That’s right kids – according to the New York Post, Beavis and Butt-head will be joining Family Guy and Futurama in the history books of canceled, animated TV shows being resurrected years later.

The new episodes will keep the two morons in high-school, as well as keep the same crude animation style the show was famous for, but the twosome will now heckle a whole new generation of music videos.  The potential for comedy gold here is absolutely limitless with how Beavis and Butt-head will react to seeing music videos by Ke$ha and MIley Cyrus and the like.

But of course the real question on everyone’s minds has to be: will there be further adventures of The Great Cornholio?

As a big TV watcher, I always like to see who gets nominated – and who eventually wins – Emmy Awards. The latest nominations were announced this morning – a full list can be found here.  The big news is that Glee and The Pacific scored a ton of nominations, and they’ll probably win a great deal of awards too.  30 Rock and The Office got their requisite nominations, all well-deserved.  And Lost got a few nods as well, for best drama series, best lead actor Matthew Fox, and best supporting actors Terry O’Quinn and Michael Emerson, although I think calling Locke/FLocke a supporting character isn’t totally accurate, I’m still happy that O’Quinn was recognized.  The Simpsons, South Park, and The Ricky Gervais Show were nominated for best animated series, and NPH got a nod for his work on HIMYM.  True Blood and Dexter got some love, as did the show James keeps telling me I’d love, Modern Family. And the surprise pick from the late-night shows is The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien.  Team Coco still has legs!

As far as the nominations I don’t understand, I’m not totally sold on Jon Cryer’s work on Two and a Half Men being Emmy worthy – no offense, Lenny Luthor.  And I was a little surprised Community didn’t get any nominations – c’mon, that show got really good!  Somethign for 24 in it’s final season would have been nice, but it probably wasn’t warranted.  A nod for Star Wars: The Clone Wars in the animated category doesn’t seem totally unreasonable to me, but maybe it’s too much of a “kids” show.

And, of course, I kinda feel that my work in Undateable should have gotten a mention in the made-up category of Best Actor in Stock/Archival Broll.

Our show is a roundtable panel discussion on the implications of this discovery, and what it means for the future.  Astute Brink viewers may some familiar faces in our panel of experts!

For mere detail on  how Venter and his team got to their synthetic cell, there’s a separate special on at 8pm on Science Channel, called simply “Creating Synthetic Life.”  I didn’t work on that show, but it’s interesting stuff, and it’s narrated by Ben Linus himself, Michael Emerson!

PS Now that this special is finished, I’m starting work today at MTV – fun times!

Clearly, there are Lost spoilers below, but if you are a year and a half behind (cough, cough, James) I don’t feel that bad if you do end up getting spoiled.

• So the Sideways world was a sort of Purgatory, a place that was important in helping our characters move on, but not necessarily “really real.” Already people are griping about it online, but I think it was a cool and unexpected twist. It also makes sense in the fact that it doesn’t undo everything that happened on the Island. It was a bold choice, it was emotional, and I didn’t guess it. So what more do people want?
• There are some questions about Sideways world that do linger.  Like, David is just totally a figment of Jack’s imagination?  And wasn’t Nadia the true love of Sayid’s life?  It would seem to me that Sayid would be reunited with Nadia in the afterlife.  And it would have been nice to see more familiar faces there – Walt, Eko, hell, even Frogurt!  Don’t they get to “move on” with our guys, or were they so unimportant  to this last phase of the story they just have to move on on their own?
• Walt in particular could have used some clarifying, but last we saw him he had moved on, and was living life as best he could in the real world with his grandma.  Oh well.
• On the Island, things were intense and amazing.  Seeing Rose, Bernard, and Vincent again was a great treat, and I knew I would lose it if FLocke killed them.  There were some action-movie cliches that were a tad on the hokey side – the fight on the cliff, the “I saved a bullet for ya!” quip, etc., but it still all managed to work for me.
• It was also nice for the show to acknowledge that jack being the next Jacob was an “obvious choice,” and Hurley’s words of “I’m glad it’s not me” did in fact to be pretty ironic.  It’s too bad that he doesn’t get home, because he did have parents who loved and missed him.  But hey, better him than Linus, right?
• So what happened in the lives of our characters after Jack died?  In my humble opinion, it seems like we are meant to assume Lapidus, Miles, Richard, Sawyer, Claire, and Kate escaped the Island, and go on  living in the real world.  I wonder how Kate will explain having survived two plane crashes.  Actually, how will Lapidus explain coming back without nearly everyone he left with?  These are small concerns.  Kate and Claire likely go on to raise Aaron,  Richard goes gray and dies naturally at the tender age of 204, Lapidus mows lawn for a living, and Miles and Sawyer enroll in police academy and become partners.  Maybe not that last part.)  Meanwhile, on the Island, Hurley is the  new Jacob, Ben is his right hand man, they have lunch with Rose, Bernard, and Vincent every once in a while, and maybe they hang out with Cindy and the two kids she’s been raising.  Hurley also is able to send Desmond home, possibly on the boat, possibly using magic, but he and Penny and Charlie live happily ever after.

