SkimIt
Spend all week getting your costume ready for the Mardi Gras parade? Here's what you missed on TV.
An Honestly Unexpected Moment
The Super Bowl, like most made-for-TV events, is micromanaged down to the second. Which is what made the power outage near the beginning of the third quarter so genuinely surprising. It felt genuinely ominous for a second when the lights dimmed and the sound cut out, with no indication of what had gone wrong as the broadcast feed cut to a commercial. The 34 minutes of time-filling prattle that followed were a bit of a trial, though.
Speaking of Super Bowl Commercials
By a wide margin, the worst Super Bowl commercial was the one for the internet domain registry that featured a supposedly hot supermodel making out awkwardly with a cliched approximation of what supermodels think IT guys look like. (Actually, most IT guys I've known look like they follow Phish on tour all summer.) It was the weirdly close-miked soundtrack that was truly revolting, though: I don't even want to hear attractive people macking that loudly.
A Roots Reunion
Kicking off Black History Month, The View welcomed the principal cast of the legendary 1977 miniseries Roots for a group interview. LeVar Burton, Ben Vereen, Leslie Uggams and Louis Gossett Jr. didn't reveal any deep backstage secrets during the chat session, but they seemed genuinely grateful for the association with what was one of biggest television events ever.
An Alternate Take
On the recently-returned FX comedy show Totally Biased With W. Kamau Bell, cult comedian Reggie Watts introduced a new segment called Great Moments In Black Hipstery. The magnificently Afro'd stream-of-consciousness comedian introduced the segment by saluting Phoebe Robinson of Silver Lake, California: the first black person to laugh out loud during an episode of Portlandia. Here's hoping the idea continues for the rest of the month: Watts and Bell are pretty much the only black hipsters currently on TV. Well, and DJ Lance from Yo Gabba Gabba.
Kittens Rule Our World
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart managed to tie together two disparate news stories -- that the United States Postal Service was going to end Saturday delivery and that Monopoly was going to replace its iron game piece with a cat -- by suggesting that the internet, with its insatiable appetite for cat photos and videos, was slowly changing the social fabric of America. My cats Monkey, Angus and The Stig say that they disagree.
