Notes on Pop Culture: Favorite Flicks, Shows, Etc. from Past Week

Movies

While I’m planning on seeing the biggest movie of the summer this coming opening weekend – I speak, of course, of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 – I finally got to go to the delightfully air conditioned movie theater and enjoy Woody Allen’s latest offering, Midnight in Paris.

As someone who’s in the midst of tweaking my own novel and who has sought feedback from trusted sources, I identified with Owen Wilson’s naïve, romantic, insecure writer character, Gil who was fearful of letting folks take a peek at his manuscript lest they rip it apart and, in a way, destroy him. However when Wilson’s Gil got the chance to go back in time and enjoy 1920s Paris with the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso and Cole Porter, that’s where the similarities end.

This movie about learning to appreciate what you’ve got, taking chances and daring to follow your dreams was clearly written by a dreamer. Maybe that’s why I liked it so much.



TV


Women’s World Cup: Quarterfinals game. Against Brazil. Amazingly inspiring for all the sports-minded members of my household. The real-life, come-from-behind drama created by the U.S. Women’s World Cup team this weekend trumped even the inspirational Nike ad the team stars in.

Friday Night Lights: In preparation for a piece about the end of Friday Night Lights (*sniff*), I watched the first two episodes of the drama where, 33 minutes into the pilot episode, the clean cut, sweet, police hero high school quarterback is paralyzed during a pivotal play. Five seasons later, the show hasn’t lost its mojo. It’s so sad that the series will end this Friday evening.

Want to relive the Panthers/Lions glory? The entire series will be replayed on ESPN Classic, according to the New York Times. Starting tonight, ESPN will air those same first two episodes starting at 8 p.m., followed by a marathon of the first season on ESPN Classic on Thursday and Friday. The series will begin regularly airing episodes on Thursday evenings on ESPN Classic starting July 21, the paper reported.

Newspapers/Magazines

In this past Sunday’s New York Times, the co-creators of The Good Wife, Robert and Michelle King wrote an op/ed about how strange the real-life marital twists of politicians’ love lives have turned out to be. Talking about everyone from Weiner, Schwarzenegger and Edwards to Spitzer and Sanford, they said, “Speaking as television writers: [The melodrama] is over the top.”

“One can imagine the studio notes,” the couple wrote. “’We like the husband who impregnates his housekeeper, but keeping her in the same house for a decade seems a bit mustache-twirling.’ ‘Love the presidential candidate cheating with the videographer, but do you need the wife to have cancer?’ ‘Tweeting semi-naked photos from the congressional gym: good – very hip. But making his wife pregnant: isn’t that too on-the-nose?’”

Notes on Pop Culture: What Are You Looking Forward to Seeing This Summer?

Harry Potter, Harry Potter, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2.

The end of the series chronicling the exploits of The Boy Who Lived hits the big screen on July 15, and I plan on enjoying it in the theaters with my Potter-crazed kids, whom my husband and I are taking to Orlando this summer to visit Universal Studios’ the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. (I don’t know who’s more excited about it, them or me.) This is the BIG film to which I’m looking forward to seeing in those slow months, pop culture-wise.

TV-wise, other than Red Sox games, there are a few shows I intend to view this summer. (You can find the summer TV schedule here.)

I’m going to catch the final, gut-wrenching season of Denis Leary’s Rescue Me on FX, which starts on July 12 and will conclude right before the 10th anniversary of 9/11, sure to be a poignant moment for this series which rose from the debris and emotional wreckage of that horrific day.

The subtle and moving Ray Romano/TNT drama Men of a Certain Age returns with the second half of its second season on June 1. I’ve grown to really admire the way the three lead characters depict the disappointment they feel about where they are as they arrive at mid-life and try to figure out whether they should do something about their disappointment or just give in to it.

Image credit

The gritty, clever but pretty depressing AMC show Breaking Bad -- about a high school chemistry teacher upending his life and leaping into the crystal meth business after being diagnosed with cancer -- comes back for a fourth season on July 17. If you’re in the mood for dark, brooding drama about the violent underworld of drugs, Breaking Bad fits that bill perfectly.

