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How to Celebrate Thanksgiving Like Your Favorite TV Characters

By Chloe Pantazi on

Thanksgiving is for sitting around the table with family and friends, expressing gratitude for things most of us take for granted every other day of the year. But above all, Thanksgiving’s a time for TV, where tempers run as high as oven temperatures. Charred turkey, sibling rivalry, yam-slamming, and sticking a turkey on one’s head; without these key ingredients, no TV Thanksgiving would be complete. Here’s a list of what you’ll need to make your own TV Thanksgiving, at home. … Read More

Television

TV’s Greatest High School Nerd Transformations

By Michelle Rafferty on

With the recent Bunheads finale, the fast-approaching end of Awkward’s second season, and a promising Inbetweeners reboot, we confess we’ve gotten caught up in a lot of teen angst these past few weeks. So since we’re in the state of mind, we decided to look at some of the great high school series in television history and their nerd spawn. Like the teenage protagonists of the aforementioned shows, these characters all started out uncool, insecure, and/or sartorially challenged. And then of course, they grew up. You can click through for some before and after shots we dug up, and hope you’ll let us know about any great geek transformations we might have missed. And now, we’ll be making our way back to the couch for more adolescent love triangles, camera phone farce, and woefully instructive tales of sex.  … Read More

Pop Culture

The Reading Lists of Your Favorite Fictional Characters

By Emily Temple on

If you’ve ever seen Gilmore Girls, there’s a pretty good chance you know that Rory Gilmore is as big a bookworm as they come — maybe that’s why we’ve always liked her so much. Recently, we stumbled on this exhaustive list of all the books Rory has read, and after we caught our breath (there’s some two hundred and fifty books on there!) we decided to compile a few more of the books we’ve noticed some of our favorite fictional characters reading — so as to follow along, of course. Click through to see what books Don Draper, Margot Tenanbaum, and Daria Morgendorffer have been occupying themselves with recently, and let us know if we’ve missed your favorite fictional bookworm in the comments! … Read More

Television

Our Favorite Female Ensembles on Television

By Jason Bailey on

In glancing at tomorrow’s new DVD releases, one title jumped out as being worthy of our little spotlight: yes, tomorrow marks the unveiling of Designing Women: The Final Season. Not that the ’92-’93 year was one of their best — it did feature the third and decidedly lesser version of the cast (Delta Burke and Jean Smart 4eva) and the writers were kind of running on fumes. Still, mediocre Designing Women is better than none at all; this was, after all, one of the best female ensemble shows in TV history. We nearly called it the best, and then realized what a tall claim that is. In contrast to the moving pictures, where you can barely find two important women’s roles in the same movie, television is full of crackerjack female ensembles; we’ve assembled our ten favorites after the jump, and if you’re the kind of person who thinks Sex and the City will be on it, you should prepare yourself for disappointment now. … Read More

Television

Exclusive Supercut: The Wisdom of Our TV Mothers

By Michelle Rafferty on

If there’s one thing moms love to give, it’s advice. This Mother’s Day we’re repaying the gift by celebrating the pantheon of great (and famously not-so-great) TV mothers and the wisdom they’ve bestowed over the years, on topics ranging from defeatism and birth control to gender equality and community chip bowls/showers. In our Mother’s Day supercut, you’ll also learn about the perilous nature of back-talk, taking a joke too far, and listening to Betty Draper. We hope you’ll tell us about the television mothers you’re most thankful for in the comments, because lord knows they don’t hear it enough. … Read More

Television

10 Fictional TV Towns We’d Like to Visit

By Peter Joseph on

Last week IFC announced that Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein would be releasing Portlandia: A Guide for Visitors this November. It’s the perfect idea for a show in which the town itself is such an important character; a more perfect vision of Portland, with a cool mayor, 100% employment, and hipster customs that seem more like local law – especially bicycle rights. And this guidebook might be our chance to find out where Ronald D. Moore of Battlestar Galactica fame lives so that we can visit him ourselves. Inspired by the news, we’ve been thinking about some other fictional TV towns that we wouldn’t mind visiting, even those without a decent Feminist Bookstore. Leave any of your favorites that we missed in the comments! … Read More

Television

Flavorpill’s Zagat-Style Guide to TV’s Best Thanksgiving Episodes

By Jason Bailey on

Thanksgiving is upon us, and it’s high time to enjoy all of our favorite yearly traditions: the turkey, the stuffing, the pumpkin pie, the awkward family encounters, pretending to care about football… and, most of all, that venerable standby of episodic television, the Thanksgiving show. As best as we can determine, the first weekly series to do a Thanksgiving-centered episode was The Burns and Allen Show, back in 1951; Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, Make Room for Daddy, and Mr. Peepers quickly followed suit, realizing that a Thanksgiving show offered plenty of fodder for conflict, resolution, and warm holiday cheer. We’ve selected ten of our favorite Thanksgiving episodes — and in the culinary spirit of the holiday, we present them in the ever-popular Zagat’s dining guide format, because why not? Check ‘em out after the jump and add your own in the comments. … Read More

News

The Morning’s Top 5 Pop Culture Stories

By Caroline Stanley on

1. Joss Whedon had the first crack at the Buffy reboot, but turned it down to work on other projects. [via Vulture]

2. Despite mixed critical reviews and tons of technical complications, producers announced yesterday that Julie Taymor’s Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark has already sold more than $1 million worth of advance… Read More

Television

How TV Dads Became Cool

By Bethany Larson on

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal ran a feature entitled “How Parents Became Cool: TV Finds Teens Like Their Moms And Attempts to Flatter Both” which went on to extoll the fact that mothers in television–and real life–are cooler, more understanding, and more attractive than ever before. Why? Because according to a study conducted by Experian Simmons, teens like their moms. A lot. Call us sticklers, but “mother” doesn’t always translate to “parents” right? Not to undermine the power and ability of the single mom , but there are lots of cool, understanding, attractive dads out there too. To prove our theory (because we like to be right), we at Flavorpill decided to use our deductive reasoning skills and donned our sleuthiest hat so we could figure out the case of the ignored-by-the-WSJ TV dad. Check out the findings of our research after the… Read More