Gossip Girl vs Friday Night Lights – Teenage Murder Subplots

*Updated with GG pix, FNL to come… eventually

Gossip Girl Season 1 was everything you could ask for: a show about rich beautiful people, high fashion and steamy gossip, intricate and interesting characters… all revolving around a murder subplot involving one Ms Serena Van der Woodsen, which was wrapped up all too cleanly in a single episode.

[crickets chirp]

Friday Night Lights Season 2, on the heels of a highly successful and well received first season about high school football, starts a long and unwieldy plot which draaaaaaaagggs through several episodes and ends in a rather unsatisfying anti-climax.

[a pin drops, loudly and clearly]

Why on earth writers think it’s a good idea to insert such an unlikely scenario into teen drama is quite beyond me. Not only does it require quite a leap of the imagination on the part of the viewer, neither of the 2 shows murder subplots really helped the show move along.

Let’s break it down now.

Thanks to Home of the Nutty for the Gossip Girl screencaps! Very comprehensive gallery

Project Runway vs Project Runway Australia

Project Runway’s Season 5 has been.. middling so far, which is why I haven’t been inspired to cover it much even if I do follow it regularly.

Mostly I’m annoyed tiring reality star wannabe characters – ‘xx-licious’, talking in 3rd person and ‘whackadoodle’ are NOT and WON’T be the new ‘Fierce’, not when they’re done so self consciously. Also, the standard of work just hasn’t been as Wow as I hoped, or perhaps it’s because last season’s batch (Christian, Jillian et all) were just so fabulous that this batch is having a hard time matching up.

Also the challenges were starting to get rote and repetitive. The latest Saturn Car Challenge however, did turn things around considerably by amping up the standards and not reworking old challenges (the grocery one, the inspiration one, zzzz) and finally getting rid of Keith whose thought process and work was kinda suspect. Now all they need to do is get Blayne off and Suede to stop talking and perhaps we’re headed somewhere.

Then, one day I was quite bored waiting for the new episode to come out, so I started watching Project Runway Australia on youtube (thanks to Kimmikimmileon, is that a riff from Culture Club’s karma-karma-karma-chameleon?). My thoughts between the 2.

Project Runway: 5×01 Innovation vs 1×01 Let’s Start

4 Complete Seasons, 42 different challenges, 57 collections shown (including the finales and decoys), it’s perhaps no wonder that some of the challenges are being recycled…

In the case of the Season 5 opener, it was a deliberate revisit to the iconic premiere challenge wayyyyyy back in Season 1, so let’s take a look at how this latest batch matched up to the inaugural batch.

I figured this was more interesting than prattling on about the dresses I liked and didn’t like. Right now in S5 there’s just way too many contestants to talk about!

The Challenge: To produce a dress for a night out on the town… with materials from Gristedes, a grocery store:

Thanks to Project Runway, Blogging Project Runway and Project Rungay for all pix! My fav sites to catch up on Project Runway every week.

Crazy Bluths vs. Eccentric Darlings: Round 1, Fight!

I watched Arrested Development first, all 3 seasons. It made me laugh and laugh, this absolutely dysfunctional and not very likeable but hilarious family. Then a couple of months ago I watched Dirty Sexy Money, about another dysfunctional family, though a lot richer and better looking. But the parallels between the families were there, so I decided to take a closer look…

Spoilers galore! Don’t proceed if you haven’t watched either show!

ROUND 1!