"Chuck" is undoubtedly one of my more favorite shows for the season. It's a good mix of comedy and action-adventure, with lots of eye-candy, fun characters, and geek-culture references. Looks like production's on hold though, thanks to the ongoing writer's strike.

Which disappoints me to no end, because it means I have to wait quite a bit to see more Yvonne Strahovski on TV. Yvonne is probably this season's breakout female lead. She comes all the way from Australia, where she auditioned from to land the role of CIA Special Agent Sarah Walker on the hit NBC spy thriller-comedy.

Basically her character keeps close to Chuck as a guardian angel of sorts. With a deadly proficiency for throwing knives and other concealed weapons, apparently.

Yvonne's name is really spelled as 'Strzechowski', as in Yvonne Strzechowski. To help us all out, she has been using the more phonetic spelling of Yvonne Strahovski as her stage name.

In any case, I'm just glad Josh Schwartz (same dude who gave us "The O.C." and "Gossip Girl") cast her for the part, and it always is something for fan-boys like me to look forward to whenever "Chuck" comes on.

Check out Yvonne's entry on IMDb here, and her Wikipedia entry here.

As long as TV keeps coming up with delicious eye-candy, this blog's feature on "Favorite TV Chicks" will be on hand to get to know more about our fine female performers who make our TV shows a little bit more interesting. Only on "Too Much TV: Renzie on TV!"

Cheers, everyone!

Yeah I watch The Food Network every now and then. I live on my own, cook my own food from time to time, so an occasional cooking tip sure wouldn't hurt.

Let's talk about one of my favorite personalities on The Food Network: Giada de Laurentiis. For the longest time, I referred to her as "that chick from Food Network who looks a lot like Natalie Portman". I first saw a lot of her on Everyday Italian (which shows in the Philippines on The Lifestyle Network, though I suspect those episodes are already years old even as they show it now).

Giada is a professional chef, food stylist, author and TV personality. Besides Everyday Italian (which had been on The Food Network since 2003), we also get to catch her on Giada's Weekend Getaways. She also hosted the network specials Behind the Bash and had a 2-part special called Giada In Paradise.

Things You Probably Didn't Know About Giada

It was only recently that I was able to know more about her from my online research. Here are a few interesting bits I found about her on Wikipedia:

• I didn't know her last name was "de Laurentiis". Her grandfather is legendary film producer Dino de Laurentiis, who gave us (among a host of other projects) Barbarella (1968), Serpico (1973), the remake of King Kong (1976), Flash Gordon (1980), Dune (1984), Army of Darkness (1992), and most of the Hannibal Lecter movies, including Manhunter (1986), that one with William Petersen.
• Given her family background, she's really grown up Hollywood-style. Her mother is actress Veronica de Laurentiis, and her father is actor-producer Alex de Benedetti, a close colleague of Dino de Laurentiis, Veronica's father. Her siblings are also, for the most part, in the business of entertainment.
  

• Giada originally had no plans to go into the "family business", which was why she pursued her interests in the culinary arts to begin with. It was after styling a piece in Food & Wine Magazine in 2001 that Food Network contacted her. She admitted to being a little uncomfortable in front of the camera at first, but later on got more used to it, and so became more relaxed on air.
  
• According to her entry on Wikipedia, when Everyday Italian first aired, the Food Network received emails accusing the network of hiring a model or actress pretending to cook instead of a real chef. Well, we all know better now, don't we?
• On an episode of Iron Chef America (in November 2006, actually), we see Giada and Bobby Flay cook off against Rachael Ray and Mario Batali. Rachael and Mario won that time. Nevertheless, it was loads of fun.
  

January is coming to a close, and at this point, a lot of shows have already resumed airing new episodes- despite the ongoing writers' strike.

For those of you who have been keeping tabs on TV, waiting for your new shows to come back, it won't be much longer anymore- you have a few good shows already going on, such as The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the second season of Jericho, to name a few.



Grey's Anatomy is finally back- we're currently on our 11th episode for Season 4. Also, we also have new episodes of My Name Is Earl. I have to wonder, though, do they have enough episodes stocked up until the strike is resolved? Or are we going to see the new episodes come in trickles once again? Suspense kills, huh?




Grey's Anatomy, you can catch on Thursdays on ABC, while you can catch My Name Is Earl on NBC that same night. For those with a reality fix, Project Runway season 4 is ongoing (we're already on episode eight, so you may have a lot of catching up to do), as well as the seventh season of The Apprentice- Celebrity Apprentice at that, which could be interesting.



For fans of the NBC reality show, we're on our second episode so far, so you can still catch up. Check your local listings on when to catch Celebrity Apprentice. You can catch Project Runway on BravoTV.



Now as far as the late night scene is concerned, I've been a huge fan of Late Night with Conan o'Brien. Conan Christopher o'Brien is back- apparently with much more facial hair. While you're at it, check out a very entertaining feature of him on Entertainment Weekly, as well as his diary on the ongoing writers' strike.

I'm keeping my eyes peeled for new episodes from our favorite shows coming out. You'll read it here when we get something.

Later, everyone. Cheers!

Frack. It's all I can say for now.

I was able to see the first 5 minutes of the brand new FOX action-suspense/sci-fi series, "The Sarah Connor Chronicles". And it was completely, totally awesome.

For those of you who have been living under a rock these past few months, "The Sarah Connor Chronicles" is the highly-anticipated TV tie-in of the "Terminator" series of motion pictures (yes, the one with Arnold Schwarzenneger in them).


How's that for a mean-looking cast, huh? We get this blurb from one of my favorite TV websites, www.TV.com:

The Terminator franchise arrives on TV with this serial drama. The series picks up a year after the events of Terminator 2: Judgment Day with John and Sarah Connor (Thomas Dekker and Lena Headey) hiding from the government. After two years in one place Sarah decides they need a change of scenery and in doing so they expose themselves to FBI Agent James Ellison (Richard T. Jones) and Skynet's army of Terminators including Cameron Phillips (Summer Glau) a reprogrammed Terminator sent to protect John. She informs them that Judgment Day was not stopped and will take place in 2011. John convinces Sarah to stop hiding and fight so Cameron takes them to a time machine the resistance has set up to take them to the year Skynet was created 2007.

I was able to catch the 2-hour season premiere of American Idol on Star World, even after I came home from a dinner date. For the most part, I'm really just curious what this season has to offer. It's really more of a guilty pleasure, I suppose. There were already a couple of times when I swore off American Idol, only to get hooked on it again.

As you might probably expect, you'll have yourself a few good singers, some human interest story-pieces that tug at your heart-strings, but also some very interesting characters.

Sometimes you get all three- easily one of my favorites for American Idol season 7 is Kristy Lee Cook.

Did you catch her bio? She wrestles and trains for cage-fighting- which means she can literally kick my ass (or anybody else's for that matter). She lives in a log cabin surrounded by pine trees and raises horses in here spare time. She's darned cute. And she sings well. Well enough, at the very least, to move to the Hollywood round.

A quick Google search has brought me to an old website that was promoting her CD back in 2005. Interesting. It would be nice to hear (and see!) some more of her.

Here's something we got from that old website, CDBaby.com...

Kristy's music idols are Martina, Faith and Shania (do we really need last names). She also loves the music of Garth Brooks and Gary Allen. Kristy has her own unique sound and style, which will be easily recognizable.

At 5'8", Kristy Lee looks like a blonde, blue-eyed Brook Shields, has an incredible voice and is the wholesome, All-American 'girl next door'. The entertainment world is in for a treat! Here's the REAL American Idol!!!