Bad publicity is still publicity.  Or something.  Which is presumably why the folks over at Downcity are so anxious to tout their forthcoming appearance on Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, the FOX TV program where a British man walks into a failing restaurant and then throws a series of conniptions about how bad the food is and about how the owners are bad people with unresolved parental issues.

Of course, Downcity could probably stand for someone to throw a conniption or two.  (It is the only restaurant where I have ever been served a meal largely comprised of eggshells!  It is the only restaurant I ever left hungry, because I was served something I don’t like and didn’t order and I couldn’t find my passive-aggressive waiter for the remainder of my lunch break!  It is also the only restaurant I ever left because the staff were watching What’s Love Got To Do With It on the giant TV thing, oblivious to the fact that some people might want to drink our Pink Ladies without having to think about domestic abuse!  Plus the bartenders are surly and the Pink Lady is off their drink menu now, anyway!  And have I mentioned the world’s ugliest bathrooms?  Because oh my God.)

more »

On January 1st, most Americans resolve annually to eat less/exercise more. But since a sizeable chunk of the Dose community appears to consist of skinny, kickball-playing hipsters, let’s skip to another top new year’s resolutions for many Americans: watching less TV.

Here, let’s let The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy tell you why:

Toast the New Year with The Three Stooges on AMC, or The Twilight Zone on SYFY, all day Thursday. On Friday The Twilight Zone continues, but AMC switches to the Matrix trilogy.

The cast of the seventh season of Project Runway has just been announced, and Woonsocket native Jonathan Peters will be appearing on the program, which kicks off next month on Lifetime.

You can get a tour of the Providence-based designer’s home (and his mysteriously stocked refrigerator) at the Lifetime website, as long as you don’t mind hearing Miranda Lambert and/or Jazmine Sullivan singing to you about how cotton is the fabric of their lives first.

(Disclaimer: I don’t actually know anything about Project Runway, having only seen part of it once in a bar where the sound was off.  I don’t have cable and my knowledge of fashionable TV shows has been spotty since Roseanne got cancelled.  Speaking of which.)

Mad Men makes me want to smoke, a lot.

When Ian Curtis sang that “love will tear us apart”, what he must have meant was “trying to design surf-inspired clothing in groups of two will tear us apart” - such was last night’s episode of Project Runway. After last week’s maternity-themed challenge, our merry band of designers were forcibly paired up by (a sandal-clad!!) Tim Gunn and given the task of creating a “fun and fashionable surfwear look”. Project Runway on Lifetime (maternity challenge!) and in Los Angeles (beachwear challenge!), how you shock us with not one but two imaginative, network-challenging episodes! Fear not, though, cynics. Half-way through the episode, Tim made a shock announcement - each team would also have to create an avant-garde look to correspond to their beach look. TWIST!
more »

TV darling Mad Men returns for its 3rd season in just a few short weeks, and we here at The Dose are guzzling our Old Fashioneds in anticipation. Will Betty keep the baby? Will Pete forgive Peggy? Will Sal and Ken finally have the gay sex? So many questions to answer, so many cocktails to drink.

If, like me, you can’t wait for the August 16th season premiere, drop over to AMC’s website and give yourself a Mad Men-inspired makeover. That’s me below, flirting with Don over a stiff drink. Don Draper, you dirty dog!

Season 3 premieres Sunday, August 16 @ 10pm.

Comedy Central is running Strangers with Candy — The Movie tonight at 11pm. They have been running episodes of the original series this week. The movie was not well-received initially, the most common sentiment expressed being “I really wanted to love this movie, but…”. Well, I really wanted to love this movie and I did. Directed by Paul Dinello (why isn’t he huge?) and starring the awesome Amy Sedaris and a younger, gayer Stephen Colbert, this film exposes the dark underbelly of Science Fair Projects, finally! Another movie in need of a larger audience is Let’s Go To Prison featuring an Oscar-worthy performance by Will Arnett, and that will be on at 9pm. This one is totally perverse; I liked it a lot. With TV this good, why leave the house?

Saturday, 9pm, Let’s Go To Prison/11pm, Strangers With Candy — The Movie

 Thank you, ProJo, for reviewing a new Muppets Christmas special that airs tonight (although I don’t know if it could rival “A Muppets Christmas Carol,” one of my faves).

It seems the cuddly creatures will encounter special guests including an airport security guard (Nathan Lane, who seems well-suited to working with zany puppets) and a hopefully fun taxi driver (Whoopi Goldberg, who was a royal bitch once when serving us drinks in her bar) on the way to the North Pole, with Shrimp Pepe apparently stealing the show.  Since we’re out of town tonight, I’m taping it and will be happy to share.

