The strike continues but could there be good news coming to us very soon? If you didn't know, both sides finally talked this week with them talking Monday through Wednesday. Things appeared to go well with there being talk that they also decided to meet today as well. There hasn't been much news out of the negotiations as far as to the public as I've heard that they've decided to not discuss the talks this week. News came out that The Writers Guild of America was apparently presented a deal and asked to have time to look over it. They have since rejected it saying that it was a bad deal. Talks are set to resume on Tuesday. Hopefully, the WGA can get a cut of the money as it is baffling why they aren't getting paid any amount off of downloads, DVD's, etc. Stay tuned and let's hope the end of the strike is near. Conan O'Brien is helping the staff of his show during the strike but aren't on the writing team. He is going to pay the salaries of the staff for the near future to help them out as their jobs are just caught in limbo cause of there being no new shows to produce. This was a really classy thing to do by Conan. David Letterman is also said to be doing the same thing. Carson Daly is the first of the late night hosts to decide to do new shows despite the ongoing strike. The talk was that new shows were possibly going to be taped this week and begin airing in very early December.
Broadway is back underway after a strike halted shows there over the holidays. The strike lasted 19 days and was said to have cost New York City an estimated $38 million.Movie box office numbers for last weekend. 1. Enchanted - $34.4 million. 2. This Christmas - $17.9 million. 3. Beowulf - $16.5 million. 4. Hitman - $13.1 million. 5. Bee Movie - $11.8 million. 6. Fred Claus - $10.5 million. 7. August Rush - $9.4 million. 8. American Gangster - $9 million. 9. The Mist - $8.9 million. 10. Mr. Magorium - $7.9 million.
The long anticipated Angel season six comic is now underway as issue one has been released. I've gotten the chance to read it and really enjoyed it. The comic doesn't pick up immediately with the final battle that was seen at the end of season five. Instead, the comic jumps ahead a bit in time and we see from time to time which characters survived. The writers do promise that we are going to find out what happened in that battle but just not right now. We see the devastation that Los Angeles has turned into with Wolfram & Hart laying out the punishment for what Angel and crew decided to do at the end of season five. It is a whole new battle for Angel in trying to deal with what he had a hand in creating. Things are not pretty at all in LA!! I won't go into spoilers as to who is seen and not seen in the comic but I did see some faces that I was surprised to see. I enjoyed the comic and this comic really felt like a great tie to the end of season five.
One episode left of Heroes as it airs this coming Monday. That will then be all of the episodes that have been completed due to the strike. The promos are saying that "two heroes will die". Any predictions on who it is going to be? I really have no clue but it looks like this episode is going to be a big one.
NBC has officially picked up Chuck and Life for a full season. On the other side, things are not looking very good for Journeyman and Bionic Woman.
This was way long overdue but I finally watched Spiderman 3 over the weekend. I know there has been some criticism over the movie but I really liked it. It is hard to keep the movies strong when you start doing multiple sequels. I liked the first two movies and liked the third one as well. It was nice to see how the other two movies tied so pivotally to the third one. I hadn't heard a lot about what they did script wise in advance of seeing this as I purposely try to avoid any kind of spoiler stuff with movies. If you haven't seen the movie and don't want to know spoilers, you may want to stop reading. I figured that this movie would revolve mostly around a battle between Peter and Harry. It did but it didn't dominate the movie and I liked the finish to the Peter/Harry story at the end that ended up seeing them fighting side by side to save the woman that both of them loved. I didn't expect the storyline of what happened to Uncle Ben to be brought back up in this movie. The Sandman character turned out to be all right. Funny thing is that I was watching the movie thinking how do you defeat a guy that is sand. I thought immediately that you could turn him to mud and thirty seconds later, he turns to mud. However, that didn't defeat him either and I was out of ideas at that point. LOL. The main point of this movie seemingly revolved around bringing the characters back down to reality. Peter had an evil side brought out in him that saw him show no mercy including him seemingly leaving Harry for dead at one point. Mary Jane saw her struggles including her work and then her love life as well. The final battle was a lot of fun. Surprised to see that they killed Harry off but I guess they had really done all that they could with that character. I assume that Peter and Mary Jane were back together at the end of the movie but we didn't get any kind of glimpse as to what the future would hold for them. Well, we had the tease of the marriage proposal early on in the movie but a lot happened after that. For now, we'll just have to leave it up for grabs on what else could happen with them. If you haven't seen the bloopers yet on the DVD, give them a look as I thought it was the funniest blooper reel of all three of the movies.
This season's Little People Big World has been a lot of fun so far. The road trips have made me feel like that I'm on a road trip as well. The footage from Yosemite and The Grand Canyon was just incredible to watch. There is so much to see and I'm sure the cameras can't even do the sights justice for how beautiful it is. Watching the family try to drive this massive RV was funny at times especially with Matt trying to get used to it at the beginning of the trip. I would be lousy at driving one of those things. This week's episode saw Matt, Zach, and Molly landing in Paducah, KY where Matt spoke and brought the kids with him. Zach is very big into history so when he saw how much Civil War history that Paducah had, he was for sure wanting to go. Molly also was looking forward to the trip. It looked like the three of them had a great time. They toured around the area seeing the sights and got to check out a Civil War reenactment. The show did a good job of showing off the history of Paducah and also the sights of it as well. So, this season of Little People Big World has been a very fun road trip season so far and I'm curious to see if there are any more episodes of them out on the road.
