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A MasterChef's Blind-siding
The most buzzed-about contestant on the not-very-buzzed-about MasterChef is Christine, who is a competent chef despite being blind. Rival chef Ryan tried to take Christine out when he won the opportunity to assign an extra challenge to certain teammates during a competition: instead of using canned crabmeat, Christine had to dispatch and disassemble a live crab. Despite a few hairy moments, she not only did it with relative ease, her resulting dish won.
Throwing Stones
If that confusing mess of a premiere episode is any indication, CBS and the producers of Big Brother shouldn't have bothered to sue the makers of ABC's The Glass House. It's going to fail by itself just fine. And the public face of that failure will be the deluded Alex, who claims he's going to be "the most epic villain on reality TV," but is in fact an infantile attention hog whose exploits already have a bizarre stench of desperation about them. When you're already wearing another contestant's bikini in the first episode, you're not a villain, you're just a loser.
Battles Against Bullying
It nearly got lost amidst all the buzz about how Ann Curry is about to be fired from her role on NBC's Today, but her co-host Matt Lauer interviewed 68-year-old Florida bus monitor Karen Klein, the woman whose relentless bullying by a group of junior high boys went viral earlier this week. It was a remarkably disturbing video, not only for how visibly upset the video made Lauer, but how completely beaten down this poor woman clearly was. So much so that she reacted to the news that an online campaign has raised over half a million dollars for her by sympathetic small donors by saying, essentially, that she doubted she'd ever see the money. It was uncomfortable in both directions.
Dude, Seriously. No.
TLC previewed a potential new series called America's Worst Tattoos, where folks with some truly regrettable ink got their past mistakes covered up. But one guy was bizarrely proud of his hideous decoration: he'd had his wife's bridal photo inked onto his arm, as a zombie. Because zombies aren't already on their 14th minute and counting as a pop culture meme. His wife, understandably hates it. She needs to dump this neck-bearded hipster-wannabe immediately.
Tweaking the Junior Elephant Club
Finally, Real Time With Bill Maher closed with a discussion of an amusing new trend in right-wing politics: conservative-minded teenagers are blogging and podcasting the GOP's talking points like the new generation of Glenn Becks. Maher succinctly sums up the obvious problem with this new trend, which seems to have passed the older generation by: "If a 14-year-old can deliver your message, it's not because he's gifted. It's because intellectually, you're a child."
