Respect Authority

In a culture full of vacuous forms of entertainment, television, particularly due to its current trends, is quite possibly the most baseless (aside from competitive eating, solicited sex, basically all forms of gambling, watching pornography, shopping, professional wrestling, and sitting on your couch smoking weed all night). Indeed, we are a people addicted… now, if only addiction didn’t feel so goddamned good.

The Office
With the world collapsing around them, The Office, in its 5th season, is regrouping in Scranton and putting on a brave, sarcastic face. My favorite line of the season: “I think I never processed 9/11″ — Ryan, temp receptionist and recovering coke addict. — lou

Chocolate News
2008 was the year I finally accepted that Dave Chappelle would not be finishing the 3rd season of his show, and with MTV’s doubtlessly upcoming Meet The Obamas no where to be found, there was a void in my heart where insightful black comedy is supposed to live. Then along came Chocolate News. Its mixture of hilarious characters, DAG’s unique intonation, and shameless puns up the ass like a prison rape is a winning combination for those of us who read the morning paper with a cup of Cristal. — aaron

True Blood
With blockbusters like Big Love and Sex and the City in its corner, HBO has long since become the go-to channel for high drama, high action, and borderline pornography. Still, I approached True Blood with trepidation, to say the least. Though vampires in theory are mysterious and chic, vampires in practice — and by practice I mean as portrayed by the media — are more often than not camp, melodramatic and a teeny tiny bit gay. Yet while True Blood is hardly an exception — it’s chock full of the audible hissing and sped-up action sequences popular in modern vampiric depictions — neither is it an exception to HBO’s tradition of developing compelling and potentially addictive television. After the first episode, I was seemingly irrevocably stuck on the mediocre acting and circa 1999 special effects. By the fifth episode, I had myself a TiVo season pass.
— kira

Am I the only one unsurprised by revelations that Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich tried to auction off Barack Obama’s senate seat to the highest bidder? First of all, senate seats are valuable, especially one still warm from the butt of our nation’s first black president. But more importantly, Blago looks kind of like a serial killer mainstreaming after plastic surgery meant to disguise him as someone else. I don’t trust people with faces like that. No one should.