Speaking of drugs . . . I’ll be setting my DVR to record new episodes of Showtime’s Weeds, which’ll be starting its seventh season on June 27. Though this show has had its ups and downs, I’m intrigued, now that Nancy Botwin has surrendered herself to the authorities, where it’ll go next. Perhaps it’ll enjoy a creative renaissance like Grey’s Anatomy did in its seventh season.

If you’re an Alias/spy genre fan, USA’s Covert Affairs, whose second season starts on June 7, is like Alias-lite. It’s set in D.C., has a light-hearted streak and isn’t excessively complex like some of the other spy shows out there as it follows the journey of Annie Walker, a new CIA agent.

Another item on my pop culture agenda this summer: Watching the first two seasons of CBS' The Mentalist on DVD with my eldest son. We started watching this show together this past winter, about halfway through the third season, culminating with The Mentalist’s fantastic season finale. Now we want to go back and gather some backstory, just me and my eldest boy child.

What movie and/or TV shows are you looking forward to?

Image credit: AMC.

'Weeds' Channeling 'Basic Instinct' in Season 7 Promo?

Weeds returns for its seventh season on June 27 and Showtime has put out a trailer featuring Nancy Botwin sitting in a police interrogation room listening to a detective recite all the illegal and ethically hazy things she’s done over the course of the past six seasons, including drug dealing, drug producing, arson and murder.

Of course she’s sipping her ubiquitous iced coffee from a straw and wearing a wry smile on her face. Apparently being in police custody is preferable to being in her drug dealing husband Esteban’s hands.

I’m intrigued to see what’ll happen next.

Notes on Pop Culture: Dysfunctional Showtime Moms, Cancer on TV, Binging on 'Covert Affairs'

Dysfunctional Showtime Moms

When the Wall Street Journal ran a story this past spring saying that Showtime was cultivating a slate of shows featuring dysfunctional, strong women, building on the success of Weeds, I think they were underplaying it.

After watching the first few episodes of the new season of Weeds and the new Laura Linney cancer dramedy The Big C, on top of what they've with Edie Falco’s Nurse Jackie and Toni Collette’s United States of Tara the word "dysfunctional" doesn’t quite cover it. I wrote about Showtime's off-beat moms in my latest pop culture column this week.

Cancer on TV

Speaking of The Big C, watching Linney’s Cathy Jamison -- who’s upending her life in the wake of her stage 4 cancer diagnosis -- got me thinking about TV characters and cancer and how other characters dealt with the news.

As I thought about TV and cancer, for some reason, my mind kept going to Charlie Salinger from the 1990s show Party of Five. While Charlie didn't immediately shake things up in his life when he learned he had cancer, he did make some changes after he went into remission. (The video below features the scene where Charlie learned he'd gone into remission and shared the news with his family.)

My CliqueClack TV post looked at Charlie, Kitty Walker from Brothers & Sisters, Lynette Scavo from Desperate Housewives, Walter White from Breaking Bad and Izzie Stevens from Grey’s Anatomy.



Binging on Covert Affairs

I’d only seen a small number of episodes of USA’s new CIA drama Covert Affairs up until this week, when I decided to binge on them. It’s not Alias. Annie Walker is certainly no Sydney Bristow. But Covert Affairs is kind of light, kind of unexpectedly twisty and fun to watch, plus I get to see actors whom I've admired from other shows, like Anna Dudek (who’s fierce on Big Love, was conniving on House and is distinctly 60s suburban mom on Mad Men), Sendhil Ramamurthy (who was the mysterious researcher on Heroes), Peter Gallagher (of late from Rescue Me where he was an unconventional priest), Kari Matchett (who’d been turned into an alien but didn’t know it on Invasion and a political advisor on 24), plus I got to see D.W. Moffett. (Joe McCoy on Friday Night Lights)

Covert Affairs has been renewed for a second season.

