Television
 Taken under: A close look at the ‘dismal trade’
Blessed are the undertakers, for they take care of it.
By: JAMES PARKER
.jpg) Sad and lonely: Aliens in America’s bracing look at high-school misery
Not all varieties of teen angst are created equal.
By: ADAM REILLY
.jpg) Heart to heart: David Grubin looks at our most important muscle
We don’t hear too much any more from the people who think heart transplants are a bad idea.
By: JAMES PARKER
.jpg) Mean girls: Digging the Gossip
Josh Schwartz loves filming scenes where his simpático underdog punches a nasty and absurdly rich Yeah Dude in the face.
By: SHARON STEEL
.jpg) Uncertain Fey-t: 30 Rock gives it another go
This time last year, who would have guessed that Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip would be dead by Emmy time and Tina Fey’s 30 Rock would be an Emmy winner?
By: MIKE MILIARD
.jpg) Paler than thou: Jim Gaffigan’s off-white superheroes
Comic-book-style superheroes have been a staple of TV since George Reeves put on Superman’s red cape and blue tights in 1951.
By: TED DROZDOWSKI
.jpg) The War is swell: Ken Burns captures reflections in ‘Hell’s own cesspool’
Sometime in the late ’80s, I was sharing some Iron City with my father at the bar of a Pittsburgh American Legion post.
By: CLIF GARBODEN
.jpg) Hero worship: In praise of Stan Lee’s reality-TV gem
The lesson of the Sci-Fi Channel’s Who Wants To Be a Superhero? might seem obvious.
By: ADAM REILLY
.jpg) BBC America?: The networks put some English on the fall TV season
The British are coming! And they have American accents!
By: JOYCE MILLMAN
.jpg) Bull market: Flipping Out on Bravo, plus Celebrity Bull Riding Challenge and Meerkat Manor
Jeff Lewis is real, baby.
By: JAMES PARKER
.jpg) Up on the roof: Will Sox Appeal appeal to Sox fans?
Given the relentlessness with which it was hyped in the months prior to its August 1 premiere, you’re probably familiar with the concept.
By: MIKE MILIARD
.jpg) Blown dry: The Hills have hair
When Lauren Conrad is blow-drying her hair before her camera crews arrive, does she ever consider giving up and allowing her tresses to frizz into a rat’s nest?
By: SHARON STEEL
.jpg) Lost World: MTV’s The Real World: Sydney
Moments into the first episode of MTV’s The Real World: Sydney, Dunbar Flinn proudly confesses, “I summed everyone up quickly — who’s worth looking at, and who’s not.”
By: CAITLIN E. CURRAN
 Reality ingenue: Lauren Conrad on MTV's The Hills
What is it about MTV’s top-rated reality show The Hills, premiering its third season August 13th?
By: ELLEE DEAN
.jpg) Nice package: Mad Men practices truth in advertising
The seductive new drama series Mad Men re-creates the beginning of the advertising industry’s shiny modern era of bullshit.
By: JOYCE MILLMAN
.jpg) Leader of the pack: Cesar Millan and Dog Whisperer
“When good dogs go bad,” goes the voiceover introduction, “there’s one man who’s their best friend. Cesar Millan.”
By: JEFFREY GANTZ
 All but the wank: Is Deep Throat sexier than the 1934 Tarzan and His Mate?
The image of Marlon Brando demanding that Maria Schneider stick two fingers up his ass, now seems the reductio ad absurdum of improvised acting.
By: JAMES PARKER
.jpg) Niagara nights: Matchmaking in Buffalo
In bleak and frozen Buffalo, people are looking for love.
By: MIKE MILIARD
.jpg) Good Shaq, bad Shaq: Is O’Neal’s fat-camp show kind or cruel?
Say this for Miami Heat center Shaquille O’Neal: in Shaq’s Big Challenge, signs abound that his intentions are good.
By: ADAM REILLY
.jpg) Greatest reality hits: The 10 best moments of the past nine months or so
To be read while listening to Green Day’s “Time of Your Life” or Mary Hopkin’s “Those Were The Days, My Friend."
By: JAMES PARKER
.jpg) Backstage masterpiece: Is Slings + Arrows better than The Sopranos?
As much as I adored The Sopranos, I have to wonder about the rush to anoint it the best television series ever.
By: ED SIEGEL
.jpg) Lean to the left . . .: Total Bull star Western Wishes, plus Ultimate Fighter 5, Fight Girls, and Last Comic Standing
Western Wishes — what an animal.
By: JAMES PARKER
.jpg) Paul’s got Kate?: Maybe not, but Simon Cowell goes up in flames
Paul Potts! Paul Potts! And again — Paul Potts!
