What’s On TV Tonight, May 26

(Originally posted Monday, May 26, 2008 )

2 CBS Sitcom: At the sound of the dulcet piano tones, the mediocrity will begin

2 ABC Kelsey Grammer remains on celebrity welfare

4 NBC American Gladiators: Female business consultant gets repeatedly kicked in the face as people without advanced degrees cheer on.

5 Fox A big sucking vacuum where American Idol used to be

6 Bravo A new fashion show: "Does This Really Look Good, Or Are You Trying To Turn Me Into A Little Bitch Boy?"

10 CNN Larry King will meet the American Idol finalists and learn all about American Idol, whatever that may be.

12 CMT Thus Spake Foxworthy

21 E! Entertainment Television Denise Richards: It's All Pretty Obvious

23 ESPN Boxing: Middle Weights Race To Brain Damage

24 National Geographic Mt. Everest Climbers Will Take Your Stunningly Bad Odds

25 A&E A repackaged version of a bad 40-year-old novel by hack Michael Crichton that is sure to expunge the memory of the unreadable book

26 Comedy Central Libertarians Telling Fart Jokes

27 Cinemax Tyler Perry finally creates the remake of the Japanese pornographic castration classic In The Realm of the Senses that we've all been waiting for

28 Discovery Channel Meet the Caribbean Indians who become paralyzed from the neck down so that you can eat at Red Lobster

29 History Channel Would it be too much to ask for, like, one show on the Gothic migrations or something like that? Or do I have to sit through more nonsense like "Monster Quest," a cryptozoology show that would be much better fare for a cable access show watched by guys with five foot bongs?

30 HBO A movie in which we point the camera at Seth Rogan and hope that he's funny.

31 HBO2 A movie in which we relive the 2000 Florida recount and hope that it's funny

32 Showtime With Anne Boleyn gone, "The Tudors" moves at a snail's pace during its third season and we are treated to much grousing by Henry VIII about his leg ulcers.

33 Lifetime "Sex and the Single Mom": The arrival of Grant Show induces labor in pregnant single woman

42 Cinemax Prehensile Attractions

43 Disney Hannah Montana feeds your family, bitch. So why don't you go get Hannah Montana a Diet Coke before Hannah Montana ends you.

What’s On TV Tonight, May 13

(Originally posted Wednesday, May 14, 2008 )

2 CBS
If I thought there were as many serial killers in real life as there are on CBS shows, then I, too, would probably be a home-bound, agoraphobic, paranoid, right-wing, CBS-watching freak.

5 Fox
A very sad "American Idol" when perky contestant David Archuleta, no longer being dominated by his harsh father, and sensing the deterioration of audience interest, loses all guidance and inhibition and moral compass and yells out "Who wants to fuck me now, bitches?" Which is what happens when your dad (and American Idol) keep you a baby for too long. Carrie Underwood will probably do it next.

5 Fox
Hell's Kitchen: "This is actually a pretty good flambé, you piece of fing sh, stupid a* c* face mother fker."

7 ABC
Kristi Yamagucci has a terrible fall during "Dancing with the Stars" and sadly has to be euthanized on the dance floor

10 CNN
Hillary Clinton breezes through the West Virginia presidential primary with her new campaign slogan: "I feel your illiteracy."

14 History
An archaeologist carrying a bullwhip like Indiana Jones inadvertently destroys thousands of ancient potsherds

20 Independent Film Channel
A Mother's Day treat featuring "Spanking the Monkey," "Luna," and "Oedipus Rex."

21 Telemundo
"Spanking Los Monkeys": Un hombre disfruta sexo con su madre."

22 E! Entertainment Television
The Top 10 Celebrity Orifices

23 HBO
Relive the classic ending of "The Sopran ...":

24 Showtime
Tonight on "The Tudors," lots of stultified melodrama makes sure that English history remains cold, abstract, and uninteresting, but a lot of naked breasts keep things grounded in the here and now.

