Cathode Chronicles

Top Design premieres tonight on Bravo

By Aubrey Shoe
Sep 3, 2008

The second season of Bravo's interior design show Top Design begins tonight at 10 p.m. Hosted by India Hicks, the show also features designers Todd Oldham (sure, he designs sofas for La-Z-Boy, but he still has a pretty good aesthetic) and Jonathan Adler, alongside Margaret Russell, editor-in-chief at Elle Decor...
Resurrecting the Colorado Countess

By Patricia Calhoun
Jul 1, 2008

Yesterday, I browsed the women's page of the New York Times -- from August 4, 1901 -- where the very latest "Gowns Worn by Visitors to Our Town" were detailed. Mrs. E. Reeves Merritt, for example, wore " a simple white pique gown" with a skirt that cleared the floor...
Don't Look Now, But It's "You've Got the Look"

By Patricia Calhoun
Jun 30, 2008

For the sleep-deprived, one of the benefits of being awake at 4 a.m. Saturday morning is being able to catch a rerun of Gunsmoke on TVLand. But that wasn't Miss Kitty on the screen this weekend. No, it was the fourth installment of You've Got the Look, a train wreck...
Design Star: Your Show Is (or Should Be) Cancelled

By Patricia Calhoun
Jun 20, 2008

Maybe it’s just that competitive reality shows have hit the tipping point. Maybe it’s that being a “star” on HGTV is sort of like being the quickest runner at fat camp. Maybe it’s that fast design isn’t usually good design. Whatever the reason, HGTV’s reality show Design Star needs to...
Project Runway, Amadeus and More

By Aubrey Shoe
Apr 25, 2008

If you somehow accidentally missed last night's episode of 30 Rock (and no, there is no valid excuse for missing the funniest show on TV), then you simply must visit www.nbc.com pronto to catch up. While 30 Rock regularly shines with genius, last night's one-two punch of a Project Runway...
American Gladiators Is Still Kicking My Ass

By Sean Cronin
Jan 14, 2008

Quick story: some friends of mine and I were at Six Flags Magic Mountain out in California. It was the late 80s, and we were freshmen in college, on our first road trip. We had, as college freshmen tend to have, plans and dreams. (More the latter than the former,...
American Gladiators: Smells Like 1989

By Sean Cronin
Jan 11, 2008

This is some painful déjà vu. Was it not enough that it's nearly 20 years later, and we still have a Bush in the White House? Do we really need to revisit American Gladiators? NBC apparently thinks so. The peacock network resorted to bringing back this product of the Reagan-era...
Size Does Matter

By Sean Cronin
Jan 8, 2008

Television has just gotten bigger. The 150" plasma Panasonic was unveiled this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It's approximately eight feet by eleven feet, which means that it's pretty much your living room wall. And if you buy one, you're contractually obligated to change your name...
Return of the Kings (of Late Night)

By Sean Cronin
Jan 4, 2008

Well, they’re back. And two, at least, are bushy. David Letterman and Conan O’Brien returned to the air Wednesday night, each sporting a strike-beard, which apparently is a thing. Why, exactly, I don’t know. On Conan, it actually worked—it lent him a sort of gravitas, sort of a young Obi-Wan...
Dick Clark’s Rockin’ Retirement

By Sean Cronin
Jan 3, 2008

Here’s the question: should, in fact, old acquaintance be forgot? Has the venerable New Year’s Rockin’ Eve run its course? This isn’t so much about Dick Clark, or whether he’s ready for the pasture. He’s not. He never will be. Despite a massive stroke in 2004, which caused him to...
The Worst TV of 2007

By Sean Cronin
Dec 28, 2007

Picking on bad shows like Viva Laughlin is just too easy. There's enough low-hanging fruit being broadcast to fill a whole bushel of awful from 2007. And then there are those shows that represent how TV fails us, how it fails itself, how it just plain fails. In other words,...
The Best TV of 2007

By Sean Cronin
Dec 28, 2007

The Year of our TV 2007 was something of an odd duck. It saw the end of some TV classics (The Sopranos) and the beginning of a strike that still threatens the medium as we know it. Fun year! But in these trying times, we all yearn for something to...
Ho-Frickin'-Ho: Christmas Specials No One Should See

By Sean Cronin
Dec 21, 2007

There's a lot of Christmas TV. Enough that ABC Family can fill up 25 Days of it in the month of December, stack up specials one after the other in prime time, and never have to repeat a thing. That's a lot of holiday spirit. It only stands to reason,...
It Just Needs a Little Love: A Charlie Brown Christmas

By Sean Cronin
Dec 21, 2007

Okay, so what's wrong with A Charlie Brown Christmas? The answer, it might surprise you, isn't "nothing". So let's get this out of the way right off the top. The animation is somewhat clumsy. The voicework is pretty bad in spots. And—horror of horrors—it actually culminates in the recital of...
Late Night Strikes Back

By Sean Cronin
Dec 19, 2007

The Writers' Strike of 2007 looks to be going into 2008 as well; but late-night programming won't be following it anymore. NBC has announced that on January 2, both Jay Leno's The Tonight Show and Late Night with Conan O'Brien will return with new episodes. It's being reported that David...
Harry Potter and Your Eventual Obsolesence

By Sean Cronin
Dec 13, 2007

Turn on ABC Family's 25 Days of Christmas programming, and you'll see a lot of what you might expect; classic TV cartoons, claymation specials, great old movies and an odd lot of newer ones. But here's something you might not have expected: the whole thing seems to center around the...
Santa the Bigoted Jerk: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

By Sean Cronin
Dec 12, 2007

You know Dasher, and Dancer, and Prancer, and Vixen, right? And Comet, and Cupid, and Donner, and Blitzen? And of course you recall the most famous reindeer of all: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Rudolph was invented by Montgomery Ward ad men, but immortalized by Rankin-Bass in 1964. It’s a beloved...
I Have a Bad Feeling About This: The Star Wars Holiday Special

By Sean Cronin
Dec 10, 2007

It's become something of legend, of course, even if YouTube has stolen some of its mystery these days. Only a few years ago, all you could find of the Star Wars Holiday Special were bootleg tapes traded at comic-book and sci-fi collections, sold like contraband spice. (This transaction was even...
When “The Best” Isn’t Very Good: Why The Rocky Mountain News Should Stop Promoting Bad TV

By Sean Cronin
Dec 7, 2007

Most newspapers have a weekly feature in their Entertainment section that highlights the upcoming television worth watching. It’s a vestigial remnant of the old days when TV grids used to run daily, with a small bit recommending something good that evening. But now, with the strike, the Rocky Mountain News...
The Nerd-Rush of Aught-Seven

By Sean Cronin
Nov 29, 2007

Mark your Pocket PC calendars; Fall of 2007 was when television discovered the power of the Geek. Oh, sure, they’d dabbled in nerddom here and there, mainly in the second-banana roles that sitcoms are so rife with (Urkel, Screech, Potsie, etc.), or on reality shows, some of them blatantly using...

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