I recorded, then stayed up late watching both shows last night. I was glad at the outcome, but I would have been glad with any of them winning. I had never heard of Hubert before this show, but have always liked both Chiarello and Bayless. I was a bit disappointed at Chiarello in the episode where the previous contestants from Top Chef came back to be sous chefs. But I wonder how much of the arrogance they showed him having was the editing. As for the finale, I loved the challenge they had to do. What a brilliant idea. I bet it was fun for the chefs to do, too. It's too early to tell about the new Top Chefs. I just hope they keep the bickering to a minimum. One of the things I loved about Top Chef Masters was there was little to no bickering, and everyone enjoyed each other's company. Sally

I didn't like that chincy floor either. It kills me how much hardwood floors cost now a days. They use to be standard in a home back in the day. And carpet was a luxury. I remember when I was a kid and my parents bought white wool carpeting to cover up the gorgeous hardwood floors. Shoot I remember in the mid seventy's I bought whip cream carpeting to go in my living room. And I too covered up beautiful honey colored hardwoods. But left the hardwood floors bare upstairs. I remember thinking how warm and gorgous my living room was. However, I was only renting and had the carpeting taken up when I moved. If carpeting was in vogue again, I bet hardwood floors would be cheap. Supply and demand I suppose.

I really wanted to watch it, but missed the first half hour, and then was busy tonight and couldn't see the re-broadcast either, but thanks to breenthumb's mention of watching it online, I managed to see the first half. The show seemed quite ambitious: trying to build an entire coherent futuristic world, introduce a half dozen main characters and present some history and motivations for the characters, and establish the main plot as well as two or three sub-plots, all without resorting to clumsy narration and minimizing the ham-handed exposition. Some of the characters had so little screen-time they seemed a little more like caricatures: The sinister administrator guy conspiring with the eccentric corporate billionaire; the doctor-friend keeping something so momentous secret; even the brilliant scientist guy being unable to stifle his atheistic views enough to avoid repeatedly insulting the people he is asking to fund his research. I also had some quibbles with plot points: Why have only one person on the large space station, especially when the previous astronaut supposedly flipped-out and killed himself? Why wouldn't the husband have at least some ready answer to deflect an obvious and expected fear-motivated line of questions? Why would they even make it possible to delete the video feeds on the space station? I did notice a couple of nice touches in the sequences on the space station: When the power goes out and she is on the rim of the station where there is some "gravity" due to the rotation of the station, and she climbs "up" towards the central hub and experiences less and less "gravity" until she is in free-fall at the hub. Then later when she see see the guy in the airlock, she is floating weightless holding on to a handhold and she then "sees" the guy come walking out which seems to clearly indicate he's a hallucination. All-in-all, despite the above quibbles, I think the show worked pretty well, and has a lot of promise.

I never heard of this show until Dennis Miller had him as a guest on his radio show last week -- so I tuned in that night (actually Tivo'd it and watched the next day.) I thought he was a talented impressionist - but didn't think his material was all that clean, and tuned out after 10 minutes or so. I might try it again though - thanks for the reminder.