– Early favorites: TK the classical-music-breaker (who can solve a Rubik’s Cube in 45 seconds!), Lisa the cocky contemporary dancer, and the trampoliney-guy who mixed some amazing aerials into a reasonably good contemporary routine.

– Leah Miller is a black hole where charisma goes to die.

– Tre Armstrong looks to be a staggeringly good judge – she’s intelligent, observant and eloquent in her praise and criticism. Judgewise she is like a more lucid version of Li’l C. Also she is hotter than Li’l C, which is good.

– Bitchy Blake from America’s Season 1 is a judge and a choreographer for this show. This is so wonderful it makes bad people die inside a little bit. And then he shows up when the judges are about to send someone packing and DEMANDS that the guy be allowed to do his choreography, because he is Blake Fucking McGrath and he Gets What He Wants Dammit. HE IS SUCH A FUCKING DIVA AND IT IS FANTASTIC.

– I was prepared for Mary Murphy’s guest appearance to be as bad as Mary Murphy can get, but she was remarkably restrained for Mary Murphy. That is about the best you can hope for, really.

– My one concern at this point is that this show will follow the Canadian Idol path: namely, that the rest of the country will once again indulge their passion for hating Toronto and vote down Torontonian dancers over, ahem, slightly less talented dancers from other parts of the country, which is what happens on Idol every fucking year.

(Non-Canadians will not understand this, but you know how Americans from not New York City have this strange antipathy for New York City? Take that antipathy, multiply it by a factor of fifty, and you have what non-Torontonian Canucks think of Toronto. Which, speaking as a Toronto resident, I can assure you we simply don’t understand. My working theory is that Toronto-haters are working out their massively depressing envy in a fashion not unlike a third-grade boy smacking around the girl he secretly likes.)

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

EDIT: Fixed with better version.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

(post by not-MGK author Dan Solomon)

Because we all love Lost, but can struggle to find the 22 hours required to re-watch an entire season after we know where all of the plot twists are going to come in, it’s clear we’ve all been seeking the ideal medium for enjoying an entire season’s events in roughly an hour. But which medium is appropriate? Which medium?

Well, obviously, it’s indie rock. Because the Flaming Lips may sing about robots and wizards and Superman, but even they aren’t quite nerdy enough to pen songs with titles like "Be My Constant" or "The Ballad of Sayid Jarrah". Brooklyn’s Previously On Lost has taken up the slack, complete with nasally vocals and a coke-fueled rhythm track. If you’re a Lost fan who’s secretly lamented the fact that you couldn’t dance to "There’s No Place Like Home, Part I", I hope that this provides you with what you never even knew you were missing.

Also, maybe y’all have seen it before, but the (severely missed) Mike Wieringo posted a series of Lost-themed sketches on his DeviantArt page in 2006 that I just found. They’re great, and now this post’s a two-fer.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Those of us who are TV critics are getting the press advance copy for the fall season right now, and I just thought I’d warn everybody in advance:

From the copy:

Get ready to laugh… like you’re crazy! Reba McEntire (Reba) stars as Harleen Quinzel, a single mom and psychiatrist working in Gotham City. Sparks fly when she meets a “mysterious, funny fellow” on a mission of destruction, and starts her own mission… of hilarity! But can this free spirit cope with her new boss, uptight Thomas Arkham (Patrick Warburton, Rules of Engagement)? Fun for the whole family.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

First, I want to think MGK for inviting me to stay on as a guest contributor and all the readers of this blog for a terrifically positive experience.

I was nervous, at first, but you’re awesome.

Second, this is Will Entrekin, and I’m cross-posting this entry to my own blog, Will in the World.

This entry concerns House, M.D. I thought that since I had already written about Doctor Who and Supernatural, I really should devote some screentime to my favorite show, especially since I’m so worried about it.

I don’t quite remember when I became a fan of House, but I certainly remember how: my best friend in my writing program at some point, told me I needed to watch it and lent me the first season on DVD. I don’t remember why, nor how it came up, but man, it hooked me right away.

Some background: I was, during college, premed. I got right up to the MCATs before I realized I’m not a doctor, and by then it was late enough that I ended up graduating with a secondary major in science. My primary major was literature, and I did my thesis on the connection between medicine and writing as embodied in the work of Arthur Conan Doyle and William Carlos Williams. Looking back, I think what ultimately made me give it up was realizing that I really couldn’t handle that responsibility. It’s not the blood or the guts or anything; it’s the fear of making a mistake the cost of which would be a life.

I was skeptical when my friend lent me that DVD, but then I started watching the show, and I found I very quickly couldn’t stop. I’d say I’m not sure there’s a better show on television because I’d have a very limited sample set (I haven’t really owned a television in several years), but I know I just kept going, straight on through. I watched the entire first season in a weekend, and then watched most of the second over my first USC winter break, my first Christmas and New Year’s on my own and in LA.

And I loved it.

For anyone not watching; House is less a show about medicine than it is about diagnostics, problem solving, and detective work, and House himself has less in common with, say, Doug Ross (or choose a favorite doctor character) than he has with Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. One can pretty much pick up the series with any episode; most are completely self-contained, and all focus primarily on a single case. With nearly perfect three-act structure in every episode. Plus, House is acerbic, sarcastic, and brilliantly curmudgeonly.

But after last season, I’ve been wondering if he hasn’t limped over the shark.

The first three were mostly terrific, and the third ended on a bit of a cliff-hanger in which he lost his entire team (Omar Epps, Jesse Spencer, and uber-hot Jennifer Morrison). It was set up well enough to be a dramatic development, and season three began first with House on his own, until his boss forces him to hire a new team. In typical House fashion, he basically has a marathon interview with, like, forty applicants. The third season pretty much became survivor in a hospital with House as Jeff Probst, with several odd-ish complications along the way.

I started to notice it most when House used a hunting knife and a wall socket to electrocute himself. I’m not sure how he did it, though; my father is an electrician, and so far as I know (do not try on your own), one needs at least two such implements, one in each slot of a socket, to complete the circuit and get a shock. How he managed to kill himself with just the knife is anyone’s guess (though, I guess, being House, he probably accounted for it), but moreso it took the character to a weird extreme. House is a Vicodin addict, certainly often a prick, and by most accounts self-destructive in some ways, but destructive enough to set aside survival instinct to see if there’s a light at the end of the tunnel? It felt very much against character.

I can really only hope that the issues that occurred midway through the season did so for the same reasons that I speculate occurred with Supernatural; that writers’ strike messed up productions several ways to Sunday, and about the only show I’d guess it didn’t affect would have been The Bachelorette and its “reality”-based ilk.

The season ended with the death of a character too prevalent and well developed, over the season, to really be called minor but not really exactly major, either. It seemed to come a bit out of left field, but it did complicate various relationships in the show in a lot of ways.

With a few weeks left before the new season starts, I hope they’ve gotten their act together and pull it off well. I’m interested to see where it goes. The friction between House and Wilson (played by Robert Sean Leonard– Swing Heil!) could be insanely tense, and Laurie and Leonard are two actors I’d love to see holding nothing back while going for each other’s throats. They have as dramatic and amazing a chemistry as Laurie ever had with Fry (and if you haven’t seen A Bit of Fry and Laurie, you must).

I’m also wondering if they’ll ever demonstrate just what Taub actually brings to anything, because so far, I’m not totally clear on his use in the show, and why he’s there.

I’m also hoping to see more of Jennifer Morrison. But that’s kind of an obvious request, probably.