There is a fan petition going on to try and get Big Brother's Jessica and Eric on to The Amazing Race. There are a ton of signatures on it. Here is the link to sign the petition: http://www.petitiononline.com/JericTAR/petition.html
November sweeps have come to a close and CBS appears to have done the best overall while ABC had the most viewers in the 18-49 demo. However, most of the networks were down overall in viewers but the networks point out that the DVR numbers aren't in yet so the numbers are likely to go up. Comparing to the previous year, Fox had an increase of viewers of 3% while the other networks were down: ABC was down 8%, CBS down 8%, NBC down 14%, and The CW was down 21%. Hmm, the Veronica Mars fan in me has to grin a bit seeing that 21% fall by The CW. Several fans have boycotted the CW's new shows actually including myself too. They have me for one show only and that is quite a change considering I watched the most shows in previous seasons on the old WB network.
Did anybody watch the beating that the Boston Celtics put on the New York Knicks?? Geez. 50 point lead by Boston as I type this. Unreal.
Interesting two episode storyline with Journeyman. We found out what happens when Dan goes out on his own and tries to fix something on his own that he may not supposed to be fixing. The guy that Dan had arrested for keeping two girls captive was put in jail but got out on good behavior. The guy then showed up at his house in present day which ended up with Dan getting shot. Dan disappears and ends up back in time around 1980. He gets fixed up in the hospital in the past and goes back to the house that he was beside when he time traveled. He finds a boy that is being kept captive in his house by his dad. Who is the boy? It turns out to be the same person that shot him but, in 1980, was a boy. Wow. That was a nice twist!!! The boy ends up helping to take care of him while Dan contemplates killing the boy knowing that it would fix his problems in current day. He ends up flashing back to present day where the man has Dan's wife held captive. Dan is able to somehow talk the guy into surrendering after the conversation turns to when they were together back a couple decades earlier. Dan's brother, Jack, was once again on the case of trying to figure out what was going on with Dan. Jack then ran into Livia. We had the agent guy who had pictures of Dan in various time periods wearing the same clothes talking to Jack about how this all defied physics. So, he knew something was up. Nice touch on the story when the agent ended up getting shot and killed. Now, the agent that was getting close to knowing Dan's secret is gone leaving Jack as the only one that knows something is going on with Dan and time travel. A couple of funny moments with the time travel in this week's episode. First was the medical guy in 1980 looking at Dan's iPhone in amazement. Dan then told him it was a calculator. Second was when he was fixed up again after being shot. He was fixed up in 1980 as I said but he ended up getting an infection from it. He was fixed up again in current day. The nurse asked Dan what he was given in his last visit trying to figure out what caused it. Dan had heard the name of the antibiotic in 1980 and relayed it to the nurse. The nurse replied that the antibiotic hadn't been used in 20 years and there was no way it could treat this virus. Dan laughed saying that it makes sense now.
Do you want to see what the new Joker is going to look like in the upcoming Batman movie? Well, Empire magazine has a cover shot of Heath Ledger in his Joker gear. Check out this link to give a look at it.
http://www.empireonline.com/heiscoming/
Dancing With The Stars is over for another season and the winner was Helio Castroneves. The finale was said to have averaged around 24 million viewers.
With the Tonight Show still out of commission, old shows have been airing all week. It's wild to watch Jay Leno and see how his delivery on jokes and all has changed over the years. The episode that aired on Monday was from 1993 and you could tell he was still working into his own.
I am looking forward to seeing Sheriff Sophia in action on next week's Kid Nation. Sophia has been one of my favorites on the show as she is very much no nonsense. Having her in charge next week while the council is away could be fun. We learned on the episode that mixing an arcade and doing work for the town doesn't work well at all.
On to this week's Chuck. This show is really starting to roll lately and becoming can't miss for me. Who is Sarah going to choose? Will she go work with Bryce or stay with Chuck? Nice touch at the end of the episode with the phones ringing with each of them on one of them as she pondered which to answer.
Tonight's Survivor. From a game standpoint, the vote tonight was the absolute right thing to do. If you let James stick around, he would have two free tribal councils which at this point would guarantee him final four and possibly more if he won individual immunity. This was the time to get rid of him cause you couldn't risk him getting further and then allowing him to use those two immunity idols. I thought James took being voted out well in his farewell speech. He realized it was a game and said that he gambled too many times on not using those idols. James never did give one of those idols back after he was helped to get both of them.
The Amazing Race added a new twist on this week's episode with the U-Turn. The U-Turn can be used at the end of a detour. There are two of these on the race with one team being able to U-Turn another one. This means that the team that gets it done to them has to go back and complete the other task of the detour before they can move on. This was the final thing to end the race for Lorena and Jason. They were yielded by Shana and Jennifer (who did by the way disagree on whether or not to use it) which I thought was just kind of an insulting way to finish the race where they didn't even get a chance to catch up. They were so far behind anyway to begin with.
HBO put out their third quarter numbers this week and subscribers have stuck around despite The Sopranos coming to an end. Their subscriber numbers actually went up slightly from the previous quarter.
TV on DVD releases for Tuesday, December 4th. 24 (Season Six in a slim set), 30 Days (Season Two), 7th Heaven (Season Five), Crank Yankers (Best Of), Diagnosis Murder (Season Three), House Of Payne (Volume One), Law & Order SVU (Year Four), New Street Law (Season One), Saturday Night Live (Season Two), Touched By An Angel (Season Four, Volume Two), Will and Grace (Season Seven), The Wire (Season Four).
TV Line Of The Week: From a rerun episode of this week's Late Night With Conan O'Brien
"Good news. Warner Brothers is producing a movie with Batman and Superman in it together. The bad news. It's a love story." - Conan O'Brien during his monologue.
You Tube Video Of The Week: Here is a first dance by a couple at their wedding. This video has become very popular over the last few days. Pretty funny!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vqiw-Kqtlr0
Have a great and safe weekend!! Take care and God bless!!