The Amazing Race: The new season got some early buzz thanks to a viral video involving one of the contestants catapulting a watermelon into her face on accident. Click the link, if you haven't seen it yet. The was just one of the highlights from what looks to be another exciting season. Unlike with Survivor, there seems to be some likable contestants here and the teams that I didn't seem to care for were struggling, which hopefully means an early exit for most of them. It definitely seems like the female contestants are going to be at the forefront of this season, which should be interesting to watch since there's never been an all-female team that has won this competition. Stonehenge made for a good starting location and I'll be excited to see where else they'll travel to this season. It's too early to tell how good this season will be, but for now I'm hopeful. Now if they could just start filming this series in HD... Grade: B+
Family Guy: Speaking of HD, this show is now being done in HD and they were eager to show it off in the premiere. The murder mystery plot showed a lot of promise, but I was disappointed that they spent more time with the visual effects and tracking shots than on the actual story. Having the entire town gathered should have given everyone an easy chance to get in a good joke or too, but they kept things more serious. The characters they killed off were no great loss, so the show didn't really succeed on that end either. Based on the past few ones they've done, it seems like they would be better off sticking to half hour episodes because the hour long ones (save for the Star Wars spoofs) just don't seem to be that funny. Grade: C+
The Cleveland Show: I seemed to be one of the few people who actually found this show very funny, particularly in the later half of the season. For that reason, I was excited to have this show back, but it too disappointed me. If Family Guy was too preoccupied with its visuals, this show was too focused on its guest star - Kanye West. His 'Kenny West' character did nothing for me and with so much of the story focused around him and Cleveland's attempt to make him into a star, the rest of the characters weren't given much to do. I understand you want to draw eyeballs in and big guest stars will help with that, so I'll cut the show some slack. For now, I'll write this off as a rare miss and hope they return to form in their second episode. Grade: B-
The Simpsons: Guest stars were also featured prominently here, but that's nothing new for this show. Now in it's 22nd season, I don't expect much from this show and those lowered expectations help. I was really worried that this episode would suffer from Glee overload, based on the commercials. Instead, the guys from The Flight of the Concords got the lion's share of the screen time. The songs they developed were decent, but they also took away from the show's plot. Likewise, the B story involving Krusty getting caught in a Roman Polanski-style sting sounded good but needed more time to develop. However, while the show was far from perfect, of all the Animation Domination shows, it actually yielded the most laughs from me. They've certainly had better openers, but this was fine for what it was. Grade: B
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