Category: TV

Red’s Recommendation of the Week: The Umbrella Academy

This show is, simply put, just delightfully weird.

The Umbrella Academy is a quarantine must watch for anyone who’s into sci-fi, graphic novels, time travel, and just generally weird shows. You definitely have to kind of go with it in this show since it really leans into the bizarre, but hey that’s to be expected when you base a show off a comic written by the lead singer of My Chemical Romance.

“I’m Not Okay” still slaps to this day.

It stars mostly unknown actors, but features prominent roles from Ellen Page (Inception, X-Men, Juno) and Mary J Blige (music superstar) rounding out the cast. The Umbrella Academy has a couple of goofy moments that are to be expected when adapting graphic novel artwork to live action (think Wolverine’s yellow jumpsuit), but the show actually deals with a lot of heavy topics too: drug addiction, suicide, and tons of childhood trauma just to name a few.

The show begins on a day in 1989 when 12 children were all born at the same exact time to unsuspecting women all around the world who weren’t pregnant when the day began. Like the Immaculate Conception on steroids. Some quirky billionaire then travels around the world to essentially adopt/buy as many of these kids as he can (he gets 7) because these can’t be ordinary children. Well he’s right and he brings them all to live and train together as a team of kid superheros. They all have abilities ranging from super strength, to teleportation, to even conjuring the dead. All of the kids, except for Ellen Page, which is unintentionally hilarious if you remember the Family Guy Justice League…and Meg episode.

Anyways, the kids fight crime together under the moniker The Umbrella Academy, but the show actually starts 17 years later after they’ve all grown up and drifted apart. They’re brought back together by tragedy and are now adults who are all understandably pretty fucked up from a childhood as kid soldiers raised by an emotionally void billionaire who gave them NUMBERS for names.

It’s a mix between a number of genres that shouldn’t really work when thrown together, yet somehow it does. You have elements of a murder mystery/sci-fi/super heroes/time travel/gothic opera/buddy cop/dry humor and it oddly works in the end.

I won’t give away too much, but when one of the main characters learns of the exact date of the apocalypse (eight days away) he has to recruit his brothers and sisters as they try and figure out what the hell is going on and how exactly they can stop it.

The Umbrella Academy definitely isn’t for everyone, but I’ve had enough friends DM me after I posted a pic of the show asking me “how is that?” People are curious and this show is weird AF, but I just finished season 1 and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

So I recommend checking it out because what else are you doing these days? Oh and if you like it, Season 2 just dropped on Netflix so you’ve got about 20 hours of binge TV ahead of you.

Quarantine Q2 TV Recommendations

The obvious question here and one that Red immediately brought up IS the fact that we are not remotely close to being in Q2. And that is true, we are not in Q2….of the year. We are however in our second set of three months of quarantine. Our second quarter-year stuck mostly inside lest we infect ourselves and those around us with the virus named after Dom Toretto’s favorite beverage.

The problem with where a lot of us are at in life and in quarantine is that the obvious choices and nominations for our binging pleasure have indeed been binged. There are fears out there that we may even run out of T.V. That is why, spoiler alert, streaming services are already resorting to throwing the metaphorical spaghetti against the wall in the form of uploading shows from other English speaking areas of the world such as the UK and Australia. They are also banking, with some success, that we’ve expanded our horizons enough to have the patience to deal with either dubs or subtitles and have pushed foreign shows to our monolingual asses.

These and a few others make up my second hack at aggregating what’s out there for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy.

Marcella (UK) – Netflix
(This may have been in the last binge blog but deserves another mention)

I may have noted in the past that FOTB Patty Blackouts has television tastes that run between police procedurals and the shittiest of reality T.V (Below Deck is his Sopranos). So needless to say I myself was shocked when I was able to hook him into this one. In Marcella, the titular character is drawn back onto the police force to hunt down a serial killer who has returned, despite the fact that her personal life is falling apart and she herself is in the throes of a perpetual psychotic break. If you like “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” you’ll like the familiar Nordic noir feel of this one, set in England and the UK aboard.

Dark (Germany) – Netflix

Grenga: Dark is a highly binge-able Sci-FI show, assuming you can get past the dubbing. It’s a mysterious ride through time that centers on 4 families in a small German town that is also home to a nuclear power plant. The first season is definitely confusing, but once you start to connect a few dots you can’t help but watch more. I haven’t finished the third season yet, but so far the show has lived up to it’s 95% Rotten Tomatoes rating.

