Launch Week

It is that time of year again. The leaves start to turn and I am suddenly compelled to buy sweaters (even though it is still as hot as August), start a journal and watch a hell of a lot more tv.

Despite the increasing wonkiness of tv's fall schedule (Lost, February, WTF) there were two premiers this week that made my 40" flat screen worth the investment: Gossip Girl and America's Next Top Model.



Gossip Girl
GG highlights: rich teens (who look older than Lohan after a bender) getting high and drinking; rich teens plotting the social demise of one another; and rich teens doing it in a Red Shoes Diary-esque scene that was both embarrassing and sort of hot (embarrassing for me because the tingles I got forced me to admit to myself it was sort of hot).

GG lowlights: the Gossip Girl intro and voice-overs. They're so Degrassi they reminded me that I am more than a decade older than the characters. That said, please tell me the audience they're aiming for is not the female 7 - 12 demographic. Because if it is, we are doomed.



ANTM (Cycle 9)
Do do do do do do do, do do do do do do do, do you wanna be on top?
Yes! Summer, with all its sun and fresh air, is finally over and I can spend my Wednesdays watching skinny chicks hobble around on 6 inch heels and unreliable runways. But are any of us even watching the models? We all know it's all about Tyra.

ANTM highlights: Tyra signing and sashaying in a feathery Vegas head-dress with white (??) nylons; Heather, the hunchback with Asperger's who literally embodies the awkwardness we all feel (especially when surrounded by 30 skinny hot chicks); a quick quote from a contestant named Spontanious!!; Marvita, a Grace Jones look-a-like with an awesome rack, who admits she was once homeless and is really hoping she won't get cut so she can, like you know, live in a house.

ANTM lowlights: Tyra prodding Marvita to admit she was raped and molested and homeless and then cutting her (so she won't, you know, like live in a house); Victoria, the Yale student who admitted she entered as a joke, making it into the top 13 (boo ivy leaguers who take a group home bed away from a homeless chick); the girl named Spontanious disappearing from the competition as quickly as her namesake.

So there are my picks for the week. Also, I smiled for an hour at my tv as Gordon Ramsay negotiated the emotional ups and downs of a Long Island mafia family with all the tough guy British aplomb that made me fall in love with him in the first place.

The American version of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares is over-produced, and Ramsay looks a little lost on foreign soil, but it's not at all the stinker the lawsuits and summer gossip suggested it would be.

And finally, I guess I should acknowledge the launch of this blog. Done and done.