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Tag: Best of 2010 (1-4 of 4)

Dec 29 2010 11:10 AM ET

2010's Most Bizarre Reality TV Moment: What's your pick?

Tags: American Idol, Best of 2010, Bitchery, Dancing With the Stars, Ellen DeGeneres, EWWWWWWWWWW.com, Fa-fa-fa-fa-fashion, Horrifying But Hypnotic, Kate Gosselin, Project Runway, Reality TV, Simon Cowell, That Was Way Harsh Tai, The Hills, What's Weirder?, Why Am I Crying?, American Idol, Reality TV, TV

“Most Bizarre” seems like the reality TV equivalent of “Best.” You gotta consider your genre!

Reality-TV-Hills-Idol-Stars Image Credit: Adam Larkey/ABC; Lifetime; MTV

It’s been a ridiculous year in “reality.” Bristol Palin outlasted fallen pop star Brandy in a televised ballroom dancing popularity contest. Ellen DeGeneres was suddenly sitting on Simon Cowell’s lap and then –poof!– both of them were gone. The Hills may have been fake molehills all along. And bangin’ Gretchen Jones took center stage on Project Runway, transforming the competition series into a riveting character study that often seemed like a senior-year elective for psych majors (PS 801: Raging Narcissism in the Age of Reality Television). READ FULL STORY »

Dec 22 2010 03:00 PM ET

2010 pop time capsule: What would you put in?

by Margaret Lyons

Tags: Best of 2010, Inception, Lady Gaga, Music, TV

Image Credit: Stephen VaughanLet’s put together a 2010 pop-culture time capsule, PopWatchers. What cultural artifacts can we entomb to communicate to our distant descendants what this year was like? What mattered to us? What shaped up? What made us laugh, made us think, or made us chitchat? My picks:

++ The top from Inception: I was at a party last weekend where people were passionately arguing about the merits and contents of this movie. This movie that came out six months ago.

++ Lady Gaga’s meat dress: Sure, Gaga wore some gagagadawful outfits this year, but it seems like the meat dress captured our imaginations more than any other.

++ Antoine Dodson’s red bandana: Hide your kids, hide your wife. Dodson’s response to his sister’s attack became a local news story, then a viral hit — and then an even bigger sensation, thanks to an Auto-Tuned song that itself was covered over and over and over again.

What would you put in the time capsule, PopWatchers?

Dec 21 2010 11:07 AM ET

Why I picked 'Kirby's Epic Yarn' as worst game of 2010 -- and why I may have been wrong

by Jeff Jensen

Tags: Best & Worst of 2010, Best of 2010, Videogames, Videogames

Kirby’s Epic Yarn is a videogame — the latest in a very popular series — made exclusively for the Wii and suitable for gamers of any age. You play as Kirby, who on most days is a spunky pink blob with big anime eyes. But in this newest adventure, an evil wizard zaps Kirby into a ball-of-yarn version of himself and sends him into Patch Land, a whimsical world made of fabric, a Willy Wonka wonderland filled with thread monsters, denim terrain, polyester backgrounds, and of course, cotton ball clouds. The gameplay involves swinging, jumping, and whipping through many madcap levels (you can collect beads along the way if you want, but it’s not mandatory), advancing through a storyline about helping a petulant royal ruler named Fluff save his torn-asunder textile kingdom, as well Kirby’s native world, known as Dream Land. The game is well produced. In fact, Kirby’s Epic Yarn is one of the best-reviewed games of 2010, with a Metacritic score of 89.

And yet, I named it the worst videogame of the year in the new issue of EW. This is what I wrote:

“There’s a fine line between cute and grating, delightfully busy and irritatingly overwhelming — and for me, this hyperactively adorable side-scrolling puzzler crosses it.” READ FULL STORY »

Dec 21 2010 10:00 AM ET

The Best TV Character Deaths of 2010

by Darren Franich

Tags: 24, Best of 2010, Boardwalk Empire, Grey's Anatomy, In Memoriam, Lost, Mad Men, The Simpsons, The Walking Dead, Lost, Mad Men

Image Credit: Michael Courtney/FoxOn TV, death is a good thing. Death shakes up the status quo. Death eliminates annoying characters, and it sends off beloved characters with an emotionally-explosive bang. The threat of main-character death has hovered over some of the greatest TV shows of the last ten years. Some shows, like 24, practically made a game out of their gleeful employment of the Death Twist, an out-of-nowhere elimination of an apparently central character. (Be honest: you had a couple bets going on who would die in the Lost finale, right?) Killing off a main character can be just a cheap gimmick, but when it’s done well, it can be incredibly moving. It can even revitalize a show. (See: Grey’s Anatomy, post-bloodbath.)

For our round-up of the best character expirations on TV this year, we focused exclusively on characters that were, if not series regulars, at least important parts of an ensemble — our (perhaps arbitrary) cut-off was that the character must have appeared on at least four episodes before expiring. By nature, this list skews towards drama, but it’s not all dour. On TV at least, death can be pretty funny. As you might expect, this post is SPOILER ALERT central, so if you’re worried, just click down to the comments right now and tell us your favorite deaths from 2010. Otherwise, check out the list after the jump… READ FULL STORY »