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Top Moments: Crazy Love on Parenthood, Mad Men and The Good Wife
In the pursuit of TV love, our favorite characters employed some really weird tactics this week. On Boardwalk Empire, Margaret got Nucky's attention by dropping a dime on him. Crosby proposed with a plastic novelty ring while wearing a tacky jumpsuit on Parenthood. House's cranky doc even agreed to — gasp! — babysit. Don Draper's impromptu proposal on Mad Men's finale caught us off guard. But it's Kalinda and Blake's destructive flirtation on The Good Wife that perhaps most eloquently underscored that love may be a many-splendored thing, but there's nothing hotter than taking a baseball bat to your intended's automobile. Welcome to Top Moments: Love Is Strange Edition.
In the pursuit of TV love, our favorite characters employed some really weird tactics this week. On Boardwalk Empire, Margaret got Nucky's attention by dropping a dime on him. Crosby proposed with a plastic novelty ring while wearing a tacky jumpsuit on Parenthood. House's cranky doc even agreed to — gasp! — babysit. Don Draper's impromptu proposal on Mad Men's finale caught us off guard. But it's Kalinda and Blake's destructive flirtation on The Good Wife that perhaps most eloquently underscored that love may be a many-splendored thing, but there's nothing hotter than taking a baseball bat to your intended's automobile. Welcome to Top Moments: Love Is Strange Edition.
14. Weirdest Courtship: After circling one another for weeks, Boardwalk Empire's Nucky Thompson and Margaret Schroeder finally consummate their feelings for one another. When baking soda bread and getting dolled up don't grab Nucky's attention, Margaret hits him where it hurts and gives Agent Van Alden information about Nucky's bootlegging operation. When he arrives at her house at a very late hour, however, Nucky makes it clear that he won't stand for further betrayals: "I have no time for games, Margaret," he says.
13. Best Blast to the Future: When Brainiac takes Clark on a journey through his past and present in Smallville's 200th episode, Clark accidentally lands himself in the future where he comes face-to-face with the tights-wearing superhero we've all been waiting for: Superman. His future self has to dash off and prevent a nuclear reactor from exploding, leaving Clark to rescue Lois from a helicopter that is going down. Seeing that Lois knows his secret — that he's become a beacon of hope in the future — cements Clark's confidence that he'll someday become a hero.
12. Best Revenge: While promoting her memoir, The Woman I Was Born to Be: My Story, on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Susan Boyle recalls the bullies who taunted her in her youth and says that she hopes they've all "grown up a bit" now. Not satisfied with her conciliatory tone, Winfrey suggests the ultimate revenge: "You know what you should do? You should send them an autographed CD ... with a note that says, 'How ya like me now?'"
11. Most Apropos Question-Popping: Crosby Braverman always strays from expectations on Parenthood. He still does his laundry at his parents' house and he became a father five years after the birth of his son, Jabbar. (That wasn't really his fault, but still). So it only makes sense that Crosby picks Halloween night, while wearing an Evil Knievel costume, to propose to Jasmine with a cheap spider ring. No word on her response just yet, but how could she possibly resist?
10. Biggest Snob: On this week's premiere of Millionaire Matchmaker, Patti's millionairess, the heir to the Dannon Yogurt fortune, is quite a handful. She doesn't like any of the guys at the mixer that Patti has planned, then the poor sap who ends up on a date with her can't even crack a joke without her being completely offended and disgusted. Honey, you ain't even that cute.
9. Best Character Detail: Renee Perry (Vanessa Williams) is the least desperate housewife on Wisteria Lane. So it was fun to see that the writers gave the Desperate Housewives newcomer an interesting chink in her couture armor: She's afraid of little people, a fact demonstrated with much hilarity when Bree asks a friend from church to crash her date with Keith. We always wanted to see Wilhelmina Slater come unglued on Ugly Betty, and now we have.
8. Most Unexpected Performance: Who knew Beyoncé's mom was such a card? During an appearance on Ellen, Tina Knowles addressed the rumors that her daughter is pregnant. "The truth is that's it's not Beyoncé that's pregnant. It's me," the 56-year-old joked. "With all the rumors, by now I should have five or six grandchildren."
7. Worst Caretakers: When Cuddy puts House in charge of watching her daughter Rachel on House, he finds a way to con Wilson into coming over to take over. But when Wilson and House both threaten to leave, the two call a truce and decide to babysit together. Unfortunately, while they were bickering outside for all of two minutes, Rachel managed to decorate the living room with spaghetti, popcorn and other assorted junk. Plus, they find a quarter in her mouth, which turns out to be the coin she didn't swallow.
6. Least Worldly Travelers: We can maybe forgive the Amazing Race teams for not being able to find Ghana — the country they were in at the time — on a map last week, but there is no excuse for Nick DeCarlo asking a Ghanaian cabbie to drive him to... the Arctic Circle. Maybe the Las Vegas resident was thinking of this Arctic Circle?
5. Best Diversity: Modern Family'sCam and Mitchell think baby Lily is a shoo-in for Billingsley Academy. An Asian baby raised by gay parents? Schools live for that kind of diversity. But when the competition -- a lesbian couple, one of whom uses a wheelchair, and their African-American child — shows up, Cam panics. In the interview, he suddenly reveals/lies that he is Native American, instructing the interviewer in a deep, stereotypical baritone that his people grow maize, "what you know as corn." Mitch's reaction shot is priceless.
4. Most Expected, Self-Induced Wardrobe Malfunction: Little is left to the imagination when it comes to Real Housewives of Atlantastar Kim Zolciak's breasts. Never has she worn an outfit from which her recently readjusted girls aren't freely spilling. So when she flashed the camera during Monday's episode -- to illustrate why her too-tight dress needed fixing — we hardly blushed.
3. Best Patriots: Baseball tries its best to attract a younger crowd by asking indie-music power couple Zooey Deschanel and Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard to sing "God Bless America" and the National Anthem, respectively, at Game 2 of the National League Championship Series. Both do a respectful, excellent job, but we're pretty sure there were a lot of parents out there wondering who the heck they are.
2. Biggest Surprise: After slowly pulling his life back together and building a healthy relationship with Dr. Faye, Mad Men's Don Draper throws everyone a curveball and proposes to Megan, his secretary and emergency babysitter. Though Megan is clearly the Anti-Betty (there's no crying over spilled milkshakes), it remains to be seen if she will challenge Don enough to truly make him a one-woman man. Judging by his gaze out the window in Season 4's final moment, things don't look that promising.
1. Most Consistently Interesting Enigma: Kalinda's twisty identity takes on a new dimension this week on The Good Wife as she ratchets up the sexual tension with her adversary Blake by... smashing the windows of his rental car. She asks him about the high-caliber bullets she finds in his trunk. "You butchering deer or compensating for something?" she says, inches from his face, with an intense stare. "It's kind of ham-fisted to use sex, isn't it?" he replies. She then reaches down off-camera and replies, "Yeah, you're right; it feels very ham-fisted."
What were your favorite TV moments of the week?