Ladhood (UK) – Hulu

Hulu decided to just blatantly stage a British invasion of their platform, almost admitting they were running out of shit to promote. Ladhood might be the best of the bunch. In this interesting take of a coming of age tale, emotionally stunted, early-30’s Londoner Liam is probably a little more broken than he cares to admit (sound familiar). He tries to determine how this came to be by visiting scenes from his teenage years in Northern England, taking part as an audience member unseen by his younger self or friends as well as breaking the fourth wall to try and provide context. While it didn’t quite live up to what I wanted it to be it was a cool idea and definitely worth a watch. Here’s hoping for more seasons post-rona.

Hightown – Starz


We come back to Massachusetts for this round of attempted Boston accents and a fresh take on the opioid epidemic. Based on the Cape with a specific interest in Provincetown, Hightown centers on Jackie, a “fish cop” (National Marine Fishery Services Agent) who wants to have her cake and eat (snort) it too, enjoying all the carnal pleasures of living in PTown, New England’s gay capital, while investigating a murder off the books. Her moonlighting intersects with and gets in the way of an annoyed Statie Detective, Ray, whose not totally legit investigation into a drug trafficking ring is related to Jackie’s own search.


Stateless  (Australia) – Netflix

Fuck. A. Duck. Not only did I not see this one coming but when it arrived I did not expect to care. But here we are. This emotional, perfectly acted, gripping miniseries follows four separate but intertwined characters at an Australian detention center for refugees – an Aussie who thanks to a cult causing a psychotic break thinks she’s German; a guard who took the well-paying, government funded job with the center’s contractor to give his family a better life; a bureaucrat who is trying to keep the center’s as well as the refugee detention policy’s reputation above water, and an Afghan refugee desperate to give himself and his missing family the life he dreams for them. You can only imagine.


The Umbrella Academy – Netflix

Red: I’ll have a full blog about this later as I just finished season 1, but The Umbrella Academy is a quarantine must watch for anyone who’s into sci-fi, graphic novels, time travel, and just generally weird shows. You definitely have to kind of go with it in this show since it really leans into the weirdness, but hey that’s to be expected when you base a show off a comic written by the lead singer from My Chemical Romance.

Gomorrah – HBO Max

First things first from what I understand if you have HBO you probably have HBO Max for free although the Home Box Office has done a terrible fuckin job rolling this thing out. Anyway, I won’t try and lie, I’ve never watched Gomorrah. But I’ve been told it’s actually one of the best shows out there and I saw recently it was ranked the #5 foreign show of the decade. By the New York Times maybe? Anyway here’s the wikipedia rundown:

Set in the suburbs of Naples, Italy, the crime drama goes inside the Camorra, a fierce Neapolitan crime organization led by Pietro Savastano. The story is told through the eyes of Don Pietro’s right-hand man, Ciro Di Marzio, whose faith in the family is tested when he realizes how far Don Pietro is willing to go to keep his power.

“F” Is For Family – Netflix

This serves as more of a reminder that a new season of Bill Burr’s hilarious cartoon dropped during quarantine. The lightly-autobiographical tale of a working class family in the 70’s remains absolutely hysterical, something we all need right now.

The Sopranos – HBO

WATCH THE FUCKING SOPRANOS YOU UNAMERICAN FUCKS.

Michael Keaton May Return as Batman Alongside Ezra Miller’s Flash. Wait, What??

The Wrap – After nearly 30 years, Michael Keaton is in talks to return to the role of Batman, to appear alongside Ezra Miller in Warner Bros.’ upcoming movie “The Flash,” TheWrap has learned exclusively. Talks with Keaton are in the very early stages, it is far from a sure thing, and can go either way. No details are currently available about how big or small Keaton’s role is.

That plot will introduce general audiences to the idea of the multiverse, one of the of core concepts underpinning DC Comics. For the non fanboy set, the multiverse refers to a shifting number of alternate universes that coexist within the larger reality depicted in DC comics. Originally created to explain various contradictory changes the company’s characters experienced over decades, it allows several different versions of the same characters to simultaneously exist and, occasionally, interact. Matt Reeves upcoming “The Batman” will not be affected and Robert Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne is still viewed as the future of the franchise.

In my head I imagine the head of the DC Comics movie studio as a high school kid just inhaling Adderall and Mountain Dew because these movies are ALL over the place. Ben Affleck is the Batfleck! Batfleck is writing and directing a standalone film! Batfleck retired! Robert Pattinson is now Batman! Hey what about bringing back 1989 Batman Michael Keaton to star alongside Ezra Miller, who literally just played the Flash next to Affleck’s Batman in two movies!

