My Boys

• The fourth Indiana Jones movie has an official title: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It was announced by an excited Shia LaBeouf at Sunday night's MTV Video Music Awards.
• "Power of 10" is getting six more episodes for midseason, Zap2it reports.
• ComingSoon reports that the "Big in reverse" movie 17, starring Zac Efron, has nabbed director Burr Steers (Igby Goes Down).
• "My Boys" is getting a third season on TBS, Variety reports.
• New Line Cinema has obtained the rights to remake Guillermo Del Toro's creepy ghost child thriller The Orphanage, says Hollywood Reporter.
• Billboard has some details on Coldplay's newest album, which is due in 2008.
• According to Variety, Karen Moncrieff's mystery-thriller The Dead Girl won the grand prize at the Deauville Festival of American Film on Sunday night.
• ABC has bought an hour-long, high-stakes game show called "The Duel," in which competitors try to outwit each other in one-on-one trivia battles, says the Hollywood Reporter.

Okay, I know that last year I kinda hated on the TBS original comedy "My Boys." A lot. And I maintain that it's obnoxious to say that being a laid-back, funny, down-to-earth girl with a few guy friends necessarily means that you can't get a boyfriend because guys are, according to this show, thoroughly turned off by confident girls who like sports. Plus, the show, all about a woman named PJ who writes for the sports section of the Chicago Sun-Times was deeply fond of using sports puns to reflect the action, which is rarely interesting and especially grating after the zillionth time ("Sometimes you just strike out!").

However, I have to admit that having seen the first few episodes of this next season, which starts tonight on TBS at 10:00 PM, the show has improved. For starters, they've given the character of Stephanie (played by Kellee Stewart), PJ's one girly friend more screen time, more dimension and far more funny lines than she ever had before, which is a pleasant surprise. I shocked myself by actually laughing out loud at some of Stephanie's lines. For another thing, they did well to bring in some new comedians, such as Nicole Sullivan who you probably know mostly from "Mad TV" and Sierra Mist commercials, and there's even a funny cameo by "30 Rock"'s Jack McBrayer in the second episode. And they did reduce the number of sports puns to a just mildly annoying degree.

I don't know that this will become one of my regular shows to catch, but I will begrudgingly cease to ridicule it quite so much. You can watch all 13 episodes of the first season on the "My Boys" website before the new season begins tonight.

Source

TBS and TNT are getting into the online-TV act with their summer series. Much like ABC and NBC, the networks will be making each new episode of several original series available online at 3 a.m. the day after they air. The networks are the first major cable networks to commit to streaming a whole season of shows, though some smaller networks have tried it and other large ones have made individual episodes available online.

Episodes of original series "The Closer," "Heartland," "Saving Grace" and miniseries "The Company" will be available on TNT's Web site, while the TBS site will have episodes of "My Boys," "Tyler Perry's House of Payne," "The Bill Engvall Show" and "The Frank Show." "The Closer," "The Bill Engvall Show," "My Boys" and "The Frank Show" will also be available on iTunes.

I think this is a great idea — as long as they make the episodes available to as many people as possible. Right now the whole first season of "My Boys" is online, but only those with Windows computers can see it.

"The Closer" photo Source

So there's this football game on Sunday. A so-called "Super Bowl," and if you didn't know that, then a few cable channels are looking for you. Most of the big networks just roll over on Super Bowl Sunday, putting on repeats of "America's Funniest Home Videos" or "Grease: You're the One That I Want" and gift-wrapping the day's ratings for whichever channel has the big game (this year, it's CBS).

But cable networks seem to think there's a niche market of people (mostly women) who don't watch the Super Bowl but would keep the TV on if it were tuned to a knitting marathon.

That's right, a knitting marathon. The DIY Network is showing several back-to-back episodes of its show "Knitty Gritty" during the Super Bowl. On the one hand, it's hip knitting (read: iPod cozies), and there's a charity tie-in for people to help make blankets for the needy. But still: It's knitting. On television. For hours. At least there would be plenty of needles handy if you wanted to stick one in your eye.

That's far from the only bad idea on Super Bowl Sunday, so read more

Recently I went on a rant about the TBS original series, "My Boys," which I find lame and annoying. It seems to want to be a kind of "Sex and the City" for tomboy-types, yet the writing is not very good, and the stereotypes that were so cliche in "Sex and the City" are simply reinforced in new ways. Clearly, I'm in the minority in my dislike, because TBS just picked up "My Boys" for nine more half-hour episodes. My theory is that the show could potentially appeal to both men and women—not just because of all the (countless) sports references but also because comedian Jim Gaffigan, who plays PJ's brother on the show, seems to have gathered a cult following. Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of his Hot Pocket routine, and I think he's naturally funny to watch, but it's not enough to make me like the show.

It must be resonating with someone, though, if TBS is keeping it alive. Or perhaps the continuation has something to do with Match.com? To find out why, read more

Because I went to journalism school in Chicago and have lots of guy friends, I was excited to watch the new show "My Boys," which airs Tuesday nights at 10 on TBS. The show follows a sportwriter named PJ (played by Jordana Spiro), who lives in Chicago, writes for the Sun-Times, and has a pack of close guy friends. It sounded right up my alley.

But after seeing the first two episodes, I've mostly just been nothing but annoyed and frustrated by this show. Many reviewers have compared "My Boys" to "Sex and the City," since the protagonist is a writer who provides continuous narration about her love life. But in this case, the narration is in the form of relentless sports comparisons, i.e. "Love is like baseball". According to "My Boys" creator Betsy Thomas, the show is meant to be a kind of "Sex and the City" for women who don't always relate to the super-feminine characters on that show. In an interview on Zap2it.com, Thomas says

"I love sports and sort of begrudgingly wear makeup, and I have a weekly poker game, and I think when I first wrote this, I felt very alienated by a lot of the women portrayed on TV."

But in attempting to offer up a less cliched version of "Sex and the City," the writers for "My Boys" have just dug those cliches deeper and deeper. For the rest of my rant, read more