SkimIt
Spend all week getting ready for your big Golden Globes viewing party? Here's what you missed on TV.
Local News Has A Premonition
During the build-up for the playoff rematch between the Green Bay Packers and the Minnesota Vikings, reporter Lee Valsvik from Minneapolis station KARE was doing a live remote from a local restaurant when the bartender she was interviewing playfully tossed their prop football to one of the station's cameramen. The camera guy then ran up the aisle and through the petite Valsvik, who was wearing a Vikings jersey, knocking her into a table and onto the ground. Sadly, the Pack did pretty much exactly the same thing to the Vikes, crushing them 24-10.
Well, This Was Unexpected
Much of the buzz about the third season of Downton Abbey has focused on the arrival of Martha Levinson (Shirley MacLaine), the American mother-in-law, particularly how a brash Yank would interact with the exceedingly proper Lady Violet (Maggie Smith). The bar for their future meetings is set quite high by the premiere's centerpiece scene, where Martha causes a mini-scandal by flirtatiously singing the pop standard "Let Me Call You Sweetheart" directly to an an increasingly discomfited Lady Violet during a dinner party. The Dowager Countess got "Zou Bisou Bisou"'d!
Homer Gets Prepped
In a week that had a number of fun guest star appearances -- hi there, Billy Dee Williams on Modern Family, Hal Linden on The Mindy Project and Octavia Spencer on 30 Rock -- The Simpsons scored the big get when avant-rock cult hero Tom Waits appeared as the leader of a group of doomsday preppers Homer becomes entangled with. An accomplished actor who's worked with everyone from Francis Ford Coppola to Jim Jarmusch, Waits isn't known for his comic timing, but his barely-contained outrage when his predicted apocalypse (caused when Homer accidentally sets off an Electromagnetic Pulse that wipes out all the electricity in Springfield) doesn't get all that apocalyptic was hilarious.
The Bridal Auditions Commence
The season premiere of The Bachelor is like the early episodes of American Idol, where the crazies get weeded out during the audition rounds. This year, said attention-seekers included Lindsay, who appeared wearing a full bridal gown complete with accessories and almost immediately tried to mack on Dallas insurance agent Sean Lowe. The other standout was Ashley, who decided that her memorable quirk is that she's obsessed with Fifty Shades of Grey. Because apparently she thinks it's still early 2012.
Only Al Could Get Away With This
The biggest celebrity story of the week flooded into late night monologues and everyone's social media feeds when NBC news personality Al Roker told an unexpectedly revealing anecdote during a Dateline NBC interview. Seems that shortly after his successful gastric bypass surgery in 2002, he was attending a White House function during which he accidentally... er... soiled himself. It says so much about Al Roker's easygoing personal charm that this story comes off as endearingly embarrassing instead of horrifyingly gross.