Before the fanboys jump down my throat, yes I understand the concept of the multiverse. I watched an episode of the Crisis on Infinite Earths episode just to see my dude Tom Welling reprise his role in Smallville one more time. It was a disappointingly short 90 seconds of screen time for the old WB’s Clark Kent, but that disappointment gave way to a crying fit of laughter when I saw who they had playing Lex Luthor.

What, was Michael Rosenbaum busy with a set at the Comedy Store that night? Ah, but I digress.

I think the entire concept of the multiverse (which not surprisingly was originally introduced to cover up inconsistencies over the years) opens up a world of possibilities. But its hard to feel good about anything DC does these days because they’ve already mucked up so many movies and planned universes. With that being said a multiverse allows DC to punt on the idea of a shared universe across multiple movies like Marvel and focus on self contained stories while plugging and playing our favorite characters and actors without the need to explain a ton of backstory. Whether that works with an audience outside of a hardcore comics fanbase is unclear, but I know I’d be pumped to see Ryan Reynolds’ Green Lantern pop into a movie with Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn as it’s revealed that The Joker is actually Mark Hammil’s version. Thats basically a 10 year old’s dream, just mixing and matching whatever toys you have and mashing em all together.

Or really any reason at all to bring my girl and Smallville legend Kristen Kreuk out of the Disney Vault.

But if we wanna get nuts then lets get nuts and do the Batman Beyond movie with Keaton as the old Bat.

Now THAT is a movie that would put asses in seats. I’d like to say Pattinson’s movie and this multiverse news with Keaton are just a giant smokescreen to distract us from a Batman Beyond movie secretly in the works, but I think that is giving the DCEU far too much credit. I’ve already written thousands of words about this nerdgasm of a movie so I won’t go down that rabbit hole again.

Either way I am fully on board with DC just throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks. Oh people love Wonder Woman and Aquaman Jason Mamoa? They’re in! People hate Jared Leto and the Batfleck retired? Out! Give me the Flash and the guy that played Batman 31 years ago and maybe another out of place character to see if we can catch lightning in a bottle with the mutliverse. That or yet another DC movie bombs and Jon Taffer just shuts it down.

Granted it came out a month after I was born so I’ve only seen it once or twice and I know it was the first comic book movie to play it serious, but I was never overly fond of Batman 1989 or Jack Nicholson, as Big Jim Murray put it, playing Jack Nicholson with makeup. With that being said I’ll have to go back and give it a rewatch because it sure sounds like Keaton could be coming out of retirement to don the black cowl once again.

Did “Speed” Rip Off “Family Matters?” In a Word, Yes.

After catching an old episode of Family Matters the other day and rewatching Speed last night, a dark and insidious question came over me: Did Speed rip off Family Matters??

We all know the plot of the wildly popular 1994 action thriller Speed starring Keanu Reeves:

But I feel like a lot of people forget about a suspiciously similar plot of a 1991 episode of Family Matters. Here’s the synopsis of “Boom!” the Season 3 premiere of Family Matters.

Urkel befriends Lowell, an orangutan who has been abused through a series of laboratory experiments. At the precinct, Carl is exercising on a treadmill when he discovers it has been booby-trapped by a revenge seeker; the bomb hidden inside will go off should he step off the treadmill. He must rely on Lt. Murtaugh – and a little bit of luck – to disconnect the bomb’s wiring before it explodes.

Just watch this clip from Family Matters and tell me this isn’t the exact plot of Speed, except on a treadmill.

Compare that to the focal point of Speed:

I mean that looks pretty damn close to me. My wife told me to do some research before slandering the good name of Speed, but I mean come on. I tried to do a little digging to see what the rest of the internet thought, but it seems nobody is asking the tough questions. All I got from my Google search was a story about Eddie Winslow getting arrested for failing to pay child support.

I am merely here to ask thought provoking questions and let you come to your own conclusions, but if you ask me Speed 100% ripped off Family Matters. Reginald VelJohnson put up with too much shit on Family Matters to not get the credit he deserves for indirectly creating one of the biggest blockbusters in movie history.