Notes on Pop Culture: 'The Big C' & 'Weeds' Premiere, Divorce on TV

The Big C & Weeds Premiere

Let’s just say this: I’m hopeful about Showtime's The Big C, no matter what Cathy’s diagnosis may be and how much time she may have left. Though the “death comedy” pilot was a tad uneven, I have faith in Laura Linney’s acting and believe that I’m going to love watching her tightly-wound high school teacher, wife and mother dispatch with her play-it-safe way of living her life.

I really liked the follow-up to the show’s very first scene: Cathy offered to pay double for a guy to immediately dig up her backyard and put in a sunken hot tub, barbecue pit and expand the deck. She’d wanted a pool, she’d asked for a pool, but reluctantly agreed to go along with the contractor’s recommendation. Went along to be nice. She said, “That’s fine, just do that,” so as not to make trouble, though she WAS insistent about the work getting started ASAP.

Later, she put her foot down, told him that she didn’t really want to do what he’d suggested and that, damn it, she wanted a pool like she said originally. Bring out the biggest digger you’ve got and get cracking, she said. For those of us who allow ourselves to get steamrolled too often (my hand is up), seeing Cathy muster the courage to assert herself was very satisfying. (Reminded me of the satisfaction drawn from watching fellow cancer patient Walter White on AMC’s Breaking Bad finally stop letting the world walk all over him once he realized his days were numbered with a cancer diagnosis.)

That’s from where I think the joy of watching this show will come, from watching Cathy emerge from her vanilla, suburban slumber. The emphasis is on, well, NOW, that, and enjoying life in a “I’m just having desserts and liquor” kinda way.



As for Weeds’ season six premiere, while I really liked the gallows humor in the season premiere (especially with Andy making all the wrong choices with his short-lived fiancé and the mallet quips), Nancy was starting to bug me with her selfishness. My irritation was given a voice by Shane and Silas who observed that Nancy, in her haste to go on the run with her family, took the time to pack stuff for herself -- including an entire bag of shoes – but didn’t afford either of them the same opportunity. If they’re leaving for good, the least Nancy could’ve done would’ve been to have let them grab a bag, particularly if she was packing shoes.

I’m just surprised that Nancy didn’t have them stop for an iced coffee for herself on the way to Andy’s house to take his van. But then again, she was drunk. And had just learned that her middle son is a killer, so I suppose I should cut her some slack.

Divorce on TV

After watching AMC's Mad Men’s Don Draper and Betty Francis do a pretty poor job of handling their divorce – as their children, especially their daughter Sally, suffer emotionally – I started thinking about how divorce on TV is done, at least these days.

I dedicated my latest pop culture and politics column to divorce in primetime focusing on, not just divorce on Mad Men, but on HBO’s Hung, TNT’s Men of a Certain Age, a trio of ABC dramas (Private Practice, Brothers & Sisters,  Grey’s Anatomy) and Lifetime's Army Wives.

'Weeds' and 'The Big C' Combo Promo: Which Mom Has It Worse?

Which character has it worse: The married high school teacher/mom of a teen who has terminal skin cancer and isn't telling anyone about it as she unravels and acts out (declaring she's only going to have "desserts and liquor" at a restaurant), or the on-the-run, drug-dealing mom of three who married a powerful, drug-dealing politician, had his baby, then fled when her middle son killed an aide to her husband who threatened her kids?

You decide.

'Weeds' Season Six: Botwins on the Run

This new Showtime preview makes it seem as though Weeds’ll be more mad-cap this season as the Botwins -- aka the Newmans -- take to the road fleeing a murder scene in Mexico after Shane killed a criminally/politically connected woman who'd been threatening his mother Nancy, by hitting the woman in the head with a croquet mallet.

“Normal Newmans from Normaltown,” Nancy's oldest son Silas says of their “new” identities in the promo as we see them assuming new lives. Only this is Weeds, so “normal” is not really in the cards, is it?

Why Nancy feels compelled to continue working in the drug business, given the grief it has caused her – and it’s not as though her life has been all that great since she started dealing – well, I suppose that’s what season six is for. New episodes start airing August 16.

