Brow Beat

Cheddar Gougères

Robert Anderson for Slate

Pâte à choux, the pastry dough essential to éclairs and a litany of other French delights, can seem alien and a little scary to American cooks, whose baking exploits may have been limited to yeast and quick breads. Its process, texture, and momentum are entirely different, in ways that feel uncomfortable the first few times you attempt it. And, as with all homemade baked goods, the threat of abject failure looms, a threat that feels all the more acute because pâte à choux relies on steam for lift rather than yeast or chemical leaveners.

What better time than the arrival of the New Year—which can itself feel a bit threatening—to face your fears and make pâte à choux? None, if you ask me.

Aldis Hodge, Beth Riesgraf, and Christian Kane in Leverage

Photograph by Erik Heinila.

After months of uncertainty and a last-minute announcement that the series had been canceled, Leverage, the TNT drama about a gang of scam artists who con the rich to win justice for the poor, had the best possible finale last night.

It’s always been hard for me to greet the news that a TV show has been canceled with anything other than sadness.

Jack Klugman attends the opening night of Lombardi on Oct. 21, 2010

Photograph by Michael N. Todaro/Getty Images.

In his long acting career, Jack Klugman, who died on Christmas Eve aged 90, created two iconic TV types that have now become stock characters.

In the 1970-75 small-screen adaptation of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple, he played a jerk who was also the show’s most lovable character. As Oscar Madison, Klugman channeled a bear trapped in a tiny Manhattan apartment with Tony Randall’s mosquito of a neatnik, Felix Unger. No matter how slobbish and inconsiderate Oscar might be, Klugman’s winning smile—and Oscar’s extraordinary patience with Felix’s uptight ways—made it impossible to dislike him.

Was John Milton the father of science fiction?

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Before an ominous two-handed engine called “budget constraints” smote it into oblivion, a movie adaption of Milton’s Paradise Lost was slated to arrive in 2013. Directed by Alex Proyas and starring Bradley Cooper as Satan, the film was billed as a science fiction actioner featuring 3-D “aerial warfare” between heavenly hosts and (probably) a lot of dark muttering about forbidden knowledge. Now Legendary Pictures has scrapped the epic, leaving us to contemplate our theology this Christmas without the promise of Cooper lolling around in a lake of fire, looking roguish.

But that doesn’t mean we should forget Paradise Lost as the holidays roll in. At Brow Beat, we’re big science fiction fans and we thought the Yuletide would be a great time to pay homage to a Christian thinker who also happened to beget one of our favorite genres. That’s because John Milton—poet, free speech advocate, civil servant, classics scholar—was arguably a forefather to Asimov, Bradbury, Delaney, and the rest. Their outlandish other worlds owe a debt to his visionary mode of storytelling; their romance—characters who go on quests, encounter adversaries at portals, channel the forces of light and dark—is his, too.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays a “Mandingo fighting” enthusiast in Django Unchained

Photo by Andrew Cooper, SMPSP – © 2012 - The Weinstein Company

Much of Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino’s blaxploitation Western about an ex-slave’s revenge against plantation owners, centers on a practice called “Mandingo fighting”: Slaves are forced to fight to the death for their owners’ wealth and entertainment. Did the U.S. have anything like this form of gladiatorial combat?

Max Payne 3

www.amazon.com

This morning, Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the NRA, took aim at “vicious, violent video games” and “blood-soaked slasher films” in the wake of the tragedy in Newtown, trotting out a litany of titles and strangely dated references. Mortal Kombat and Grand Theft Auto! Natural Born Killers! Kindergarten Killers, a game that never achieved any measure of real popularity, but sports an appropriately shocking title!

Clara Mamet, Max Charles and Isabella Cramp in The Neighbors.

Photo by Peter "Hopper" Stone © 2012 American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.

At this shirt-tail time of year, instead of new television, each day brings a fresh Top-10 list. I did my part, providing a Top 10 for the HitFix poll of polls. Rest assured that I chose those 10 with a scientific precision that permits no possibility of error in either selection or ranking, but I adore many more TV shows. So, under the principle that there’s no such thing as the wrong kind of TV-viewing pleasure, here are my 15 favorite pleasure shows—the ones that are not the great shows, but whose imperfections make me love them all the more.

A still from the 1932 "Silly Symphonies" short "Santa's Workshop"

YouTube

Three years ago, I wrote a piece for Slate explaining the peculiar Swedish tradition of coming together every Christmas Eve to watch Donald Duck. The ritual of collectively viewing the 1958 Walt Disney Presents Christmas special “From All of Us to All of You”—known in Sweden by the shorthand “Kalle Anka,” or “Donald Duck”—is as much a part of the holiday to Swedes as Santa Claus is to Americans.

When I first saw the show, I was struck by the blatant 1930s-era Disney racism of one of these cartoons, even as my adopted Swedish family remained unfazed. Now, 53 years after the first airing of Kalle Anka in Sweden, Disney has removed the offending clip from the international version of the special that it distributes to 40 different countries each year.