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Is Boardwalk Empire about to enter its golden age?

Television

Miss you, Muncie

NASHVILLE STAR 5: Angela Hacker has a rasp like a chair scraping backward.

But the chief is being too modest: Armed and Famous — must I be its eulogist? — was a show in the best tradition of reality. Its premise (celebs making busts in underclass USA) had that classic we-came-up-with-it-when-we-were-high quality, and every episode was stuffed with accidental Life. Here were the unpurged images of America, and the great lines. Emile the wife beater, railing at his swollen spouse from the back seat of La Toya Jackson’s police cruiser: “I never hit you! No! I pushed you and held you, yes . . . ” Officer Jack Osbourne, son of Ozzy, observing a woman in handcuffs as she took a desperate, wheezing drag off her husband’s cigarette: “It was like a baby bird feeding from its mother.” Always amusing, too, was the way the arrestees, from beneath their various welts, Taserings, and clouds of meth, would manage to recognize their celebrity apprehenders. One shirtless miscreant, pounced upon by Officer Erik Estrada, tauntingly called him “Mr. Emilio Estevez.” Muncie, Muncie, you fairyland of disgrace, we’re gonna miss you.

Besides, last week’s American Idol was a bore, a whole hour without any singing, just the judges saying no or yes to a long parade of contestants. Cowell teased them with drawn-out double negatives — “You haven’t . . . failed,” “We have decided not . . . to exclude you” — and there was plentiful use of that industrial swooshing sound so beloved of the show’s producers, the noise of someone’s hopes being vacuumed into the abyss, but the suspense was mild at best. Chris Sligh is still in it, the man who said he’d entered the competition because he “wanted to make David Hasselhoff cry.” Sligh, as Jody Rosen has noted in Slate, is “American Idol’s first ironist: if he wins it’ll be like Stephen Colbert becoming president.”