Notes on Pop Culture: FNL's Matt Saracen's Heartbreak, Harry Potter 'Deathly Hallows' Trailer, Summer TV

FNL's Matt Saracen's Heartbreak


How good was the actor, Zach Gilford, who plays Matt Saracen on Friday Night Lights in the recent episode, “The Son?” He underplayed his role as the grieving son very nicely and to great effect.

For practically the entire series, Matt has been the character who’s had to act more mature than his age, like the responsible authority figure in his house when he was just an immature high school kid. He took care of his ailing grandmother and, only recently allowed his previously estranged mother to help them out. At the end of last season Matt was planning to go to Chicago to pursue his promising art career. He prepared by getting his grandmother all set up in a home that would keep her safe.

Then he was beset by horrendous guilt. Guilt about leaving his girlfriend Julie behind. Guilt about leaving his grandmother in a group home. He, once again, put himself and his desires on the backburner, took a job delivering Panther pizza and enrolled in community college classes where his art teacher didn't think his work was all that special.

Now, in this recent episode, his largely absent Army father was killed in Iraq. The normally even-keeled Matt felt utterly lost and unhinged, particularly by his mixed feelings about a dad who he believed was so afraid of responsibility and child-rearing that he kept re-enlisting and going to Iraq to avoid being with his son.

That scene with Tami and Matt at a strip mall funeral home, so upsetting. If that scene, where Tami dressed down the funeral director after Matt left -- chastizing the man for how much he was trying to charge Matt for the funeral services -- doesn’t demonstrate that the Taylors are the central, beating hearts of this show, nothing does. (Why, by the way, was Tami there and not Matt’s mom? Is it because he’s closer to Tami? That doesn't say much about Matt's mother.)

Will this event become a major catalyst for the drifting Matt? We'll see.

Harry Potter Deathly Hallows Trailer



I live in a house full of Harry Potter fans. My 11-year-old twins have read the Potter series over and over again and have seen all the movies. My husband – who’s not a big reader – was coerced by the twins into reading the entire series last summer.

Currently my husband and I are reading the series aloud to our 8-year-old son – we’re in the middle of the fourth book, The Goblet of Fire. So whenever there’s anything new on the Harry Potter front, there’s tremendous excitement.

While my kids have been asking when we’re going to go down to Florida to visit the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios, I think I'm going to try to distract them with this new trailer for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Summer TV



Who says there’s nothing decent on TV in the summer? You’ve got FNL still airing new episodes, Mad Men coming up next month, Weeds and couple of new shows including ones starring Betty White and Laura Linney on tap.

My Pop Culture column this week is all about summer TV and I highlighted what’s in store for shows like Mad Men, Rescue Me, Hot in Cleveland, The Big C, Weeds and HawthoRNe.

When it comes to Weeds, what’s your take on the teaser Showtime put out? Do you really think that, after Nancy’s son killed Esteban’s evil, criminal political “consultant” with a croquet mallet in the season finale last year, that Nancy’s really going to be able to “bury” her connections to Esteban, especially given that she had his baby, oh, and she married him last season?

Now About Those Finales . . . 'Rescue Me,' 'HawthoRNe,' 'Weeds' & 'Nurse Jackie'

*Warning, spoilers ahead from some recently-aired season finales.*

A lot of the shows which premiered in the spring are ending their runs right about now so we've had a run on season finales as of late, for shows like Rescue Me, HawthoRNe, Weeds and Nurse Jackie. And what finales they were.

First, with the most recent and most explosive finale . . . Rescue Me.

This season has seemed like a quasi-renaissance for Rescue Me, at least as far as I was concerned. The season saw Tommy vacillate between various women -- mostly between the nutty crazy control freak Janet and the nuttier pill-popper Sheila -- give up his year of sobriety while sitting at a bar overlooking Ground Zero and encourage his formerly AA-attending family members and friends to just enjoy the drinking life. It was his Uncle Teddy who planted the idea in Tommy's head that if he knocked back a few while watching old family videos, he'd work through his demons following the death of Tommy's father. Tommy had been worrying about whether he was losing his capacity to feel anything, so he gave Uncle Teddy's advice a shot.