With that being said, Speed is still one of the most rewatchable action movies ever made despite just how dumb it truly is. Dennis Hopper, Jeff Daniels, and Sandra Bullock are all great, but I am a Keanu Reeves stan and he is in the middle of a HEATER here. Just a decade plus of dominance starting with Bill & Ted in ’89, Point Break in ’91, Speed in ’94, The Devil’s Advocate (with Pacino!) in ’97, my favorite movie of all-time The Matrix in ’99, The Replacements in ’00, and Hardball in ’01. Keanu has always been a stoic, sometimes mistaken for stilted, actor which is why he absolutely kills it in some roles (Neo) and whiffs on others (Dracula) before landing a career defining role in yet another blockbuster action franchise, John Wick.

Did I just turn a blog accusing a movie of plagiarizing Family Matters into a Keanu Reeves stan session? I guess I did.

PS – Heres how the episode of Family Matters ended in case you weren’t watching it at 9 am on a weekday like me.

That Time I Got Boom Roasted By Jeopardy Legend Ken Jennings On Twitter

You come at the king you best not miss.

So now that my nightmare has finally been realized and Jeopardy has run out of new episodes, they have started airing reruns and they played Ken Jennings’ first appearance earlier this week. As I tweeted out, Jennings was an absolute weapon from Day 1, but it was far from a runaway as he barely won in Final Jeopardy. On a sports question no less, which the Jeopardy nerds notoriously struggle with.

The Final Jeopardy category was 2000 Olympics and the clue was “She’s the first female track & field athlete to win medals in five different events at a single Olympics.” The answer was Marion Jones. Ken Jennings’ answer: Jones.

Like I know for a fact that Jennings wins this episode, but watching it I wasn’t sure if Trebek was going to bust his balls for not being specific enough.

So Ken sounded off on all of us for questioning his knowledge of trivia.

I actually went searching for the official Jeopardy rules and the full rulebook is not actually that easy to find. There are some basic rules and strategy guidelines on the Jeopardy website, but these debates continue to rage in the internet streets. Although I did learn that in the event of a tie after Final Jeopardy, Trebek will read one tiebreaker clue for no additional money and the first contestant to buzz in with the correct answer walks off with the win.

In fairness though, I’ve seen Trebek not give people credit on an answer for less egregious omissions. Maybe, thats just me remembering Trebek smoking people over the years for infractions that I thought the judges should have accepted.

But hey its not just me, Jon Tomase legitimately wrote an article about the same exact thing yesterday.

Jennings simply wrote “Jones,” which could’ve been interpreted as a guess of a common name. But after consulting with the judges, host Alex Trebek declared the answer valid because, “in terms of female athletes, there aren’t that many.”

“I had been trained by years of ‘Jeopardy!’ watching and college quiz bowls that you only give the last name,” he said. “Because there’s then an additional opportunity to introduce some kind of error. By default, I just wrote down ‘Who is Jones?’ I didn’t even think what a common last name that is. It wasn’t until Alex revealed my answer that I realized it looked like I just guessed a random last name. Who is Jones? Who is Smith? Who is Williams? There was what seemed like an eternity of a pause. He looked at the judges’ table. It didn’t take too long before he got a nod.

“I don’t think it was a tough judgment call. The ‘Jeopardy!’ rule is almost always ‘the last name is acceptable by itself’ unless there’s a particular ambiguity, like Benjamin Harrison versus William Henry Harrison or something like that. I did think for a moment, ‘There are probably a number of American athletes named Jones, is it not clear I meant Marion Jones?’ I remember feeling this wave of euphoria when Alex said it was correct. Somehow, against all odds in these 20 minutes, I survived.”

It’s crazy how after winning 74 games in a row and over $5 million in his Jeopardy career, Jennings nearly was a one and done Jeopardy contestant. That is some serious butterfly effect type stuff right there.

Steve Carell is Back On TV in “Space Force” and This is Exactly What I Needed

The co-creator of Space Force is Greg Daniels, who was the co-creator of The Office, Parks and Rec, King of the Hill, and also won an Emmy as a writer on The Simpsons. That is an absolutely teflon resume for a TV writer. Throw Steve Carell into the mix and you have one of the most promising shows in a long time.

It’s not just Daniels and Carell either as the show has a cast of comedy vets including John Malkovich, Ben Schwartz, Fred Willard, Noah Emmerich, Lisa Kudrow, and Jessica St. Clair.

So we get a collection of some very funny actors, Steve Carell and Greg Daniels leading the way as co-creators, and it’s all on Netflix where they aren’t constrained by 22 minute episodes or F-bomb regulations from the FCC. Throw in the subject matter of Carell playing a general leading the (very real) newly created Space Force branch of the military and I am all in.

