Saturday, September 24, 2011

Saturday morning coffee

- Week one of the fall television premieres is almost complete and no show, which I watched, truly stood out. Modern Family's first episode was a miss as they made little use of the obvious material available to them in the dude ranch setting. The follow-up show, to fill out the hour, was much closer to the mark. As for Glee, the first show was okay, establishing some of the new story lines for this season. The much anticipated Playboy Club started out with an implausible storyline and main character Eddie Cibrian doing his best poor man's Don Draper (Mad Men) imitation. (Cibrian even tried to affect Draper's speech cadence.) A Gifted Man, debuting last night, showed promise. Still on the DVR are Charlie's Angels and Grey's Anatomy and still to come, on Sunday night, are the opening episodes of The Good Wife, Pan Am and season two of Boardwalk Empire on HBO.

- In the reality show genre, The X Factor opened with a whimper. The show has little positive word-of-mouth and will have a hard time matching the "appeal equity" of American Idol.

- This falls in the "that's a special date on the calendar" category. A couple in Cincinnati was married on September 9--a date which happened to be the 50th wedding anniversary of the bride's grandparents, the 75th anniversary of her late great-grandparents, and the 100th anniversary of her late great-great-grandparents.

- Catalina Robayo, the Miss Universe contestant from Colombia, received a unique warning during the recent competition. Robayo was, shall we say, going commando and was warned by judges to stop wearing tiny skirts with nothing underneath. The judges were fearful of what audiences and photographers were "viewing."

- In the crassly commercial product placement category, Tony Bennett and Carrie Underwood appeared together on last night's premiere episode of Blue Bloods, the police drama starring Tom Selleck. Bennett and Underwood were woven into the storyline, singing together, and just happened to be singing a tune from Bennett's new album, Duets. A special commercial then followed, promoting the album which is being sold exclusively at Target.

- I'm having a hard time dealing with the break-up of Derek Jeter and Minka Kelly. Just sayin'...

- Stat of the day: 46% of Americans don't care about the gender of their boss. Of those who do, 32% say they prefer a male boss to 22% who prefer a female boss.

- And finally, a perhaps sad sign-of-the-times is the fact that lottery sales across the U.S. have increased. In 17 states, record numbers of tickets have been sold in the past fiscal year.

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