Who let all these brown people on Top Chef?

Five! Out of 17! That's . . . hold on one moment . . . (carry the 4; add the 2; yes, I graduated from elementary school) . . . 29 percent brown people!

You can learn more about Timothy, Tiffany, Tamesha, Kevin (the “Barack Obama of the cooking game”?), and Kenny on Bravo's Top Chef website. There's also Angelo, but he's too full of himself for my taste. And let us not forget Arnold, the token Asian person. Like his predecessors, will Arnold be short-tempered like Dale, manic like Hung, or angry and forgettable like Gene?

Take note, other television shows I watch. You can have lots of colorful people on the screen at the same time in significant roles, and still have a well-written, succesful program. Seven seasons of Top Chef? Crazy.

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Whatever happened to

Justin Shenkarow? The kid from Eerie, Indiana and Picket Fences?

To my surprise and delight, he is going to be featured on current favorite show on Bravo, The Millionaire Matchmaker, next Tuesday at 10/9 Central. Excitement!

If only we could discover whatever happened to Austin O'Brien.

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I doubt this is accurate

because I don't even watch Chuck. Plus, I am so into Cappie right now. Thank goodness quarterlife got cancelled, er, "shifted to Bravo". Thanks, Stephanie!

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I Don't Want to Be

any of these losers: AMPTP Dedicated To Feeding Delicious Content To Hungry Screens, from Defamer.





Also, TV Blogs Go Dark in Solidarity with the Writers Guild of America, by Liz at Glowy Box, via Defamer.

On November 13th, this blog and the blogs listed below will be on strike for the day in solidarity with the Writers Guild of America. As fellow writers and as TV fans, we are coming together to express our strong support for the writers and their goals. We believe that when a writer's work makes money for a company, that writer deserves to be paid . . .

You may notice, as TheStarterWife did, that Television Without Pity is conspicuously missing from that list of 17, even though its arguably most famous contributor of yore is a strike captain. As far as I know, the blog, which is now owned by Bravo/NBC Universal/GE/The Sheinhardt Wig Company, has not mentioned the strike once. Last year, before the takeover, I'm pretty sure the strike would have taken up a whole lot of space on the front page, with recappers' hypotheses and Mondo Extra interviews with writers on the front lines. If the TWoP co-founders Tara Ariano and Sarah D. Bunting are really "[maintaining] complete editorial independence, despite now being a tiny division of General Electric", then they are doing a sucky job. Also, the new TV Guide-esque design of the site looks stinky-pooh.

My new celebrity crush

Meet Ilan Hall, winner of Top Chef Season 2. He's so dreamy. I wasn't that into him when I was watching his season last year. But after watching Top Chef: Watch What Happens, the inexplicable reunion that is airing during the middle of the third season, I can smell what Ilan is cooking. He was wearing a tuxedo with too-short pants and no socks, which is normally a bad look, as well as too fancy for any show on Bravo. But he looked so cute!

According to the special, Sam (seen below) is the former cheftestant who attracts most of the ladies.


He reminds me of this guy that I once knew. Same look, same distant persona. Not my bag, man.

Before a certain someone asks, yes, Ilan is Jewish; but that's not why I like him. I didn't know he was Jewish until after I started writing this post. I'm sure some of the other guys on Top Chef are Jewish, too, but do you see me labeling them as my new celebrity crush? No, you don't. So stop judging me!

This is Bad News.

Bravo nabs popular TV Web site: Television Without Pity bought by cable station.

[Co-founders Tara Ariano and Sarah D. Bunting] will remain as editors of TWOP, overseeing all content. Bravo execs said the site will maintain complete editorial independence, despite now being a tiny little division of General Electric.

I feel quite uneasy about this takeover. Having a multi-billion, multi-national corporation like GE owning a previously independent forum for speech and ideas sounds very, very wrong. How can we snark on the TWOP boards about 30 Rock riffing on NBC being owned by the Sheinhardt Wig Company when the boards we are snarking on are now owned by the very same company?

"If Television Without Pity didn't exist, we would have built it," said Bravo exec VP Jason Klarman, who's at the center of Bravo's online strategy.