PS – Daniels was nominated for another Emmy for his song “Who Needs the Kwik-E-Mart” in the season 5 episode he penned, “Homer and Apu”, which any Simpsons fan can sing to you right now.

Nicolas Cage is Playing Joe Exotic the Tiger King in a New TV Series Because Why Not?

Variety – Nicolas Cage is set to star in a scripted series centered on Joe Exotic, the subject of the Netflix docuseries “Tiger King,” Variety has learned exclusively.

The eight-episode series is being produced by Imagine Television Studios and CBS Television Studios. It will be taken to market in the coming days. It is based on the Texas Monthly article “Joe Exotic: A Dark Journey Into the World of a Man Gone Wild,” by Leif Reigstad.

What a time to be alive. I fought against Tiger King for about a week before I caved because I’m a contrarian by nature. If everyone likes it so much it must be pandering garbage for simpleminded people was my original thinking. I watched the first ep and thought okay this white trash asshole illegally buys and sells tigers, why do I need 7 more hours of this? Well when I dipped my toe back into the tiger infested waters a couple of days later, I ended up watching the remaining 7 episodes in one sitting.

Joe Exotic is undeniably a white trash asshole that deserves to be in jail for murdering endangered animals, but my goodness is the man fascinating. Besides the fact that Exotic is as he describes himself ” the gay, gun-carrying redneck with a mullet,” the Netflix series was so fascinating because it followed a man down a completely self destructive path despite having every reason to avoid rocking the boat. I mean the man married two guys at once rocking a cowboy hat, repeatedly threatened to murder his arch nemesis on YouTube, and even ran a competitive campaign for Governor of Oklahoma.

You’ve all seen the greek tragedy that is Tiger King so I won’t recite all the details, but in all seriousness WHO better to play Joe Exotic than Nicolas Cage? Is there anyone other than this guy you’d want taking this role?

Nic Cage has perfected the art of playing an absolute lunatic and losing his shit in just about every movie he’s in. Now picture him with a bleached blonde mullet threatening to murder a fellow zoo owner while he wrestles tigers and his two husbands smoke a billion pounds of meth in the office? I really don’t want to glorify the Tiger King any more than he already has been, but goddamnit I can’t quit you Joe Exotic.

Apparently Kate McKinnon also has a Tiger King show of her own on the horizon as she’s set to portray Carole Baskins. So this dysfunctional group of characters isn’t going anywhere for a while.

Final Answers No Longer Final on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire

popculture. – The second episode of ABC’s latest iteration of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? aired Wednesday night, and it had game show fans talking on social media. Tonight’s guests featured SNL alum Will Forte, who ended five questions away from the million-dollar prize. After Forte’s run, comedian Nikki Glaser took the spotlight for a very eventful session in the hot seat…

Though Forte played well, it was a fairly standard round. Glaser, however, had only gotten to the $16,000 question when she accidentally blurted out the wrong response and even tacked on the words “final answer.” While the judges eventually decided in Glaser’s favor, it was a call that wasn’t looked favorably upon by the audience based on the tweets that followed.

I don’t mean to be that guy, but you can’t do that. You can’t change your answer after you utter the words “final” and “answer” back-to-back in the hot seat. I know it’s a celebrity edition, with teams basically, for charity, and in front of an empty audience. But rules are rules.

Cosmo Kramer Chaos GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY

If you’re wondering why I’m making such a big deal out of this, it’s because there is precedent on this issue:

I’ve got no issue with Glaser. I’m happy for her that she was allowed to change her answer and keep going, because she is trying to take more money from ABC for a good cause. But I do have a beef with the judges. Allowing Glaser to change her “final” answer would be like Trebek giving celebrities two cracks at a Celebrity Jeopardy Final Jeopardy. And what if Glaser accidentally said “final answer” after unintentionally giving the correct answer? Would the judges have allowed her to change her “final” answer if it had been the correct answer? I shouldn’t even have to ask that, but here we are…

Credit to Jimmy Kimmel, though, for handling this whole fiasco with great aplomb. Don’t forget, before he took over ABC’s late night slot, Kimmel won an Emmy for hosting the Comedy Central game show Win Ben Stein’s Money. While Kimmel has bigger fish to fry, last night showed us again how good he is at helming a quizzer.

And just for kicks, here was Kimmel when he was a contestant on Millionaire way back in 2001:

What Song Does the HBO Intro Remind You of First?

