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• New on Nerve, 1.7.08: American Gladiators

  In case you missed last night's premiere of the American Gladiators remake, let me tell you all you need to know: 1. Hulk Hogan is a natural game show host and totally should have gotten that Price is Right gig. 2. New York City firefighter: 10 trillion; Southern Cali skateboarder: 2. 3. Being gigantic alone isn't enough to make you a gladiator these days. You must also have a vaguely racist Aztec schtick, or boobs, or have been on the original Gladiators. But other than that little tweak, the show is remarkably faithful to the one in the '90s, right down to the pun-driven play-by-play. The biggest difference we could pick out was that when you get knocked off the tower with the giant Q-Tip, now you fall into water instead of onto bouncy mats. Our intrepid reporter Justin Clark tested out those mats himself, after being pulled off a giant vinyl pyramid by a gladiatorette named Venom and waxing philosophical about what the remake says about how we've changed as a people in ten years. (Short answer: very little.)  And if you'd like to see more of Justin's unflagging intrepidness, here you are. Posted Jan 07 2008, 06:05 PM by Will Doig with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: TV review, American Gladiators, Justin Clark, '90s

• From the Archives: Amelie Gillette reviews the Food Network and the Discovery Channel

  Today is Amelie Gillette day. (Hi Amelie!) She’s previously published two equally funny reviews about strange TV shows and channels. In "Freaks and Geeks" Amelie posits that the Discovery Channel is trying to refurbish the image of science, moving away from nerdy nebbish and towards the macho man. “It’s not that the Discovery Channel is trying to make science fun and entertaining; it's trying, desperately, to make science seem manly. That's why the channel will often follow a program about the science of making plastic bottles and jars (How It's Made), with, say, Motorcycle Mania 2 (not to be confused with the original crazy-about-bikes show, Motorcycle Mania). It's as if they're overcompensating for being nerds.” “No Accounting for Taste” is part homage to TV cooking shows, part screed against Rachel Ray and her ubiquity on the Food Network. “To me, the TV chefs are the main draw of cooking shows, not because I feel anything aching about them, either, but because there's something intimate about watching someone cook. Hands are dirtied, tongues are relaxed, and, pretty soon personal lives and secrets are revealed. It's like watching a very slow-paced soap opera, complete with lessons on how to chop.” Amelie also has a blog on the Onion AV club called The Hater.  Posted Dec 04 2007, 01:00 PM by Sarah with | with 5 comment(s) Filed under: TV review, Amelie Gillette, Discovery Channel'

• New on Nerve, 12.4.2007: A Review of “Snapped” by Amelie Gillette

  Amelie Gillette has a really funny piece up today about Snapped, a true-crime show on Oxygen about previously normal women who suddenly go crazy and kill someone, usually their husbands. Amelie swears that she’d never kill her boyfriend, but if she snapps at least she knows how NOT to do it. “When I watch Snapped, I'm an armchair killer. I second-guess the murderer's methods (stabbing someone with a knife 192 times? Haven't you ever heard of good, old-fashioned succinylcholine?), or their clean-up attempts (hastily hung wallpaper? Nice try) or their defense strategies (self-defense doesn't make sense if he was sleeping when you shot him).” Posted Dec 04 2007, 10:45 AM by Sarah with | with no comments Filed under: TV review, Amelie Gillette, Oxygen Network, murder

• New on Nerve, 11.6.2007: A review of "Pushing Daisies"

  Bryan Christian reviews ABC’s new show Pushing Daisies. His points: “It's a whimsical, deeply stylized, romantic murder-mystery fairy tale with a weird, complicated conceit: boy meets girl, boy raises girl from the dead with a magical touch to solve her murder, boy and girl solve other murders in similar fashion but can't touch each other, or girl dies again. For all its storybook trappings, Pushing Daisies is an adult exercise, much more of the Grimm school than Disney's….It's a worldview borrowed from other thanocentric shows like Six Feet Under or Dead Like Me (the latter also created by Pushing Daisies Bryan Fuller), and it makes the show's casual approach to mortality seems weirdly earned. With its breakneck adherence to the conventions of genre, Pushing Daisies hews close to the classic screwball tropes. In fact, the show that it most resembles is Moonlighting, which had a similar affinity for broad, adult comedy, frustrated lust and oddly confessional culprits.” I saw part of an episode and I couldn’t watch the whole thing. It was too cloying, brightly colored and contrived for my taste.  Maybe if I’d managed to watch more than half an episode I would have liked it. But I’ll never know because there’s a limited number of TV hours in my week and Pushing Daisies is no longer on my DVR list. Posted Nov 06 2007, 10:56 AM by Sarah with | with no comments Filed under: ABC, Pushing Daisies, TV review, Bryan Christian