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...)