By: JAMES PARKER
.jpg) Viva Las Vegas!: Sin, sun, and survival, plus lesbian surfers
Last week in reality world, it was Vegas, Vegas, Vegas.
By: JAMES PARKER
.jpg) Idiot box: We watch QubeTV so you don't have to
When QubeTV — the video-sharing site “run by conservatives for conservatives” — was launched in April, we were intrigued.
By: MIKE MILIARD
.jpg) Dark passage: Insemination, 12-hour tanning, and . . . modka
As we grind collectively toward the Apocalypse, let us pause for a moment to salute the last-ditch efforts of the Institute of Zoo and Wildlife Research.
By: JAMES PARKER
.jpg) Looking for the next ‘Lisa’: Annals of Cultural Decline
A Dutch TV station says it will go ahead with a programme in which a terminally ill woman selects one of three patients to receive her kidneys.
By: ADAM REILLY
.jpg) Who wants to be a filmmaker?: Plus, can Diesel stand firm on It’s Me or the Dog?
Anybody who’s had dealings with small children knows the importance of “the pitch.”
By: JAMES PARKER
.jpg) Sucker-punched: Girls Next Door, Going Tribal, The Contender, and Be Real
An unexpected chamber of sympathy opened in my heart this week for Hugh Hefner.
By: JAMES PARKER
.jpg) A case of crabs: Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School, Divine Canine, Ultimate Fighter 5, and Deadliest Catch
fThere’s nothing sweeter than family.
By: JAMES PARKER
.jpg) Taking their lumps: Red-king-crabbing, pitbull smacking, and more bull riding
Across the underwater plains of Alaska’s Bering Sea go movable cities of red king crab, silently marching sideways.
By: JAMES PARKER
.jpg) Choke holds: Chuck Barris’s Big Question, Shear Genius, Ultimate Fighter, and more bull rides
That interesting man Chuck Barris has written another book.
By: JAMES PARKER
.jpg) Purists and tourists: PBS takes a refreshingly honest look at the summer of ’67
The Greatest Generation didn’t go quietly.
By: CLIF GARBODEN
.jpg) The dirt: Predatory bachelorettes, animal assassins
ABC’s The Bachelor has long been one of the dirtiest shows on TV, a softcore brothel spritzed with the air-freshener pieties of courtly love.
By: JAMES PARKER
.jpg) Closing on a classic: The Sopranos plays its last hand; Entourage fires up a Yom Kippur war
Why is it that as Tony Soprano sits on a deck chair overlooking a pristine upstate New York lake, the atmosphere is filled with dread?
By: JON GARELICK
.jpg) Predators!: On the hunt with Rabbi Shmuley, Tred Barta, and prehistoric felines of the Arctic
I kept my appointment with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach this time and was rewarded.
By: JAMES PARKER
.jpg) Bon appétit: Sometimes you eat the bull and sometimes . . .
With apologies to those of my readers who were expecting a poignant analysis of Rabbi Shmuley Boteach’s Shalom in the Home.
By: JAMES PARKER
.jpg) Flash!: Sedaris busted for unreal humor, apathetic Oxycontin addict discovered in California!
David Sedaris, laughing gnome of NPR and bestselling humorist, may — in the course of trying to be funny — have made a few things up.
By: JAMES PARKER
.jpg) Where everything is meant to be seen: Baudrillard, the Pussy Cat Dolls, and Anna Nicole
So I’ve been reading Introducing Baudrillard (Verso).
By: JAMES PARKER
.jpg) Seeing isn’t believing: Ira Glass takes This American Life to television
Public radio has a number of gritty survival skills. One of these is the ability to fly under the pop-culture radar like an ambiguously cool former classmate.
By: SHARON STEEL
.jpg) The new reality: TV execs and contestants reverse roles: Fat chance
Oh no, she did not just ask me if I want to fill out an application.
By: SARA FAITH ALTERMAN
.jpg) Breast friends: Stalking Pete Doherty and The Girls Next Door exact their pound of flesh
When it comes to reality TV, the Brits operate with a pungent, hot-button immediacy that America’s producer tribe must envy.
By: JAMES PARKER
 A lost fan: Stranded somewhere in the South Pacific
What happened to the black plumes of smoke?
By: ELLEE DEAN
.jpg) Hail and farewell: The OC, when it was good
The OC name-checked Michiko Kakutani and Julius Rosenberg; one character read Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire and another had a poster for Imitation of Life.
By: CHARLES TAYLOR
.jpg) Dirt cheap: The unintentional brilliance of FX's new show
This steady diet of shock tactics and Dynasty-esque histrionics that makes the show feel like a celebrity rag set in motion, aligning the style and credibility of its own content with that of trashy tabloids that tempt us at supermarket checkout lines.
By: SEAN BARTLETT
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