TV
What does the B in Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 stand for? Bear? Birkenstock? Bogart? We may never know. But what is clear is that Apartment 23 is another example of ABC’s surprisingly adequate spate of recent sitcoms. The Odd Couple-ish premise: Sunbeaming optimist Dreama Walker (The Good Wife) lands the conniving, evil Krysten Ritter (Breaking Bad) as her roommate. It’s another show where the very good pieces (the central duo’s chemistry, Dawson Creek’s James Van Der Beek playing James Van Der Beek) must, tragically, compete with very problematic pieces (the apartment complex has not one, but two, unfunny perverts.) Here’s hoping the Beek outweighs the bad.
Videogame
Remember those really old videogames, before you ever knew what dragonshouts, quick-time events and cover shooting were? Thanks to the rise of indie developers, suddenly the old genres — adventure games, 2D platforms, turn-based role-playing games — are being taken out of storage and actually sold at a profit. Legend of Grimrock is a resurrection of that unique game, in which you must explore a dangerous dungeon full of traps and secret passages and killer snails, tile by tile. Oh, and none of this “running in all directions” nonsense. Life has but four directions: east, west, north and south.
Book
Say this for Stephen King, the famed master of horror: Where the man could have just made a living writing about evil household appliances come to life, he has crazier ambitions. That ambition — good or bad — created the Dark Tower series, the seven-book sci-fi/ horror/fantasy/western that occasionally featured a character named “Stephen King.” Now he’s delivered The Wind Through the Keyhole, a new stand-alone companion novel in the supposedly competed series, set in between the fourth and fifth book.