I’m still processing the finale, but overall it was an emotional, satisfying conclusion to one of the greatest TV series ever.  There are questions that still bug me – like how Smokey appeared as Christian to Jack off the Island, and why Desmond told Charlie he saw Claire getting on a helicopter with Aaron, and why were Jack and company blamed for the time-jumping because they left, when it was all Ben’s fault for turning the wheel?  I do like the fact that we now know that Jughead did NOT split the timeline – that was the Incident, and that was that.

Bottom line, Lost succeeded where The Sopranos, The X-Files, and Quantum Leap failed – it provided a great ending to a great show.  Lost’s ending will be debated for years to come, and some people will always hate it.  But it worked for me, and I think a lot of other people out there, too.

Lost, you will be missed!

The last regularly scheduled Lost episode has come and gone, and all that remains is the series finale. A lot happened last night, so let’s get to it.

• In Sideways world, Desmond is still trying to get his Island buddies to remember their other lives. It sorta kinda worked on Ben, Ana Lucia “isn’t ready,” he didn’t really try with Sawyer or Miles, but he clearly has a plan for Kate and Sayid. It seems like the big Sideways showdown will take place at David’s concert, and not Locke’s wedding as I previously thought. Either way, I’m looking forward to the resolution of this whole arc.
• On the Island, the body count keeps on rising.  Alpert, Widmore, and Zoe all met their ends, and I’m especially bummed out about Widmore.  Will we ever find out what his real plan was?  Why did he plant explosives on the plane?  And why was he worried that FLocke would kill Penny if he left the Island?  he told Jin that if he did leave the Island, all life on Earth would cease to be, so wouldn’t that threat not hold much weight?  And how is Desmond a fail safe?
• And what – Desmond can destroy the Island?  That’s a bummer. And Jacob said that FLocke wants to go back into the cave – why didn’t he do that right after Jacob was killed?  Is that his way off the Island?   And now FLocke wants to destroy the Island, too?  Is that what happened in Sideways land?  Hmmmm.
• I loved that Jack is the new Jacob.  Sure, it was the safe choice, but it’s also the most logical, and it feels like what the series has been building towards.  Sawyer’s quip about the G-d complex was also a nice moment of comic relief.
• So now Ben is evil?  I don’t buy it for a second.  He has already had his redeeming moment, and I think he is exacting revenge against FLocke for using him.  Widmore was a necessary casualty, and since he didn’t really like him anyway, an acceptable loss in his (buggy) eyes.

Just four more days until Lost ends.  I simultaneously can’t wait and am dreading not having any more Lost to look forward to!  After this episode, last week’s looks better in hindsight, and I am totally confident the finale will be amazing!

Also, just a caveat that my blog posts will be sparse for the next few weeks – sorry, I will post when and what I can!

The line about the puppy is especially hysterical.

And now for the worst. See if you can spot exactly what is so wrong with this clip from Glee.

Awful, right?

Last night, we got the Lost episode we had been waiting for – and it provided… just a couple of answers, and a ton more questions. Well, consider yourself SPOILER WARNED and let’s get down to it, shall we?

