This Can't Be Broccoli

My heart sank when I heard the news. ABC had dropped the axe after years of declining ratings, and was going to cancel the long-running soap operas All My Children and One Life to Live . To the surprise of everyone, including myself, I was devastated. It was like finding out an old friend was going to be taken off life support. I'd been watching soap operas ever since I was twelve. My grandmother got me hooked on Days of Our Lives during the "Marlena gets possessed by the devil" plot line while she was babysitting me over summer vacation. "He's a boy," she told my mother, "He'll like all that violent, Satan stuff." Apparently it never occurred to her that sending me into junior high school talking about things like Vivian's scheming and the Carrie-Austin-Mike love triangle might be like sending a bleeding man into a shark tank. Luckily, my mom caught the problem before it was too late. The night before my first day of scho...

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly regarding his new show, an American version of the British hit The X-Factor , Simon Cowell commented on the newest hit talent show The Voice on NBC. He said that it was silly to do a show that prized talent over appearance since the music industry relies so heavily on appearance. Sooo...rather than try to change that, television should just...embrace it? That comment was the final straw for me with Cowell. I always found him to be amusing on Idol , but as the years dragged on, some of his digs went a little too far. He was constantly criticizing people who sounded too "musical theater" as if musical theater singers aren't the best-trained in the country. Even Randy Jackson, hardly the voice of reason in any situation, pointed out that a big part of Glee's success--you know, that juggernaut also on Fox--had to do with the popularity of musical theater. Simon just went back to sipping his Coke and texting from his IP...

Thank goodness for Veronica Mars . And thank you Netflix for bringing her to me. In many ways, she saved my soul. I had just been through a terrible break-up, and was back living at my mother's house. Break-ups are never a fun experience, but when they end with you sleeping on a futon staring at your mother's doll cabinet, they seem especially cruel. My boyfriend and I had been living together for a year, and he had become my entire existence. Before I met him, my life was a quiet one--filled with Tuesday nights at the movies and Sunday afternoon marathons of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit . It was great having another person in my life, and I missed it as soon as it was gone. But then I realized something--I missed all that pop culture! It was a part of me that I really liked, and somehow, I'd been neglecting it--along with my friends and other hobbies I enjoyed. Hmm, I thought, maybe the relationship wasn't so great after all. That was when I ...

It happened last night. I was twenty minutes into "The Killing" and I found myself checking the clock on the television for the fifth time to see if it was anywhere near done. That's when I admitted to myself that I don't like this show. I've been force-feeding it to myself for the past few weeks, because of the rave reviews from critics and the big ratings it took in for its first episode, but now I'm five hours in, and I find that I couldn't care less who killed Rosie Larsen, or why, or--you know what? I just don't care. I'm tired of being expected to invest twelve to thirteen hours of my life in a television show for one or two big pay-offs at the end of the season. Television shows like this were conceived in the wake of the pop culture phenomenon that was "Twin Peaks" where the murder of Laura Palmer captivated audiences for an entire season. Now the "solve-the-murder-in-the-last-episode" trend is everywhere. Wh...

This weekend, the movie Rio made 40 million dollars at the box office. That's not a huge surprise since Rio is family friendly. The big surprise is that the reboot of Scream failed to make even twenty million dollars. ...Or did it? When I was reading about box office trackers scratching their heads over why a popular franchise's latest edition such as Scream 4 failed to land a bigger opening--especially when fans of the series are applauding the new installment--it took me back to the last time a popular R-rated movie underperformed at the box office. That movie was American Pie . The sex-filled comedy eventually made a bundle of movie over a longer period of time--and analysts may remember that the first Scream movie did the same--but both had less than impressive opening weekends. What some may not remember is that the Disney movie Tarzan is what flattened American Pie...except it probably didn't. More than likely, kids under the age of seventeen, who ...

I have a confession to make. I stop working fifteen minutes before we close. Well, that isn't technically true. Where I work, it takes about fifteen minutes to close up, but the public can come in right up until the second we're officially "closed." I make sure everything is closed up the way it should be, but if anyone comes in during those last fifteen minutes, they are not getting my full attention. What they get is a brisk (at times borderline rude) employee who is simply trying to convince them that they should come back when we aren't shutting off the lights or locking the doors. Maybe it's the way I was raised. When I was a kid, my parents never went in anywhere if it was near closing time. My mother still avoids entering a store if it's an hour before closing. "I don't want to be rude," she'll say, "They want to go home." Maybe that's why it amazes me when people show up at my work at 7:55 on a twe...