Ironically, it was Teddy's grief over the death of his wife following a drunk driving accident that led to the shocking scene in the season finale. Was it really in character for Teddy -- the man who murdered the drunk driver who accidentally killed Tommy's son in season two -- to shoot Tommy and watch him bleed while using his gun to hold Tommy's friends and family at bay so they couldn't help Tommy? It seemed wrong to me, for Teddy. Sure, the Gavin family fights, oftentimes brutally, but they're not going to off one another, are they?

Otherwise, I loved the finale, particularly the wacko scene with Janet and Sheila confronting Kelly.

As for the nursing/hospital drama HawthoRNe -- to which TNT has given the go-ahead for a second season -- the series got better in the last half of the season, as it has dealt with more serious personal and work issues. The season finale found Jada Pinkett Smith's Christina Hawthorne walking arm in arm with Michael Vartan's Tom Wakefield, the obvious central, unconsummated love story. The finale also went full circle from the pilot episode, looping back to the subject of Christina's husband who died of cancer a year ago.

In the pilot, Christina was supposed to hand over her husband's ashes to her mother-in-law, who she despises (the feeling's mutual), but took some and conducted her own little ceremony by putting ashes in the bottom of a small hot air balloon and watching it float away. In the finale, Christina -- whom writers have started to make more fallible and therefore more real, which is a good thing -- and her mother-in-law came to an understanding and wound up peacefully disposing of the ashes in the ocean together, in the company of Christina's daughter. It was a quiet, but sweet ending to HawthoRNe's freshman season.

"Sweet" is not a word I'd apply to the season finale of Weeds which concluded with Nancy Botwin's teenage son Shane trying to take care of business for his dear old mom by offing her nemesis -- who was blackmailing his mom's new hubby into doing her bidding and viciously threatening Nancy's sons' lives -- with one swing of a croquet mallet. It was disorienting enough to have Nancy's on-again/off-again relationship with her Mexican drug lord/politician baby daddy morph into a marriage and watch Andy, jettisoned. But to have Shane commit murder: Whoa. This is definitely not the same wimpy kid from season one.

Nurse Jackie's finale was none to sweet either. Jackie's boyfriend Eddie, who was just laid off from All Saints Hospital, found out that his gal pal was cheating on him with . . . her husband Kevin, the tavern owner with whom Jackie has two daughters. While viewers were waiting to find out if Eddie would blow the lid off of Jackie's little, extra curricular arrangement and tell Kevin ("I met Kevin and that's a really nice boy you've got," he whispered into Jackie's ear), at least we got to enjoy a little bit of humor seeing hospital administrator Gloria Akalitis trapped in the elevator and Zoey donning "depressed" scrubs.

But, as with Greg House, Jackie's drug dependency is most likely going to spiral out of control, the only question is when will it start to affect her work, and overtly affect her marriage?

Any spring show season finales you liked? Hated? Which intrigued you?

Image credit: TNT.

Suburban Mom's Pop Culture Week: Hamm on Talk Shows, Julie & Julia and Classic Kerouac

TV:

To be honest, I've been DVRing talk shows all week to catch Jon Hamm talk without saying anything of substance about the season three premiere of Mad Men on Conan, Fallon & Good Morning America, watching marathon Red Sox games (like last week's 15-inning losing battle against the sinister Yankees) and cringing as Kate Gosselin also visited the talk show circuit, including her terribly awkward chat with the clueless Regis Philbin who apparently is the only person on earth who thinks there's a chance in hell that Jon and Kate will reconcile. Other than those things and the latest episode of Entourage -- which'll be the subject of an upcoming stand-alone post -- I haven't caught much TV this past week.