• Jacob and Man in Black -still not named for some annoying reason – are brothers, fraternal twin mothers.  And their adoptive mother killed their birth mother by bashing her head in right after they were born.  So first Claudia, then Rousseau, and then Claire, all came to the Island pregnant, gave birth, and then had their babies taken from them.  Home births don’t sound so bad now, do they?
• Seriously, why didn’t we get names for MiB and his and Jacob’s “Mother?”  Can their names be THAT significant that we STILL can’t find out that they are, even with such precious little time left on the show?  Clearly Mother had been imbued with some kind of mystical powers, right?  She, like our buddy Richard Alpert, didn’t appear to age a day while her sons grew from babies to teenagers to men.  And there must have been something in that wine she made Jacob drink.  And she “made it” so that the two would never be able to hurt each other.  Except she might have screwed the pooch on that one, as Jacob did sorta-kinda-from a certain point of view kill his twin when he pushed him into the Light Tunnel.  I mean, clearly he lives on as the Smoke Monster, but he did kill his human self.  Does that mean that Jacob, MiB, and Mother were all somewhat supernatural, in that they could live for a really long time without aging, but not immortal, as a dagger in the chest would still kill them?
• Mother’s view of men is the same as MiB’s: “They come, they fight, they destroy, they corrupt.”   Also interesting is that she told Jacob he didn’t have a choice to become the Island protector, but Jacob’s whole motto is “You do have a choice.”  Interesting…
• So, let’s look at the questions that were answered: MiB and Mother are Adam and Eve.  This despite the fact that Jack estimated the bodies were about 40-50 years old based on their decomposition.  Well, maybe bodies just decompose in weird ways on the Island or something.   But the cutaways to Jack and Kate finding the bodies was completely gratuitous, forced, and unnecessary.  We got it, thanks!  We also found out that the boy who has been haunting MiB is in fact young Jacob.  So why is it that everyone (except Richard) can see young ghost Jacob, but no one (except Richard) ever saw the real Jacob when he was alive?  We also saw MiB starting to build the donkey wheel, but we didn’t get much of an explanation as to how it would work, nor do we know who finished it after Mother sabotaged his first efforts.
• Now onto the questions  NOT answered by this episode, many of which really bugged me.  First and foremost, I was hoping to get a better sense of THE RULES that Jacob and MiB play by, and all we learned was that they can’t kill each other directly, which we already knew.  But also pretty big is the question of how is MiB now pure evil, that must be contained on the Island?  WHY can’t he be allowed to leave?  Because he absorbed the Light’s powers?  Could he have left before that moment?  If so, why didn’t Mother just let him go?  If she only needed one replacement, and Jacob wanted to stay and MiB wanted to leave, why not just let him go?  Because he’s “special?”  How so?  What does that mean?  Why could he see his dead real Mom and Jacob couldn’t?  In regards to Jacob’s analogy to Richard about the Island being a cork to contain evil, is the Light itself the evil, or is it MiB now that he’s absorbed it’s energies?
• Before last night’s episode, something had been bugging me: When the Oceanic 6 were trying to get back to the Island, Ben and Eloise Hawking told Jack they had to bring Locke’s body back to the Island.  I know believe that Ben was just spouting gobbledy-gook – that he really had no deep understanding of the Island, Jacob, MiB, etc.  But Eloise seems to know A LOT.  About everything.  Even in different timelines.  So shouldn’t she know that the MiB could use Locke’s form if they brought his body back to the Island?  Shouldn’t she have said, “Whoa, hey there Jackie boy, what ever you do, DO NOT bring any corpses to that Island – they can be used against you by an evil supernatural force!”  My working theory is that she – and perhaps her ex Charles Widmore – are in cahoots with MiB.  To what end?  Well, if Widmore does in fact want to exploit the Island, to use the Light in the cave for all sorts of evil purposes, and MiB wants to leave, then they both have a vested interest in killing Jacob and all of his candidates.  Perhaps their whole feud is a ruse?

It was nice to get some backstory about the Island and its key players, but the episode still felt somewhat frustrating by the way it answered a few questions but continued to throw even more questions at us.  There’s only three and a half hours left in the show, dammit!  Still, I can’t help but feeling that I will like this episode more when I rewatch it later, after the series wraps up.  Maybe it will make more sense in the context of what is still to come.  Despite being somewhat disappointed by last night’s episode, I remain confident that Lost will still end on an incredibly high note.

The show is called “Undateable: Top 100 Things Guys Do That Guarantee They Won’t Be Dating Or Having Sex.” The subtitle pretty much explains it all. The above clip is from #56 on the countdown, Bad Dancing. Does that bad dancer look familiar? He should!

And that isn’t the only time a Noah is going to be onscreen over the course of these five hours of television. So set your DVR’s, because alannoah.com is having an official contest! The person who can spot the most (ideally all) of the instances when either myself or another Noah appears on the show, you will win a prize! A real prize! An unopened, never before watched comedy classic film on DVD! I don’t want to spoil what movie it is, but I will say it involves Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd “trading places” with one another.

So be sure to tune in every night this week, Monday through Friday, from 10pm – 11pm on VH1. That’s five hours total. You already know you’ll see me in the Bad Dancing segment, which is number 56 and will air Wednesday night. But there will be more! Post your contest submissions as comments here, and good luck to everyone!

