Otherwise known as thoughts I’ve had about the last few days of TV that aren’t long enough individually to make an entire article…
WOO-HOO, THEY LOST! – I lamented the possibility of Charla and Mirna winning The Amazing Race: (not really) All Stars, and they didn’t.  They came in last (or third, really) and it was all…kinda lackluster.  I didn’t want C&M to win, and I wanted the Beauty Queens to win, but they didn’t either.  Eric & Danielle (aka, Team Not Charla & Mirna) won and their fakey relationship and the love between them will, I’m sure, flourish like a sunflower and I’m feeling underwhelmed.  Then again, I felt underwhelmed most of the season, so I guess this is a fitting finale.  By the way, Race Producers (and I know that you read all of my work), let’s try to make sure in the future that you not design the race legs so that the decisions made by the racers in the first thirty-five minutes of the episode don’t matter at all.  I know you want to keep things close, but that’s just annoying.
BEST OF?  REALLY, SNL?  REALLY?? – Saturday Night Live was not new this week, but instead had their best of the 2006/2007 season episode.  There are a couple of things wrong with this.  The first is that they still have a few more episodes left.  I’m not sure why they felt the need to jump the gun on this one, but maybe they were just tired of rerunning the Peyton Manning episode.  Just a tip, NBC: maybe you should wait until the season is over before you start doing a “Best Of” episode.  And this leads me to the other thing that’s wrong with this episode: just because you’ve chosen the best example of a recurring sketch, that doesn’t necessarily mean that what you’ve chosen is any good.  I know that a lot of people like to hate on SNL on the internet (I believe the phrase “Is this show still on?” is a common “joke” (ironic quotes firmly in place)), but I can’t fully hate the show yet because there are always funny moments every week, and that’s why God invented TiVo (that has to be invented by God, right?  Humans are not that good).  But, SNL, “Deep House Dish” and that Bronx talk show … they’re not funny.  Really not ever.  And I really like Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, and Keenan Thompson.  Those sketches, though, are just … ugh.  Oh, and finally, SNL went online to have people cast votes on what their favorite digital short of the year was (and maybe the whole episode should have just been digital shorts).  Did anybody really think “Dick in a Box” wouldn’t win?

SURVIVOR GOT GOOD AGAIN – Survivor last season was so great.  Smart and talented people won and the mediocre and smug were tossed aside left and right.  Then this season, Mark Burnett decided to take inspiration from his horrible reality show, The Apprentice, and use it for his good reality show, Survivor, and he had some people sleep in a lavish camp with couches, a bed, and food, and the other team sleep in a camp that you’d find on, well, previous seasons of Survivor.  The mediocre and smug (and the gym rats, who are usually those things too) got comfortable and they wouldn’t leave.  But in the past few weeks, the two most interesting, good-humored people on the show, Earl and Yau-Man, have emerged as the frontrunners in the game (with the diminutive Yau-Man, also the oldest person in the game, impressing everybody at how athletic he is).  These are smart, cool people who have come up with some of the best strategizing I’ve ever seen on Survivor, and so the show is good again.
I STILL DON’T GET CHARM SCHOOL – This week on Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School, the most befuddling TV event since the success of According to Jim: one woman didn’t know whether she’d dropped out of high school in 10th or 11th grade; another woman (or possibly the same woman, it gets confusing) was mad because she was called a bad mother, even though she’s decided to leave her kids for a month to go on this show (and then, it seems, go back to being a stripper); host Mo’Nique disagreed on who won a debate with A COLLEGE DEBATE PROFESSOR and then berated the winning team for … winning, I guess; and all of the Charm School girls, who are ostensibly trying to learn to be better, more refined people, got to drink for free at a college bar on VH1’s dime.  At some point, the entire show will be explained to me and I will become so smart that I’ll be able to figure out what’s going to happen on Lost without even batting an eye.  But that day is far away.
THE SOPRANOS CONTINUES TO BE GREAT – Tony gives the same advice to his two sons (one real, one figurative) and they both follow it.  Oh, and it turns out to be really, really horrible advice, since it leads both of them into violent, despicable acts in order to make them feel better about their respective lots in life.  The ending with Chris fixing up his home and Tony sitting down at the dinner table with his family was a great, dark joke about the difference between how things look on the outside and what’s really going on in people’s hearts.
OH, AND JIM IMPERSONATING DWIGHT ON THE OFFICE = GENIUS. – Watch it.  You’ll love it: