TIME looks at films that revel in over-the-top mayhem. (Warning: The following trailers and summaries deal with sometimes disturbing violence.)
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Top Chef Watch: Failure to Launch
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Brief spoilers for this week’s Top Chef coming up:
The finals of this season of Top Chef will take place in Singapore, a fantastic choice: a vibrant food city—or, um, so I gather from food TV and magazines—with a colorful culture that melds a numbers of Asian cuisines. And I wish they …
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The Morning After: Overaccessorized?
Since Project Runway debuted, it has been rightly praised as the model (so to speak) of a high-quality competition reality show: entertaining, smart about its subject and visually crisp. Then, for season eight, Lifetime decided that if an hour of Project Runway was this good, 90 minutes would be 50% better.
Instead, the superfluous …
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Jamie Oliver's Revolution Will Be Re-Televised
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Here’s some good news: Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, a (1) entertaining reality show that (2) treated its subjects intelligently, seriously and respectfully yet (3) actually got pretty decent ratings, has been picked up for a second season. While the show didn’t set the Nielsens on fire last …
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Hung's Renewal and the Mystery of HBO Decisionmaking
Yesterday HBO announced that Hung, its dark comedy about a suburban Michigan gigolo and his pimp, will get a third season. I’m pleased and surprised. I don’t think the show has lived up to its potential, but when it’s on—and the past couple of episodes have been strong—it’s an insightful look at people trying to hold on to their …
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The Discovery Gunman: TV as the Enemy, and as the Weapon
James Lee, a 43-year-old man with a long history of grudges against Discovery’s networks and their programming, was shot and killed by police yesterday after he entered Discovery Communications headquarters with a gun and explosives and took hostages. None of the hostages were harmed.
Lee left behind a manifesto that collected a …
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Fixing Emmy, Part 2: The Case Against Comedy and Drama
Earlier this morning I posted about the broadcast networks’ hopes to solve the problem of their not winning enough Emmys, by any means short of actually making better shows. (Let’s not get crazy here!) Now let’s take a minute to look at an Emmy problem that actually might need fixing. Namely: does it still do any good to have separate …
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The Morning After: Colonial Reenactment
Last year, I wrote one of the first reviews of Discovery’s post-apocalyptic reality show The Colony. That meant my post got indexed highly in whatever system search engines use to index articles, so a year later, you’re still likely to come up with it when you search on “The Colony reviews.” And that in turn means that I have become …
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Spoiler Alert! Conan Announces Shocking Name of His New Show
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Ladies and gentlemen, this November, Conan O’Brien is… Conan! Or “Conaw,” depending how you prefer to pronounce it.
The show-title announcement is neither earth-shattering nor a surprise, I guess, but with two months to build hype for the show, and no Emmy win for Tonight to …
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Should Broadcasters Make Emmy Cut the Cable?
The Emmy Awards are over, but as always, the complaining about them isn’t. This year, however, the gripes are not coming from critics—who mostly found it in our two-sizes-too-small hearts to enjoy this year’s Emmycast—but from the major broadcast networks who televise them.
Their beefs are various, but they simplify to: we’re not …
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Catching Up With: Rubicon
Mild spoilers for AMC’s Rubicon coming up:
Between Mad Men reviewing, vacation, preparing to go on vacation—and, OK, a debilitating helium-inhalation habit—I haven’t had time to do a regular Rubicon Watch since the show debuted. My favorite episode so far, “The Outsider” (in which Will Travers and Truxton Spangler visit their …
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DWTS News: Bristol and The Situation, Together Again at Last
Media personalities and future 2032 Presidential ticket Bristol Palin and Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino are among the celebrities chosen for the coming edition of ABC’s Dancing with the Stars. TIME’s NewsFeed has the complete list, which also includes David Hasselhoff, Florence Henderson and sundry figures accomplished in the worlds …
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Talking Mad Men With the Amazing Ryan Twins
OK, they’re not twins, but they are Ryans. Last night, I Skyped it with Ryan McGee of Boob Tube Dude and Mo Ryan—formerly of the Chicago Tribune and as of tomorrow, of AOL TV—to discuss Sunday’s Mad Men, “Waldorf Stories,” and season four in general. The results are above. The podcast is also available here and at iTunes, and while …