The Golden Globes, 2011

January 17, 2011January 23, 2011 / Jared / 1 Comment

We warmed up earlier this month with the People’s Choice Awards, but now Awards Season begins in earnest with the Golden Globes. By the way, People’s Choice Awards, you may need to reassess your existence if you’re nothing more than an unnoticed ramp-up to the ridiculous disaster that is the Golden Globes. And I’m sure you noticed that I didn’t even bother with you, Critics’ Choice Awards.

As per the usual, my wife Johanna and I will be competing in a winner-picking competition. We’ve done this for nine award shows and I’ve beaten her eight times. Her one win? Last year’s Golden Globes. That doesn’t bode well for me tonight; I suspect her tendency to make at least one or two crazy choices really helps her because of the general goofiness of the Hollywood Foreign Press.

She wants the win, too. You guys should have seen her agonizing over her ballot! I thought she was going to have a breakdown making her picks. She also had to fulfill her role as award show bartender. In honor of the foreign voters and the drunken, vaguely trashy vibe of the evening, she’s whipped us up a wine spritzer with equal parts Chardonnay, Sprite Zero, and Diet Orange Fanta. As she set it down in front of me she said, “These are relatively disgusting, BTW,” but I’m enjoying mine so far. She’s calling it the “Slutty Exchange Student” and assures me that she’s working on a second concoction for later this evening.

All right, let’s get started. As always, categories and winners in bold. Take it away, Ricky Gervais!

8:01 – Here’s Ricky! As I said last year, I think he’s perfect for this job, mostly because he doesn’t seem to care much about offending people and he doesn’t seem stiff and over-prepared. I’m looking forward to it.

His drinking a beer on stage thing is starting to feel like a gimmick, though.

8:04 – The audience has definitely warmed to him since last year. He’s getting more laughs from the famous people up front. Robert De Niro is certainly enjoying himself.

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I’m actually excited about streaming something on Netflix!

September 25, 2010September 25, 2010 / Jared / Leave a comment

Don’t let the title of this post fool you. It’s not that I’ve never enjoyed streaming something through Netflix; that’s a feature I use regularly. It’s just that it seems like nothing I’m ever really, really excited about watching is available. I always decide I want to kill some time by streaming something and then struggle to find something worth watching, as opposed to deciding what I want to watch and then being pleasantly surprised by its instant availability.

That changed today with NBC Universal’s announcement that they’re going to allow Netflix to stream a ton of their content, including Battlestar Galactica, 30 Rock, The Office, Friday Night Lights, and, the kicker…

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The Emmys, 2010

August 30, 2010November 12, 2010 / Jared / 1 Comment

Here we are again. Another award show, another winner-picking competition between me and my new wife, Johanna. And after slogging through a few shows that, while fun, were ultimately inconsequential (The ESPYs, The Daytime Emmys, and the MTV Movie Awards) we finally have a big one: The Emmys.

This has traditionally been my award show of choice; I’ve always been more of a television guy than a movie guy, I guess. Plus, I don’t usually get around to seeing many of the nominated films before the Oscars, whereas I’m always pretty invested in the Emmys and opinionated about the categories. It feels like the recent golden age of television has faded a bit, and my interest has waned slightly, but this remains my favorite masturbatory Hollywood event.

Tonight is big for Johanna, too. My friend Alex, in anticipation of tonight’s competition, asked me if Johanna had won any of these. I quickly said that yes, she had. While I knew I had taken the last few, I thought we were actually pretty even. Having gone back to check, though, I’m surprised to report that I won The Grammys, The Academy Awards, The MTV Movie Awards, The Daytime Emmys, and The ESPYs, with Johanna only claiming the Golden Globes, the first one of these we did. I’m up five to one! She needs a win. In preparation, she’s been scouring the internet for expert predictions.

As always, we choose for the most part whom we think will win, not whom we want to win. Never is that more true than with the Emmys; trust me, I’m no fan of The Good Wife or, heaven forbid, Glee. Categories and winners are in bold. Johanna has concocted an Emmy cocktail containing peach vodka, Sprite Zero, and a splash of grenadine. She’s named it the “Leading Lady.” It’s better, both in name and taste, than the drink she fixed us for the Daytime Emmys. Let’s do this.

7:41 – Taco night is over, the red carpet has begun, and I’m filling out my ballot. All of these interviews are so unbelievably awkward and cringe-worthy. I instinctively reach for the mute button.

8:00 – Here we go. We’re opening with a shot of the director’s booth. This is such an ego move; it’s like they think we’ll assume the show was put together by elves if they don’t show themselves. Johanna just thinks it’s hacky and compares it to starting a school paper with a Webster’s definition.

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Television, 2000-2009

December 28, 2009April 28, 2010 / Jared / 4 Comments

This has been a great decade for television, so much so that the list of my favorite shows of the decade pretty much doubles as the list of my favorite shows of all time. Other than Seinfeld and the nineties-era Simpsons, I’m struggling to think of a pre-2000 show that would make the cut. It’s amazing how far television has come as a medium over the past ten years. Anyway, here they are, not the best, necessarily, but my favorite shows, 2000-2009 (clips when available and appropriate):

30) Sealab 2021 (Adult Swim, 2000-2005)

A bizarre show for a bizarre decade.

(I couldn’t get the embed code from Adult Swim to work for my favorite clip for some reason, so here’s the link. If I can figure it out, I’ll fix it.)

29) Extras (HBO, 2005-2007)

It’s not The Office, obviously, and parts of the series finale were painfully earnest. But Ricky Gervais (on television, at least) is always worth my time, and about half of the guest stars were hilarious.

28) The “House” Series (Frontier, Colonial, etc.) (PBS, 2000-2006)

It’s almost always entertaining to watch the types of people who sign up for reality television on PBS. For instance, Michelle Rossi-Vorhees, of Colonial House, is simultaneously attempting to recreate the life of a female pioneer in 1628 while staying true to her 21^st-century ideas about feminism and atheism. In doing so, she basically undoes the premise of the show, but it makes for great drama, and the PBS veneer allows viewers to pretend that it’s not just a higher-class Wife Swap. Very sad that there hasn’t been a new installment since 2006.

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