Sitting in my DVR queue are two episodes apiece of HawthRNe (which just got renewed for a second season) and Rescue Me, plus I've got to catch up on Weeds and Nurse Jackie with my Showtime On Demand because I'm behind a couple episodes with those as well. (I blame my backlog of unwatched material on my new puppy Max who likes to howl in the middle of the night, for long stretches of time, who's got me feeling like a sleep deprived new mother. It's easy to blame the pup. He doesn't read my blog.)

Oh, I AM planning on watching a niche drama on Sunday night, LIVE. It's on AMC. Maybe you've heard of it . . . something about ad men in the 1960s . . .

DVDs:

Last week I was all wrapped up in season two DVDs of Mad Men for a column I was working on and am just about finished with watching the first season thirtysomething DVDs in preparation for another piece (have one episode left). Don't know what I'll watch on DVD when I'm done with these two shows. Maybe I'll finally watch the Milk Netflix DVD I have sitting, unloved, next to the TV.

Movies:

While I haven't seen any movies this week -- save for the tail-end of Message in a Bottle which I caught on cable and made me instantly tear up because I'm a sentimental fool -- I'm hoping to see Julie & Julia this weekend. Reviews have been stellar. I think my best plan of action will be to eat something halfway decent before walking into the theater, otherwise I'll be distractedly ravenous during the entire thing.

Books:

Finally finished re-reading The Time Traveler's Wife and sniffled my way through the end. Again. Even though I knew how it ended, it still made me cry and ponder Clare Abshire's life choices. Wonder if the movie -- which is, unfortunately, getting mixed reviews -- aptly translates the dense, long and somewhat complicated book. I hope that it does a decent job because that's on my "to see in the theater" list.

After completing Time Traveler, I was browsing through my bookcase at books I own but haven't yet read and pulled down a 1959 edition of Jack Kerouac's On the Road (a paperback that once belonged to my mom). I've never read any Kerouac. It's time I change that.

Image credit: From this web site.

Suburban Mom's Pop Culture Week: Weeds, Jon & Kate, Mrs. Washington, New York Times Mag on Julia Child

This past week has been sheer madness at my house. We celebrated my youngest son's birthday and then took a seven-plus round-trip car ride to New York to adopt a 3-month-old puppy who has yet to sleep through the night yet in his crate without howling all night long . . . kind of like my youngest son did. Until he was three.

Here's what I've been able to fit into my pop culture consumption in the past week+, that is when I'm not taking the puppy outside in an attempt to housetrain him and keep the six-pound ball of fluff from being dinner to larger animals in the neighborhood.

TV/DVDs:

-- In order to prepare for writing a column about Showtime's Weeds, I ODed on it, watching several seasons via Netflix and On Demand. After watching the evolution of Mary-Louise Parker's character Nancy Botwin, while I remain entertained and intrigued by the current season of the mom-pot dealer comedy, I liked Nancy's character a whole lot more in first season, before she got seriously dragged down into the muck and immorality of the drug trade.

-- Jon & Kate Plus 8 returned with two new episodes this week, only with a lot less of Jon and more of Kate-as-a-single mom. As I sympathize with Kate more each day as I read more about the heel that is her soon-to-be-ex-"Hey I'm still young!" spouse, Kate sure doesn't make it easy with her queen-like, dismissive attitude displayed in the show's first new installment since they announced that they were filing for divorce. In one scene where Jon and Kate were consulting with kitchen designers about renovating their kitchen (a room which I think looked awesome and didn't need massive changes, but what do I know?) she was wretched when she gestured toward a vase of flowers and dismissively told Jon, "Can you get rid of those? They're really distracting and ugly." Then, in a strategic feat of editing, the show's producers soon went to a cut where Kate -- who now sits in a white chair, not a love seat, for her one-on-one interview, Jon does his separately from a leather chair -- said, "I'm not as ridiculous as I used to be."

I also really did not like how the show's editors mocked Kate's attempts to camp outside in her backyard with the kids in two tents by getting her children to make fun of their mother and say she didn't know what she was doing in putting up the tent. It was disturbing to watch to say the least.