“A Muppets Christmas: Letters to Santa”, tonight, NBC, 8 p.m.

Gaudeamus hodie and honor Lydia Fassett for her impressive performance last night on ‘Jeopardy!’.  While not taking top honors, she acquitted herself very well, racking up quite a pot of money, just not enough for the win. (Let me say here that I am in awe of people who can remember to breathe when near a microphone, never mind think quickly on camera.) I was really rooting for her, hoping she might get into a ‘Ken the Mormon’ groove and drag this thing out for months giving me at least one thing to write about every day. In her personal chat with Mr. Trebek, she revealed that she is a Latin teacher, and that she and her husband were married in the Providence Atheneum. Very Cool.

Some of her correct answers were; Leviathan, Girlcott, Puleeze, Ix-nay (she also speaks Pig Latin) and The Lusitania. I got really excited when one of the categories was ‘Flight of the Concordes’ but it turned out to be about aviation.

Hometown smarty-pants Lydia Haile Fassett is a contestant this week (scheduled for Tuesday) on’ Jeopardy!’. Wild Colonial pub quiz participants found this out last Sunday night when her teammates outed her.  She seemed quite modest and not at all braggy but the team did name itself something like “Hey I’m going to be on ‘Jeopardy!’” and then proceeded to kick everyone’s ass around the block.

So Lydia has game and she’s representing — you have to go see her super little Hometown Howdy at the Jeopardy website.  Well done Lydia. (It was kind of weird trying to ‘interview’ her.  Apparently Homeland Security is holding her family at Gitmo until after the show airs.)

7:30pm, tonight, Jeopardy! on WPRI-Channel 12

Dethklok may not be a real band, but they make real music.  At some point while watching Metalocalypse, the discriminating viewer will suddenly realize — hey, these guys are actually kinda good. At any rate, this album is now on my iPod.  It stands on its own just as music, but the rewards of researching the lyrics — which can be a tad indecipherable — are huge. Very silly stuff.  ‘Birthday Dethday’ is probably my fave right now.

The show has returned to Sunday night in reruns.  Tonight’s episode: Murdering Outside the Box. Dethklok has an end-of-quarter employee evaluation to find out who is embezzling from the company.

Metalocalypse, 12:30am, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim

(There is some violence, but only when integral to developing plot and character … as in ‘Itchy & Scratchy’.)

ABC 1985 Fall Season Preview

Anyone who has spent a significant amount of time listening to Television’s absolute classic Marquee Moon knows that it’s a life-changer. I first heard of it when reading the liner notes to a promo cassette (yes) for Matthew Sweet’s also-classic Girlfriend, where it made the top spot of Matthew’s “desert island discs”, and when I finally tracked down the album (it hadn’t been reissued on CD yet, or at least I couldn’t find it) I found myself not being able to not listen to it. The tape I dubbed for my car stayed lodged in the stereo for months, until it finally broke and I had to track down the CD. Skittery and taut in all the right places, lithe and dreamy everywhere else, the record takes late 70’s proto-punk and stretches it out on the rack, and in the holes where the taffy’s pulled apart they smother it with hot guitar and the dripping bark of Tom Verlaine. If nothing else the record makes you believe in the guitar solo again, and Marquee Moon rescued me from long and ill advised affair with house music and like an adulterer who had realized the shame of his infidelity, I fell back in love with my beautiful electric guitar. This was a long time ago.

Saturday night at Firehouse 13, a group from Boston called The Cult Of Point Break Society will be performing the album in its entirety, as a charity benefit for Coalition of the Willing, a group raising money to build wells and schools in southern Sudan. The group has covered classic albums in the past, such as Neil Young’s Tonight’s The Night and Big Star’s #1 Record. They have a couple of convincing recordings on their Myspace, so check them and get to the show! Firehouse 13 Presents: Cult Of Point Break Society covering Television’s Marquee Moon. 8pm, $5

If Don Draper was fat, yellow, drunk, impulsive, dumb and bald…

Sooner or later we all end up posing in front of the electric company.  Tonight is the opening episode of the third season of Showtime’s ‘The Brotherhood’.  It’s shot entirely in Rhode Island so that is very cool, but I watched the first hour of this show and couldn’t really get into it.  The drama of corrupt snow-plowing contracts eludes me and how come I never bump into Jason Isaacs?  And where are all these Irish people supposed to be living anyway?  Maybe I should get out more. I’m up to my pupik in Jews over here at the Dose, I’ve probably lost my perspective.