57 Channels and Only This Is On - 5/26/12

Quote of the Week: Yes my bad-boy prom date is gay. He just doesn’t know it yet, so I’m basically his beard. Pre-beard. His stubble. (Alex, Modern Family)

Song of the Week: Cocaine – Eric Clapton (Men At Work)

Scene of the Week:



Big News of the Week: Dan Harmon Fired: In true Hollywood fashion, the executives at Sony decided to not renew the contract of Community creator and executive producer Dan Harmon very late last Friday (it is where everyone likes to dump bad news in hopes it gets buried in the weekend). Even with its late release time, the internet still exploded the way only the internet can. Personally I could care less. Sure Harmon’s high concepts led to some great television, but he also had much more swings and huge misses. I really do not care who is behind the show as long as I continue to get my weekly dose of Alison Brie. And all the vitriol towards Song and NBC are pretty unwarranted. By all accounts Harmon is a douche who is hard to work with. You may be able to pull that off if you are Aaron Sorkin and are getting great rating (but even he got pushed out the door at The West Wing eventually) but you certainly cannot if you are pulling in The CW style ratings. And a note to the new showrunners: more Annie Edison please.

Preview Picture of the Week:



Mad Men: Just when I thought the show could not come up with anything more distracting than a topless Rory Gilmore, Kinsey reappears as a Hare Krishna / Star Trek fan-fic writer. Coolbeans and touché Mad Men writers.
You can download Mad Men on iTunes.

Modern Family: What a horrible tease. I thought next season we would get more Dylan next season with Haley moving in with him, but no, she had to go ahead and get into college. Booo. Maybe she will get knocked up by the time next season comes around (while Gloria somehow gets unpregnant). And I may have pinpointed what was wrong with this season (aside from a lack of Dylan), they try to shoehorn in too many emotional moments like after a very funny telenovela bit they had to go ahead and ruin it with Mitchell having a very unfunny breakdown.
You can stream recent episodes on Hulu.



Revenge: Just when I thought the show was heading for yet another disappointing payoff when Emily ended up not killing the Albino, but then just as Emily was going to tell Jack everything, Not-Amanda shows up all pregnant (oh snap!) and Victoria got blow up in a plane by the Albino (double snap!!). Sure anyone who has ever watched a soap opera know there is a 0.0% chance that Victoria is actually dead (unless it turns out Madeleine Stowe is even harder to work with than Dan Harmon), same with Charlotte’s overdose, but at least we get to spend the next four months trying to figure out just how she comes back from the dead. Oh yeah, and real-Amanda’s mother is not quite dead as they had us believe. Somebody get Stowe’s Bad Girls co-star Mary Stuart Masterson on the phone.
You can stream current episodes on Hulu. You can also download Revenge on iTunes.

Awake: When the series premiered I predicted that the series finale would reveal that Det. Britton was the one that died in the car crash and his wife and kid were alive and well. Well two out of three is not bad. But it turns out I was right that both worlds were not real, I think (unless the Asian doctor was right and Britton cracked again creating a third reality which is what we were seeing at the end and a potential second season would have been split between three different realities; just the thought of that kind of makes me glad that it stopped after one season).
You can stream current episodes on Hulu. You can also download Awake on iTunes.

Free Download of the Week: If you missed my review of the debut from Kimbra (see I Can’t Explain Away the Way I Feel) I pointed out ways you could download three of her songs for free: you can get Warrior courtesy of Converse, Cameo Lover on iTunes, and Good Intent over at MTV.com. And in addition to those three, you can also grab Settle Down for the same price on Amazon MP3. That is 30% of her album you can get for free.

New Album Release of the Week: What We Saw From The Cheap Seats - Regina Spektor

New DVD Release of the Week: Gone

Video of the Week: It is ironic that when I was forced to read The Great Gatsby back in high school I had visions of Jay-Z, Kanye West and Jack White singing U2 going around in my head even though none at that point in time had released any music let alone back in the twenties where the book was set. It also donned one me that the book would make possibly the greatest 3-D movie of all time. Thank you Baz Luhrmann for bringing all of this to fruition with his adaptation of the film.



Next Week Pick of the Week: Hatfields and McCoys, Monday at 9:00 on History: Kevin Costner and Paxton play the patriarchs of the most famous feud of all time in the History mini-series which airs over three straight days.