Sex on television can be fairly unrealistic. For instance, it’s not possible for someone as cute as Zooey Deschanel to bomb with someone as equally cute as Justin Long (see New Girl episode #8). That said, the bottom line rings true: sex isn’t always pretty. Time and time again we learn that scented candles and starfish lingerie straps prove useless in diffusing the awkwardness of human intimacy. Which is why this Valentine’s Day we’re cutting through the hoopla and spotlighting some of the biggest romantic misfires in television history (no pun intended). And since we’re not total curmudgeons, we’d like to point out that, sometimes, bad sex is beautiful. It can blossom into true love, bring a couple closer together, or even save a friendship. Just click through and see for yourself. And be sure to add your own favorite awkward couplings in the comments!
Keeping in mind the amount of gratuitous violence and rape that goes on in David Fincher’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, India’s decision to bar the film from showing there is easy to understand, albeit unfortunate from a creative standpoint. But the highly publicized decision got us thinking about some of the less obvious justifications some countries have used to keep foreign movies from their theaters. We’ve rounded up a handful of the oddest bannings from around the world for your consideration after the jump.
Everyone knows that TV weddings are ratings bonanzas, and the destructive aftermaths of those weddings are even more exciting. Happy couples tend to get boring pretty quickly, after all. It’s not surprising, then, that Gossip Girl celebrated its 100th episode last night with the wedding of Blair and Louis, even though Blair is still obviously in love with Chuck, in an hour with so many twists and turns and false stops that we’re still not sure what, exactly, happened. To celebrate their clearly ill-advised big day, we’ve put together a list of some of the most disastrous marriages in television history.
As we may have mentioned, we are pretty excited to see Absolutely Fabulous back on TV. We missed Patsy and Edina, we missed Saffy, we missed Gran, and we especially missed Bubble, Eddy’s walking acid trip of an assistant. But it wasn’t until we read Tom & Lorenzo’s great blog post about the show’s return that we realized we had been longing for more than just the characters. As they note, Eddy has one hell of a kitchen, and it feels great to watch the cast sip coffee and chug champagne in it again. The Monsoon kitchen and 14 others that we wouldn’t minding owning are after the jump.
The recent news that Hilary Mantel’sWolf Hall will be adapted into a television show doesn’t surprise us too much. We can only add it to the growing list of book-to-small-screen adaptations that we are anxiously awaiting, joining the planned HBO series based onA Visit From the Goon Squad, and the one on Eugenides’s Middlesex, which HBO seems to have optioned and then forgotten about. However, there are no promises that any book to TV adaptation, even those with great books as starting points, will be any good, and there are hundreds of shows created in this way that aren’t — but in our minds, that just makes the great ones even greater. To get ourselves pumped for the adaptation of Wolf Hall, we’ve collected a list of the ten all-time best (according to us, that is) TV shows adapted from books. Click through to see our picks, and be sure to let us know your own favorites in the comments!
Most scripted television strives to mirror contemporary life with at least some level of precision. Producers spend months, sometimes years, meticulously surveying target audiences and researching subcultures in order to accurately reflect the humor, taste, attention span, fears, politics, and self-image of a particular demographic or scene. But sometimes, they end up forecasting and setting cultural trends rather than reflecting them.
That’s clearly been the case with the 1920s fashion craze brought on by Martin Scorsese’s Emmy-winning Boardwalk Empire, still young in its second season. The fascination with the Roaring Twenties may have already begun in 2009, when faux speakeasies began popping up in every city across the US, but the show has repackaged the Prohibition image for a wider audience and spoon-fed it to designers, whose catwalks are now crowded with flapper-inspired frocks and feathers.Boardwalk Empire isn’t the first, though, and it won’t be the last. We’ve rounded up the television shows that, for better or for worse, catalyzed the fashion fads of their eras. Which current shows do you hope turn out to be trendsetters? Read More »
While Hollywood still sits on top of a celluloid empire, TV production is rapidly moving east. New York may not have the temperate filming climate that Los Angeles boasts, but it does offer producers a 30 percent tax credit, instated in 2008, and of course the authentic New York City backdrop against which many shows are set. This season, 23 prime-time series are being filmed in New York, up from a measly nine in 2006.
But flying a film crew out east and renting out a Brooklyn loft doesn’t ensure that a show will get the aura — or the facts — right. New York shows have tried and failed to accurately portray New York City on screen, often apparently because they were too busy collecting a library of picturesque Central Park shots to pick up on the kinds of food New Yorkers eat, how much rent they pay, the way they talk to their neighbors, and the fact that most of us actually don’t spend all that much time in Central Park. We’ve rounded up our favorite Big Apple shows and ranked them from realistic to laughable. Which city show do you think is most representative of the real New York?
‘Tis the season to be a woman on TV comedies. If you’ve spent the last few months living in a television-less cave, you might be surprised to discover that we’ve reached a bit of a renaissance of female-driven network sitcoms. (Also, you might be surprised to be back in society! In that case, hello! Hope your time in the cave was okay!) The latest primetime trend is usually a pretty boring and inconsequential thing to discuss, but we’re now at a moment in which a significant portion of the surviving and debatably thriving fall sitcoms have women as their comedic leads (See: New Girl,2 Broke Girls, Whitney, etc.). If you ask us, that’s a pretty neat thing!
Still, while we love that these funny ladies are dismantling the boys club of primetime TV while simultaneously getting a shot to spice up the comedy scene, we can’t help but wonder if these shows themselves are doing all that we proclaim they are. If you ask us, it’s not even about feminism, per se; it’s more about pushing the envelope by including female-specific perspectives in humor. (A little less banal period jokes, a little more Bridesmaids, you know?) After the jump, we’re taking a look at some of the great females of sitcom history. Consider it our attempt to remind Zooey that fabulous bangs does not an instant comedic legend make.
Like a chronic rash, Carrie Bradshaw just keeps coming back. It’s old news that the folks behind Sex and the City want to make a third movie, but that vague threat was overshadowed by the very real revelation, earlier this week, that the CW has committed to developing The Carrie Diaries. The SATC prequel will follow Carrie to high school in the early ’80s, where she’ll have a boyfriend and a popular-girl rival. Pretty groundbreaking stuff, right? The whole misguided mess has us thinking about shows whose prequels we’d actually enjoy watching. Ten of our suggestions are after the jump; add yours in the comments.
As we may have mentioned a timeor twelve, we’re less than pleased that we had to go an entire summer without a new season of Mad Men. While we’re waiting for its postponed winter season premiere, however, the fine folks at NBC and ABC have been kind enough to offer up some alternatives — and hey, look at that, they just so happen to each have a show set in the early ‘60s, all full of vintage styles and attitudes! ABC’s Pan Am (starring Christina Ricci) focuses on a group of stewardesses and pilots working for the titular airline; executive producer/director Thomas Schlamme (who, in all fairness, has done a lot of good television) says — insists— “It’s not the time period it takes place in, it’s not the characters. It has nothing to do with Mad Men.” Uh huh. NBC, meanwhile, is offering up The Playboy Club (“Basically, it’s Mad Men with boobs,” said Joel McHale at a press event), focusing on the staff at the famed nightclub — where, huh, Mad Men’s Lane Price had a membership and a girlfriend last season. What a coincidence!
Television is a business, of course, so it would stand to reason that networks would want to hedge their bets by giving viewers more of a good thing they like. More often than not, however, TV’s copycats fail — because viewers see right through the ruse, and because the reason they liked the trendsetters was that they were new and unique, unlike the other stuff on the tube. After the jump, we’ll take a look at some of the most blatant Xeroxes in TV history.
