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Once upon a time, late-night TV was filled with all sorts of performers, not just movie and TV stars plugging their latest product. Truly literary authors, classical musicans and dancers, sat and conversed with the likes of Jack Paar and Steve Allen. (Oh, for the days when Oscar Levant shambled into a chair to chat about his latest breakdown!) Last night, David Letterman made a nice connection to that bygone era in welcoming the great ballet dancer Veronika Part to the Late Show.
Letterman admitted, “I’m woefully ignorant; I don’t know anything about ballet,” and I’m not much better. But I do know that Part is a great artist. Part was charming, going along with Dave’s joshing (”People are constantly lifting you — and that’s just in the lobby!”). Even this brief glimpse of Part was wonderful; I wish there was a wider display of culture, high as well as low, on the late-night TV landscape.
Waggling his posterior and shot from the waist-up, Elvis-on-Ed Sullivan-style, Bruno delivered a rather randy Top 10 List last night.
In case you were wondering why Sacha Baron Cohen agreed to appear on Wednesday night’s Late Show as himself and not, as he usually does on publicity tours, in-character as Bruno, here’s the probable explanation: Cohen got a double-shot of publicity by returning last night (or taping the night before?) to deliver the Top 10 List:
“You look fantastic!” murmured Dave into Bruno/Cohen’s ear at the end of the bit.
Last night, Craig Ferguson reverted back to his would-be pop-star days, with a get-down, get-funky lip-synch to Duran Duran’s cover of the Grandmaster Flash hit, “White Lines”:
Really, what more is there to say, other than, contra Flash, “Do it!”
Bravo to Neil Patrick Harris for proving himself the master of yet another TV genre: the television cooking show. As the special guest hosting a dinner at Los Angeles’ Magic Castle, Harris was more tartly critical than many other celebs have been on the Top Chef shows. Good for him: who needs a wishy-washy diner on a show like this?
The four competing chefs were given their challenge via a card trick performed by magician Max Maven, and you won’t catch me making fun of his pulled-tight ponytail and hocus-pocus airiness: I’m a magic fan, and admire Maven’s skills. (As cornball as it looked, I’d love to get invited into that invitation-only Magic Castle, wouldn’t you?)
Each chef’s playing card revealed his or her theme for the main-competition dish: Surprise, Mystery, Spectacle, and Illusion. This was a tad unimaginative on the part of the producers. I mean, when it comes to cooking, is there really much difference between making something that’s a surprise or an illusion?
Anyway, Harris was as articulate a judge as any of the professional ones surrounding him, pronouncing, for example, chef John Besh’s icky-sounding horseradish and creme fraiche sorbet “executed as [well as] he had probably imagined.”
I have to say that the winner [spoiler alert!] made a dish that looked — well, chef Anita Lo covered up most of her “illusion” with another plate, so it didn’t look like much to me, but Harris and the judges were impressed with her braised daikon with kombu caviar and steak tartare. Lo described it as “a seascape that if you listen really carefully will crackle,” because she’d coated it with something like Rice Krispies. Personally, I think someone in charge of sound on Top Chef Masters should have put a microphone right on that plate, and if it didn’t make a crackling sound, I’d have docked her a few points.
But once again, Top Chef Masters worked its overall charm: the competition brings out the best, not the worst, behavior in the competitors, making this one of the most civilized and pleasant of all summer reality-competition shows.
Last night’s Better Off Ted was a cramped affair. When a toxic acid leak was discovered, a whole area of Veridian work-space had to be cordoned off, and workers had to share their offices with others. For Ted, this meant sharing his roomy office with the roomy bright eyes and (trust me, this isn’t sexist, it bears upon the plot) backside of Linda. He thought this would be fun, but Linda proved dismayingly neurotic (trying to teach her pet fish to talk) and lazy. Pretty soon, an unnerved Ted was swilling antacids and plotting Linda’s exit from his office.
For Lem, the situation meant the arrival of a lovely young woman who compelled him to overcome his shyness, flirt, and attempt a date. Not without misgivings, of course: As Lem phrased his ideal life: “If only I were a worm, I could cut myself in half and date my lower half.”