SPOILER ALERT – DO NOT READ FURTHER IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN LAST NIGHT’S EPISODE OF LOST.

Whoa.  I mean, seriously, wow.  Last night’s Lost was huge, and epic, and it contained one hell of a twist at the end.  So let’s get analyzing, shall we?

• In Sideways world, we got a version of Jack that we know well – the compulsive fixer.  Even when Locke told him that he was not interested in surgery that would help him walk again (that he was a perfect *candidate* for), he kept on digging.  Apparently in this world, Locke injured his father in a plane crash, and he felt so guilty that he wouldn’t allow himself to “let go” and heal himself.  Quite a twist on what happened in the other timeline, when Cooper paralyzed Locke and never looked back.  I wonder what Sawyer would do if he discovered this Anthony Cooper was a vegetable – would he still want to kill him for what he did to his parents?  And along those lines, how was Jack able to track down this Anthony Cooper so easily, while Sawyer – a cop – couldn’t?
• Claire and Jack’s meet up in the hospital was interesting; what was the significance of the music box?  Other than the fact that it contained a mirror which they both looked into, and that it plays “Catch A Falling Star,” a song that Claire and Kate have mentioned/sang before?
• Also interesting was Jack getting an Apollo bar from the vending machine – the same candy that Jacob gave to him when he touched him and said that all it needed was a little push.
• Neither Sideways Jack or Locke said out loud that they remembered their Island selves, but we did get several hints that Locke was having some (perhaps subconscious) memories, the most obvious example being when he said “Push the button.  I wish you had believed me,” while he was asleep.  He also said “I know you” when he first saw Jack.  Jack assumed it was from their meeting at the airport, but could it also have been from the Island?  Jack is at least noticing that an awful lot of people he’s coming into contact with were on Oceanic Flight 815.
• The most obvious thing about this Sideways story is how it is the opposite (or mirror image) of what has happened before in the show, and what was happening on the Island in this episode.  In Sideways world, Jack is trying to get Locke to trust him, so he can save him.  On the Island, Locke (or FLocke, actually) is trying to get Jack to trust him, so he can kill him.  And even though Sideways Jack is still a man of science, he wants Locke to have faith that he can be healed, and is trying to convince him of something he will not accept.  The line he yelled to Locke down the hospital hallway, “I wish you believed me,” was what Locke wrote in his suicide note to Jack.
• But who are we kidding, this episode was all about what happened in the Island timeline.  The deaths of Sayid, Sun, and Jin were incredibly shocking and sad.  Jin and Sun were JUST reunited, only to die so soon thereafter.  Courtney was saying that Jin should have left Sun because of Ji Yeon.  Why would they want her to be raised by Sun’s evil father?  But I understand why he couldn’t leave her.  Their deaths were tragic and horrifically sad, not just for us as viewers, but for their friends as well.  I can’t remember the last time any of our castaways cried so much after a death of one of their own (excepting Sawyer after Juliet’s death, but even that was more full of rage than sadness.)  Sayid’s death, while also sad, was noble, and served to redeem him after he killed a LOT of people in a very short period of time.
• Oh, and where’s Lapidus?  Did he survive?
• OK, so now we know that FLocke is evil.  There is no doubt about that anymore.  He wants all the candidates dead.  He has succeeded halfway so far – only Hurley, Sawyer, and Jack remain.  His long con of everyone worked – including Sawyer.  And speaking of Sawyer, if we assume that Jack was right, and the bomb wouldn’t have gone off unless it was tampered with, then isn’t Sawyer responsible for Sayid, Jin, and Sun’s deaths in the same way that Jack was responsible for Juliet’s?  The show may never address that, nor does it really need to, just an interesting thought.
• But what of Widmore?  What are his intentions?  Maybe keeping our Losties in the cage WAS for their own good.  But why threaten to kill Kate?  Even if you don’t need her, that’s not gonna win you any friends with the rest of the gang.  And why plant explosives on the plane?  Assuming that it was really he who did it.  Could it have been Richard, Ben, and Miles?   Still, Widmore must have some sort of plan for killing FLocke, right?  Otherwise, why come back to the Island?  With a whole team of scientists and mercenaries and all that.  So what is his plan?  And why won’t he tell the Losties what it is?

Overall, this was an amazing episode – one that hit you in the gut and really moved the story along.  Quite a bit.  The teaser for next week’s show looked equally promising – will we finally get more clarification on the “rules” of Jacob and Man in Black’s game?  This show is almost over forever, but in the mean time the wait between each new episode is oing to be pretty tough to take.