I saw this question posed on Twitter somewhere, but can’t find the original tweet so here we are. Now I have a feeling the answers are going to skew wildly here. Everyone has an HBO show that they watched religiously before the fracturing of content with social media and streaming. These days I watch so many shows on so many platforms I don’t really associate them with any one channel. Back in the day though you’d have to wait all week for your next fix and come Sunday night when that HBO static noise drops its like the first drip of morphine.

Disclaimer: This is not a list of the *best* HBO shows, this is a list of what hits your brain first when you hear the opening static. The Sopranos is an all-time show, but I was 10 when it started so I only watched episodes here and there with my dad in later seasons. I didn’t even properly binge Sopranos until last year, so go ahead and shame me if you want, but Tony’s fate in my rankings is not as ambiguous as that finale was.

With so many all-time shows and cult classic series, what song does the HBO Intro remind you of first?

3.) True Detective

The first season of True Detective is one of the few instances of TV in the past decade that was appointment viewing. The HBO Opening followed by that creepy Bayoux theme song was a one two punch that had me glued to my seat no matter what. There could have been a fire in my kitchen and I would have let my shitty Allston apartment burn just so I could try and figure out who the Yellow King was.

2.) Game of Thrones

Pound for pound my favorite TV show of all time and one that changed the game forever, despite some minor (massive) missteps over the final season or two. This was a show you couldn’t afford to miss the opening seconds so the dog was walked, the snacks were set up, and the lights were dimmed at 8:58 pm leaving nothing but silence in my house as that sweet, sweet HBO Opening hit followed by one of the greatest opening sequences in TV history. I literally went to a Ramin Djawadi concert just to hear this played by a live orchestra and it was some of the best money I ever spent.

1.) Entourage

For me the hands down No. 1 in the Power Rankings is Entourage. I readily admit a lot of this has to do with the age I was when Entourage was starting off and hitting its stride, but when I hear that HBO static the first thing I think of is Vinny and the boys. This show was just straight up fun to watch with your buds so it’s probably just a dopamine connection in my brain. Did the show become formulaic in its later seasons? Sure, but that doesn’t change the fact that my brain is hardwired to play Jane’s Addiction in my head as soon as I hear the HBO Intro.

So who ya got?

PS – The honorable mention that didn’t make this list is Ballers. I don’t even really associate Ballers with the HBO Opening (hence not making the list), but tell me you can’t think of The Rock just crushing deals every time you hear Lil Wayne and Drake’s “Right Above It.”

It Looks Like Everyone in Quarantine Is Watching The Price is Right Again

The Price Is Right' Decides Social Media Is Awesome This Week

Soap Opera Network – Viewers are flocking to CBS’ “The Price is Right” as the legendary game show is achieving ratings highs not seen in more than four years.

For the week of March 30-April 3, 2020, the daytime broadcast leader in terms of viewers and numerous demographics posted its highest viewership numbers since the week of January 18-22, 2016, according to newly released Nielsen Media Research ratings data.

If your childhood was anything like mine, every sick day you spent home from school was spent with Bob Barker. Now, as so many of us stuck at home during the COVID-19 crisis, it appears that we are spending our days with Drew Carey.

Thankfully,  I’ve been able to work at home the last few weeks. I’ll be honest, though, my productivity dips around 11 AM each morning. I haven’t watched TPiR this frequently since college. Everyone remembers Plinko and Yodely Guy, but this has given me a chance to enjoy some pricing game deep cuts for the first time in a while. Which got me thinking…

You can only keep three:

IMG_6461

Who ya got?

I’m taking Hole in One, Cliffhangers (Yodely Guy) and Race Game.

I don’t care if I’m putting from the back line in Hole in One. I’d bet my mortgage I could sink that putt if given two chances and that larger-than-regulation sized cup. Cliffhangers might be the easiest game on the show. $25/$35/$45 never loses, I don’t even need to see the prizes. And Race Game just looks fun. As long as you hustle you have a pretty good shot at taking home at least a couple of prizes.

My honorable mention goes to Safe Crackers. I used to love it when they played the Pink Panther music for that game. Also used to love Golden Road, which has offered some of the biggest prizes in the history of the show. At this point in my life, though, I really don’t have the need for an $80,000 RV.

As for Plinko… I love Plinko as much as the next guy, but no one has ever won the top prize on that game. Obviously this is the whole point, but too much is up to chance for me in that game.

Who are you keeping? Let us know on Facebook or Twitter.

Blogger’s Note – I get all of my news from Soap Opera Network. Don’t judge me.