Jon & Kate Gosselin have an announcement. So say the advertisements for tonight's episode of TLC's "Jon & Kate Plus 8," a formerly cutesy reality show that I've seen exactly two episodes of.

Those two episodes were seen about a year ago as I was doing things around my house and had the TV on a random channel for no particularly memorable reason. Here was this couple, with eight kids (six sextuplets; two twins). During the interview segments, the couple sat on the couch and talked to the cameras, and what became very clear to even the novice viewer was that Jon was fairly hands-off about things, and that Kate didn't miss any opportunity to bitch out her husband on camera. Jon would sit there and take it, and you could almost read his thoughts as he'd try not to react when belittled in front of a basic cable audience. (Read more...)

Sunday night's season premiere of HBO's True Blood (which I found to be somewhat lacking, because it seemed mostly about reintroducing everything and everyone while laying groundwork for upcoming episodes rather than being compelling in its own right) got me thinking about the nature of gender demographics and targeted marketing and certain assumptions we tend to take for granted in popular entertainment.

Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) and Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) can't avert their transfixed gaze in HBO's True Blood.

True Blood in general is a cheekily entertaining if fundamentally ludicrous show. While the show has its "serious" aspirations and character arcs, it certainly doesn't go out of its way to take those serious aspirations very seriously. Its focus on cheap thrills and exploitation reaffirms that the term "potboiler" was invented for this show. (Every episode ends on an over-the-top cliffhanger.)

But I also can't help but think of this series as something of a "chick show." Or perhaps a "guy show" made for chicks.

Bear with me here as I employ the usual stereotypes about "guy movies" and "chick flicks." True Blood is a guy show in that it features hot chicks who aren't shy about getting naked, a fair amount of graphic sex, an abundance of blood and gore (scenes of vampires who get staked through the heart and dissolve into gallons of goo, heads severed with shovels, etc.), dialog that is shamelessly crude and profane, and other various trappings of your genre film for genre-philes, all set in the low-income southern grittiness of a Louisiana swampland town. (Read more...)

Conan O'Brien is something of an acquired taste. I remember how bad Late Night with Conan O'Brien first was in 1993 when it premiered. It just seemed flat-out amateurish. But Conan got a lot better, and gradually I became a fan. For a while, from probably 1999 to 2004, I watched Conan almost religiously. I gradually gave that up as I had less time and became a regular of The Daily Show (and later The Colbert Report).

Conan O'Brien has taken over The Tonight Show, and, my, what a beautiful set they've built him.

In more recent years, I'd watch from time to time. I took a look, out of curiosity in January 2008, to see what he'd do during the writers strike. I remember how he grew that beard and made a nightly game out of spinning his wedding ring on his desk. The highlight was when Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and Conan engaged in a hilarious mock battle over who made Huckabee.

And when Conan had his last week of Late Night back in February, I settled back in to watch. It was like rejoining an old routine. (Read more...)

Two years ago, when I launched IDWID, the first incarnation of my foray into the blog world, I had a mission. That mission was: (1) Here's a blog where I can write more stuff, and (2) there are no parameters to the mission, because It Do What It Do [TM].

IDWID was more or less conceived as a series of inside jokes, and early blog posts reflected that nature. Over time, however, it became clear that IDWID as a name and a concept was too disconnected from Jammer's Reviews and its audience and where I actually wanted the blog to go. (Read more...)

The Internet is particularly susceptible to media fad mentality. Back in the early days of the Web's mainstreaming (about 1995), people in the media loved throwing around goofy fad terms like "Cyberspace," "Virtual Realm," and the "Information Superhighway."

Twitter provides you with plenty of Tweets, which are sort of like dumber versions of blog entries.

The latter was always my favorite, because it managed to take a one-syllable concept — the "Web" — and turn it into needless four-syllable jargonese. These names existed only because journalists wanted to sound cooler when they reported them.

Such is the case with the Internet's latest mega-craze, Twitter. I gotta be honest with you. I fail to see the value of Twitter in about 95 percent of its application. Who needs a status update on you eating lunch, or going to a movie, or DRIVING A CAR? (Dude: Drive your car; don't "tweet" your status for those of us "following" you.) There's even a microblogging cat on Twitter. (Read more...)

This is not a surprise, but there's been little action here at IDWID since I've been back to my regular reviewing duties on Battlestar Galactica over at Jammer's Reviews. This blog isn't dead. It's just inactive for the time being. At some point, it'll be back. There might even be some changes in store for IDWID in 2009. We shall see.

On Monday will be the final episode of "Boston Legal," the David E. Kelley series that, among many other things, found a way to revive William Shatner in a way one previously would not have thought possible.

Denny Crane (Willaim Shatner) and Alan Shore (James Spader) are best friends in the end-of-its-run "Boston Legal."

Now, it's a crime that I did not write about the masterful ending of "The Shield" and yet I am somehow finding time to reflect upon what is obviously a much lesser show, but that's just how the ebb and flow of blogging — or at least my blogging — works. (I had plenty of thoughts and strong feelings on the election we just had, and I watched untold hours of coverage and analysis all year, but I did not feel like throwing myself into the discussion. Sometimes you have the energy, and sometimes you don't.)

I must confess to having a soft spot for "Boston Legal," despite its obvious flaws. It does what it sets out to do fairly well. And that seems to be, like "The Practice" before it, to provide a (liberal) soapbox for writer/creator David E. Kelley to preach from while showcasing its quirky cast of characters. (Read more...)

With Battlestar Galactica returning to finish up its fourth and final season soon, I've been thinking again about the concept of a television "season" and what it means. This is mostly an academic question, as it ultimately doesn't have any huge significance, but it's something that I've been pondering lately.

BSG might just have the most protracted ending in the history of television, with the obvious exception of The Sopranos. In March 2007, when BSG season three ended and it was announced that season four would be the final season, I couldn't imagine a scenario where we would be heading into 2009 and the show still wasn't over. Think about it: When Battlestar airs its final episode, presumably in late March, it will have been two full years since the previous "season" ended. (Read more...)

Two years ago, on a lark, I did the Black Friday thing, as sort of a sociological experiment more than anything else. I consider myself above the fray on this whole issue; even as I was doing it I was lamenting the stupidity of having lowered myself to participating in the increasingly hyped event that is the Biggest Shopping Day of the Year. (Read more...)

If you watched the presidential debate last night, you no doubt heard the many references by John McCain and Barack Obama to "Joe the plumber," which might as well be written Joe the Plumber with a capital P, seeing as that's his official name as far as the media is concerned. (Read more...)