-- In a moment of weakness, I DVRed and watched the Hallmark Channel's original film, Mrs. Washington Goes to Smith, about a woman who quit college during her junior year in order to get married, worked to put her husband through dental school, raised their children to adulthood and was unceremoniously dumped by her husband for another, younger woman. In a life-altering decision, the character, Alice Washington, decided to go back to school and live in the dorms in order to complete her final year of college. She hoped to then become a high school English teacher.

Why would I watch a completely predictable but satisfying TV film -- akin to gorging on a salty bag of chips -- which had at least one totally fantasyland situation (there's no way a fifysomething woman would make the Smith College hoop team, at least that fiftysomething)? I watched it becuase it starred Cybill Shepherd, whom I've always liked -- especially for her sitcom Cybill -- and was surprised to find that her love interest/college English professor, was played by Jeffrey Nordling, who was in Once and Again and, more recently, 24. Sure, it was a chickflick in its purest form, but it was one with an upbeat, positive message, "This is the next big step in the rest of my life," Shepherd's character, Alice Washington said. The Hallmark Channel is re-airing the film numerous times.

-- I'm up-to-date on Entourage and have found myself getting increasingly irritated with the man-boy that is Vince.


-- In preparation for a Mad Men-themed column, I'm immersing myself in the Mad Men Season 2 on DVD, especially the special features.

Magazines/News:

-- This past weekend's New York Times Magazine was so chock full of articles that I haven't even finished reading it all yet. Among the pieces was a solid one on the dearth of female superheroes for little girls to embrace and a thought-provoking one about the contradiction between the fact that while the Food Network seems to be doing well and people are much more sophisticated about food in general, we're making fewer and fewer meals on our own, instead preferring to outsource meal prep to the grocery stores and restaurants. Julia Child's revolutionary 1960s PBS cooking show was featured prominently in the piece, given that the film Julie & Julia comes out this week. (I'm hoping to see that movie soon and write a column on.)

The lengthy Michael Pollan food article was a fascinating read. Here's a sample:

"It’s no accident that Julia Child appeared on public television — or educational television, as it used to be called. On a commercial network, a program that actually inspired viewers to get off the couch and spend an hour cooking a meal would be a commercial disaster, for it would mean they were turning off the television to do something else. The ads on the Food Network, at least in prime time, strongly suggest its viewers do no such thing: the food-related ads hardly ever hawk kitchen appliances or ingredients (unless you count A.1. steak sauce) but rather push the usual supermarket cart of edible foodlike substances, including Manwich sloppy joe in a can, Special K protein shakes and Ore-Ida frozen French fries, along with fast-casual eateries like Olive Garden and Red Lobster. "

-- Last week's issue of New York Magazine arrived at my house just yesterday -- thank you snail mail -- and I got the chance to enjoy Emily Nussbaum's ode to the chameleon-like Madonna who's now entering another phase of her life and of her public persona. While Nussbaum's favorite phase was the "Ideal Brunette Madonna . . . saving Black Jesus in that incredible slip," (mine was the "Express Yourself" Madonna), she wrote:

"Maybe it’s because I’m getting older along with her, but watching Madonna strut past 50—hips grinding in high heels, posing legs spread—brings out anxious, contradictory emotions. It’s become taboo to criticize stars for plastic surgery—both because it is their choice and because they have no choice—but each time I glimpse that grinning mask, I wonder why it’s impossible for Madonna, with all her power, her will to shock, to ever stop 'giving good face'? I try to persuade myself to admire her most New York qualities (ambition, workaholism); I tell myself she’s a dancer, and this is what dancers do. But I feel exhausted just witnessing the effort it must take to maintain this vision of eternal youth. This didactically selfless Madonna is less inspiring than the selfish one in so many ways."

The latest New York arrived today and I can't wait to dive into the Mad Men pieces, including an interview with Christina Hendricks, a defense of Pete "The Snake" Campbell and an abridged guide to the first two seasons. Not that I'm obsessed with Mad Men or anything.

What are your pop culture fixes of the week?

Image credit: Alexx Henry/Hallmark Channel via the New York Times.