Then why didn't you build it four years ago, when Queer Eye for The Straight Guy took off and pretty much made your network?

[Bravo President Lauren Zalaznick] said she wants the cabler and its Web sites to speak to people who, like many TWOP visitors, don't necessarily watch a lot of TV--but who get worked up over the shows they do watch.

"They have to get smart and rich by reading a lot, going to movies, going to school and having big jobs -- therefore they have less time to watch TV sometimes," she said. "But they seem to have infinite bandwidth, so to speak, to love television, talk about television and go places and spend time deeply with their kind of most essential core television connection."

Um (which is a word forbidden on the TWOP boards), doofus? I learned about TWOP from my fellow TV obsessed friend three years ago, when both of us were unemployed.

While searching for more news about this development, I stumbled upon this article in the LA Times: 'Real Housewives of Orange County' eye greener pastures.

I don't really care about the battles between those fame-whores in Coto de Caza and the cable television network they are contractually obligated to obey. What I am concerned about is the passage that appeared towards the bottom of the article:

"Internet blogs have blazed with crass and incendiary comments about their looks and their past and present personal behavior. After attorneys for one participant contacted Television Without Pity, the fan-based website shut down a "Housewives" thread. (Bloggers on the Orange County Register's website complained their negative comments were not published on Bravo's website in favor of more favorable ones.)"

So supposedly, "No massive changes are planned to the site in the near future," but TWOP coincidentally shut down the Housewives thread last month because people were speaking about negatively about the show. I thought maybe this was a temporary closure, as is done from time to time on the TWOP forums when discussions get overly heated. But no. The still locked Housewives thread states: "In response to concerns raised by various show participants' lawyers, we're no longer hosting a thread about the show. Don't start one." posted by Wing Chun (aka Tara Ariano), on "Feb 8, 2007 @ 1:58 pm."

This sucks.

In even creepier, more twisted news: Halliburton will move headquarters from Houston to Dubai. For those of you who aren't what the words "Halliburton," "Dubai," or "Houston" mean, please look them up, then tell me your take on this story. There are as many theories floating around as there are blogs on the interwebs. The Halliburton discussion is still going strong at Daily Kos.

This news is bad, but not at all shocking to anyone who owns a working television set: Black leads still absent from network dramas. And network comedies. And non-syndicated comedies on cable.

Here is the excuse given:

"There is a feeling that the vast majority of the audience is not black, and having a black lead dominating the show makes most viewers feel shut out since they don't work with an African-American in a dominant position in their daily life," TV historian Tim Brooks says.

Who is having this "feeling?"And can this person or persons back up that feeling with any statistics proving their racist theories?

Furthermore, this theory that "black people don't watch black dramas--therefore they fail" is ridiculous. Happy Hour and 'Til Death and 20 Good Years didn't fail because "white people don't watch white comedies." They failed because the shows sucked.

Lastly:

Latinos, who overtook blacks as the largest minority in the U.S. in 2003, have a good chance at landing their first drama series on commercial broadcast TV this year with CBS' untitled family drama pilot featuring an predominantly Latino cast, including leading man Jimmy Smits.

So let me get this straight. Latinos (all of them, regardless of their countries of origin) have been the majority minority in the United States for four years now. And they have chance of getting a drama on broadcast television for the first time ever. Over 35 million people in this country identify as "Hispanic or Latino," and this is the first drama series that they might get on the air? It's not definite, even though Jimmy Smits has starred in three of the biggest network television series in the past three decades?

Yes, I'm sure that they're aren't many black people or Latino people on primetime because black people and Latino people obviously never watch TV. I obviously don't. And don't get me started on the lack of Asian people anywhere in the media, and yeah, having Hiro on Heroes and that guy on Lost is great, but that's two people.

It's nice that these articles never question how many non-white people have Nielsen rating boxes in their households. I don't know anyone of any color with a box on their TV. The articles also never mention that most of the people in charge of writing, directing, greenlighting, producing, casting, and advertising on these television shows are straight white men. Not that the race, gender, ethnicity or orientation of the people who control corporate media would have anything to do with the type of people who are shown on our television screens. Clearly these issues are unrelated, so there's no need to bring them up.