25 Fox News
If Sean Hannity can outwit John McCain, then just think what the Iranians, Chinese and Russians can do.

26 Lifetime
Movie: A fact-based story about an inspiring female. Not factual. Just fact-based. We made up the parts about the abusive husband, the growing up in poverty and the alcoholism, but the scholarship thing is true.

27 MTV
"Shot at Love With Tila Tequila": Tonight's revelation: Tila has smallpox, herpes and scrofula. Still want her?

28 Oxygen
"The Bad Girls Club." The bad girls realize all of a sudden that they are simply puppets in a controlled sociological experiment, and soon form an enlightened proletariat class-consciousness that allows them to rise up and begin killing members of the TV crew, the producers and members of the audience.

29 Cinemax
Max After Dark Movie: "Naked And Foreclosed Upon"

30 VH-1
A VH-1 special about the sexual revolution that misses most of the intellectual changes going on in the '60s and mainly focuses on the nudity.

31 We
Women Behind Bars: You might die old in prison, but your caged heat is timeless.

32 Animal Planet
Weird Canary Island Fighting Dog Sex Cults

33 Crosswalk
George W. Bush offers a compelling epistemological insight that "I invade countries, therefore I exist."

34 Crosswalk 2
... which pretty much sums up history in a nutshell, doesn't it?

Artistic License With ’The Tudors’

(Originally posted Tuesday, April 22, 2008 )

Showtime's popular historical series "The Tudors" takes lots of liberties with the actual story of Henry VIII and the Great Matter of his first divorce and schism with the Catholic Church. What are some of the distortions the show has come up with in taking artistic license?

--*Though Henry VIII was a stud in his youth like Jonathan Rhys Meyers, by the time he started courting Anne Boleyn, he was already in his late 30s and likely starting to turn into an ulcerous fat fuck.

--*Henry was a giant husky type rather than a wiry, slithery type. That's why he remained such a hug-a-bear after he started drawing, quartering and disemboweling everybody he ever loved.

--*Henry's fetching younger sister was actually named Mary, and rather than marry the aging Portuguese king, she actually married the aging king of France, Louis. And rather than smother him to death with a pillow in their bedchamber, she more than likely fucked him to death.

--*The real Catherine of Aragon was a multi-talented princess of the Renaissance with a great mind who liked to laugh, whereas in the series she is some kind of rosary-saying, Crucifix-clutching Catholic robot whose dialogue seems to be written by machines at IBM.

--*Henry had an illegitimate son by his mistress Bessie Blount named Henry FitzRoy. Since all of Henry's progeny were bastards at one point or another, FitzRoy could likely have been anointed heir to the throne at a crucial point, but luckily for posterity he dropped dead at age 17 of consumption.

--*Henry's chancellor, Thomas Cardinal Wolsey, did not commit suicide, which would be a pretty fast-track way to hell for a cleric.

--*He was, however, guilty of simony, nepotism, graft, selling of indulgences, mass groupie fucking, and all the other things that would make the Protest Reformation the best reformation ever!

--*Nobody tried to shoot Anne Boleyn with a matchlock rifle out a window Lee Harvey Oswald-style during her coronation progress. Everybody did mutter under their breath that she was a scrofulous slut-bag, however.

--*Henry VIII did not write "Greensleeves," whose stylistic inconsistency with the period would make it about as likely that he wrote Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart."

--*Anne Boleyn didn't rail on about idolatry--because like every other neurotic superstitious girl she had one of those weird Virgin Mary things that it took even heretics a long time to grow out of.

--*Anne's brother George is seen in the show to be both a serious womanizer and a homosexual. This is confusing, but so is the history on the matter. It was the 1530s. Maybe you just had to be there.

--*Anne's father wasn't likely fomenting a vast court intrigue to gain power. It is more likely he turned his daughters over to the king simply because he was an obsequious douche bag who got some extra scratch out of it. "Here you go, king. I got 'em all warmed up for ye."

--*What's correct, however, is that if Catherine of Aragon had been a bit more fuckable, we would all be living in a very different world.