled shoe—but as soon as you slap a heel strap and a buckle onto that sad, flapping sole, my objections disappear. Individual sandals and clogs are subject to scrutiny as to their wearability and visual appeal: Tevas and Crocs may be aesthetic abominations unto the Lord, but at least they perform most of the basic functions of shoes. They permit the wearer to break into a run or take a step backward when needed (who can predict when you’ll need to sprint to catch a bus or help a friend move his couch on short notice?). And with their thicker soles and foot-harnessing straps, they at least go some way toward protecting the feet from the most egregious aggressors in the outside environment: broken glass, loose nails at construction sites, wads of gum, pools of motor oil, piles of dog poop, puddles of human effluvia. (If this unappetizing imagery is skeeving out you flip-flop loyalists, welcome to the mental world of everyone who looks at your feet.)

It’s tough to find hard numbers for the growing pervasiveness of flip-flops as city footwear, though the explosive growth of the popular, Brazilian-owned Havaianas brand over the past two decades suggests that wherever we’re choosing to wear them, we’re certainly buying more of the things than ever. But anecdotally, it’s evident that flip-flop culture is steadily gaining ground. In 2005, several members of the Northwestern women’s lacrosse team wore them on a visit to the Bush White House, sparking a national conversation about whether shoes originally worn to ward off fungus at the gym were also appropriate for trekking through the Oval Office. By 2011, the stigma had diminished to the extent that Obama became the first-ever president to be photographed wearing a pair of flip-flops (though to the president’s credit, the context—an ice-cream shop in his native Hawaii, where he was vacationing with his family—was entirely flip-flop appropriate. It’s not like he was meeting with foreign dignitaries).

I contacted some professionals to confirm my suspicion that flip-flops are not only unappealing and unsanitary, but actively bad for the health of the human foot. Dr. Richard Kushner, a podiatrist in New York City, stopped just short of committing to the condemnation of flip-flops per se—though he allowed that they left the foot more vulnerable to injury, and that any thin-soled, unsupportive shoe would encourage the eventual degradation of the structures that maintain the joints of the foot: “If the foot is too flat on the ground, there’s a clawing effect that happens with the toes.” Asked about the hygienic properties of the flip-flop as city street-wear, he replied, “That’s another matter. That’s something that I myself certainly wouldn’t …” He trailed off, joining me in a moment of anguished silence.

Jeff Gray, C. Ped., a pedorthist and director of education at the orthotics company Superfeet Worldwide in Ferndale, Wash., was more voluble in his condemnation of the rubber-soled scourge. “I see young people going through airports wearing flip-flops and I want to run after them and say ‘I can help you.’ And half their foot isn’t even on the shoe; it’s collapsed off the shoe. … I believe 20 years from now we’re going to see a whole generation who will have foot problems when they’re in their 30s and 40s—soft tissue problems, joint problems, arthritis.” I asked him to lay out the precise anatomical problem with locomotion via flip-flop: “Mother Nature knew that when your foot hit the ground it needed to be a loose bag of bones; then when you push off it converts to a rigid lever. Shoes are really a timing device that manages the transition between those two states.”

With the ordinary flip-flop, he continued, the “bag of bones” stage of the step lasts too long, leaving the foot in the pronated (inwardly rolled) position. (This would explain why flip-flop soles tend to wear out from the inside edge first, and why people walking in them often seem to have inwardly collapsing ankles.) Gray also believes that backless shoes in general are a major cause of injuries and falls, especially among older people, thanks to their lack of maneuverability: “Go and take the lug nuts off your car and see how well you corner.”

My final line of argument against flip-flops is a more nebulous one, having to do with their laziness and lack of character as footwear. Because of the ease with which they’re put on and removed—along, perhaps, with their generic ubiquity—flip-flops connote a sort of half-dressed slatternliness, a sense that the wearer has forgotten to do anything at all with his or her body from the ankles down. I was going to call them “foot underwear” (nomenclature that would be consistent with their older U.S. designation as “thongs,” a term still used in Australia) but that’s not quite right—after all, it’s not like you’re going to put a pair of real shoes on top. More precisely, flip-flops are foot robes, and seeing hundreds of strangers walk by in dirty, sidewalk-sweeping bathrobes barely held on with loosely tied belts (the analogy holds up all the way through) is no one’s idea of summer fun. Unless your daily commute is a stroll from your hammock across white sands to the piña colada stand you manage in Waikiki, please consider leaving the foot robes at home.

 

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/a_fine_whine/2013/07/against_flip_flops_put_a_shoe_on_you_slob.html

 

My Parents Made It Into The Newspaper