Potpourri

Two column links for the price of one this morning: a more detailed rant about what went wrong with the Emmy nominations, plus a triple-header preview of "Chappelle's Show: The Lost Episodes," the new season of "Monk" and USA's very annoying new "Psych."

I only watched the "Rock Star" results show live, and probably should have buffered it so I could skip through Brooke Burke's "hosting" efforts (she really makes you appreciate Seacrest). Last year, the bottom three had to sing INXS songs; since Supernova has no back-catalog, I wondered what they would have to do this time. (A choice of Motley Crue, Guns 'n Roses and Metallica songs?) Opening it up to pretty much any rock song that'll clear makes things more interesting, especially when a knucklehead like Matt goes and picks a Duran Duran song. From the minute he said the words "Duran Duran," you could see the band making up its mind to punt him, and the fact that it was a much harder arrangement and arguably a better vocal than Chris' didn't matter.

On Monday, I fly out to LA for the two and a half week long Television Critics Association press tour (aka "Death march with cocktails"). This means several things for this blog:

1)Press tour runs all day and well into the night most of the time, so I won't have much time for actual TV-viewing. Day-after reviews will be minimal at best, except on those occasions when some nice network drops a DVD screener off in my hotel room. I'll definitely review the next "Deadwood" and "Entourage," and after that I'll create an open thread every morning for people to discuss stuff, whether or not I saw it.

2)As in years past, I'm doing an official press tour blog for NJ.com. You can see previous editions here. (And if you go here, the entry at the very bottom gives a pretty thorough summary of press tour for anyone who doesn't know about it.) The interface is more primitive (no comments, no sub-links to specific posts), but rumor has it we're only a month or two away from purchasing better blogging software. In the meantime, every day I'll post a brief summary here of what's on the official blog, and anyone who wants to comment or ask questions about the event can do it here.

One of the events I'm most looking forward to is attending a taping of the "Rock Star" performance show, followed by the party back at the mansion. With a bunch of reporters invited, I'm guessing the party will be a bit less raucous (or, at least, powder-free) than your average bacchanal.