If the jokes weren’t quite as dense and thick as last week’s edition, this week’s Ted was still funnier and had more loony comic logic than any other sitcom on the air. At a time when HBO’s Hung is getting lots of attention because — well, because it’s HBO — Ted continues to be the zingiest half-hour in prime time.
Did you watch? Extra points for knowing what Phil’s shorthand term for “acid interface” is…
With most of the other talk shows in reruns this week, it was left to The Colbert Report to do the hard-news celebrity reporting required of the past busy weekend. I speak, of course, about the rumored death of Jeff Goldblum:
Last night, NBC ran a cut-down version of the 2003 TV special that did more than any other piece of media “reporting” to turn Michael Jackson into a punchline and worse. Living with Michael Jackson is a documentary overseen by the British journalist Martin Bashir, who now co-anchors ABC’s Nightline. In 2003, however, Bashir’s biggest claim to fame was interviewing Princess Diana in 1995 about her failed marriage.
Grinning at Jackson in their face-to-face encounters, sitting cozily next to Jackson on a Ferris wheel on the singer’s Neverland estate, or holding the hand of one of Jackson’s children, Bashir was the very picture of fawning unctuousness. But when he got into his editing room, he started playing the concerned tough-guy: “Jackson’s behavior was beginning to alarm me,” he says in a voiceover Jackson would hear only after the documentary aired. “Confronting him wouldn’t be easy, but now it had to happen,” Bashir describes himself with heroic determination.
Yeah, right: But only after making sure he had footage of Jackson spending gobs of money buying garish home furnishings in a Las Vegas store. “That’s only $275,000 each,” he says loudly, smilingly, as Jackson chose two items, among many others. Bashir wanted to make sure we thought the singer was a no-taste spendthrift.
Having secured scenes that would make for maximum salaciousness — “What else would he beat you with?” Bashir prodded, after reducing Jackson to tears amid tales of father Joe Jackson’s cruel punishments — Bashir went in for the money-quotes. He brought up the 1993 allegations of child molestation and let Jackson talk about how his relationships with minors were “not sexual.” Bashir made sure we heard that Jackson had made a “financial settlement” with his accusors.
Jackson was so upset with how Bashir portrayed him in the original, two-hour version of Living that he produced his own special, The Michael Jackson Interview: The Footage You Were Never Meant To See, which aired on Fox and showed some of Bashir’s wheedling and manipulations. The harm had been done, however.
It’s safe to say Living with Michael Jackson was, at the least, one reason Jackson withdrew from the media, and the world, even further in his remaining years. And you can watch it six more times on MSNBC over the next two weeks. What a way to honor the dead.
So what did you think of the first episode of Hung last night? Me, as you can read here, I thought it was kind of ehhh, but I liked the performances of Thomas Jane as Ray and Jane Adams as Tanya the baking poet.
But what I really liked were the opening credits. Yes, once again, HBO has come up with one of the best opening sequences in television, in this case courtesy mostly of the Black Keys’ fine, stomping blues-rock music, which you can see/hear here.
Last night on the Late Show, Johnny Depp and David Letterman played a little game of cat-and-mouse: Depp isn’t the gabbiest guy, but Dave respects him and likes his new movie Public Enemies. So Dave let the star get away with brief answers and the claim that he never sees his own movies. (”Once I’ve done my job on the film, it’s really none of my business,” he said.)
Still, Depp was pretty entertaining in unlikely areas. Such as his friendship with Elizabeth Taylor. Whom he called “a liver-and-onions broad.”
Never heard that phrase before, have you? But we know what he means: earthy, unpretentious.
In a double-header of summer-movie stars, Letterman also ushered in Megan Fox:
Saying she’s only had “three crushes in my life: Jon Stewart, Conan O’Brien, and you” set Dave up for a perfect response: “What do the other two do?”
I wonder if she’ll use the same line if she Transformer-promotes on The Daily Show and The Tonight Show…
Last night on the Late Show, Ray Romano was in fine form. After all those years of Everybody Loves Raymond, absence makes my heart grow fonder for Romano, no more so than when he let loose with how his character truly felt about his TV wife. (Check it out near the end of this clip.)
Judging from the raucous audience reaction, who among us did not want to say just that to Patricia Heaton’s Debra, especially in the final few seasons?
