Cake Boss is a suspenseful, action-packed series, all about cake. Cake! White or dark filled, spongy or dense, gooey, nicely decorated cake. Will it make it to the city fete on time despite the impossible last minute change orders? Will the nitwit nephew Anthony drop the platter and be made to pay a heavy price? Sorry. It’s just cake.

Still, we care enough about the drama to make dirty ice and fondant household words. Humans who once cheered for Betty Crocker are throwing sophisticated cake designing parties with the works, competing for best decorations while impersonating dough boy icon, Buddy Valastro, who provides the sweet inspiration. He’s the boss! Yep, superman now wear a chef’s coat and a pompadour and wields a rolling pin. I guess Marie Antoinette was onto something. The people won’t have as much fun with bread.

And so, the phenomenon has taken the boutique cake concept a step further to transmogrify the tiered and frosted celebratory dessert into interactive iced sculpture. After all, it starts with an artist’s sketch, just like real art, and ends with a cavity and a pound or two.

But no matter how you slice it, the short-lived presentation (a band of Italian men trotting into a 50th anniversary with a giant cake shaped like an accordion) is followed by mounds of waste (big sob), not to mention what goes into the super size daily batter: vats of eggs, pounds of butter and countless bags of sugar.

The adorable host, who boasts that winning combo of artistic genius and serious addiction to chocolate, convinces us there is a great demand for the extravagant custom cakes he builds best. But we all know as reality shows go, there is an ultra fine line between reality and half-baked plots hatched by producers. Rod Serling called this middle place the Twilight Zone. Heidi Klum calls it Project Runway.

On Cake Boss, we’re led to believe customers demanded a colossal Roman Coliseum, a kitschy and slimy aquarium, a vast USA train town and an upscale botanical garden. When delivered, the truly masterful creations had recipients dizzy headed with delight, drooling like mad Pit Bulls over a delicious Pug puppy.

Meantime, I’m done with the twenty questions. The edible train cars forged from something labeled cereal treats and human figures carved out of modeling chocolate don’t look like a food group to me. Seriously, would you swallow a giant sugar diamond Buddy carved for a man who proposed at Carlo’s Bakery via a custom cake? Didn’t his girlfriend think something was fishy in Hoboken when the bright camera lights hit her?

Alright, so we can agree much of the hit show is staged, and we can also admit the awesome cakes are not sustainable museum pieces (freezing the top of the wedding cake for a year doesn’t count).

I suppose you could argue Buddy’s job is to sell cakes and his customers must decide whether to donate leftovers to the needy – people who still appreciate Betty Crocker but won’t turn up their noses at a slab of red velvet cake, molded into a six-foot hero sub sandwich.

The good news from a desperate recession standpoint is the made-in-America cake biz is thriving (Buddy is getting set for a new book tour) while keeping a sizable kitchen crew of kin out of the unemployment lines. Hey, that’s what famiglia does!

The bad news is the white powdery substance being peddled by the Boss is considered the most harmful legal drug for the body. Just keep it under wraps, kids. If the other bosses in the hood find out, they may want to take over Carlo’s Bakery, and viewers who have witnessed Buddy’s  four older sisters in action, know it could get hella ugly. I’m not ready for the spin-off show, Cake Boss Wars. Are yooze?

Images: Derek Purdy

Just because your guilty pleasure is watching “The Bachelorette,” that doesn’t mean you must have your television sitting center stage in your living room the other six days of the week. Check out these five clever ways to disguise or outright hide your TV when it’s not in use.

Stashing the boob tube in the fireplace is a common approach when you want to make the TV disappear into the decor. Interior designer Kelly Giesen took the idea a step further and installed a faux fireplace around the television with the express purpose of using it to hide the box. A mirrored fireplace grate rests in front of the TV when not in use for an elegant look that ties together the whole room.

If you’ve got paneled walls, see if there’s any dead space behind it – say, underneath a staircase, for instance. If so, consider burrowing into the wall and creating a platform for television storage. Put the missing wood panels on hinges or sliders so they’ll stash out of the way for easy TV viewing.

If you’ve got room for an extra piece of furniture, have a look at these elegant media centers by Reversica. They’re specifically designed to look like cabinets and bookshelves, with a little James Bond magic behind the shelving. When you’re ready to watch TV, just spin the bookcase around 180 degrees to expose the set, then hide it again when you’re done.

Finally, two-way mirrors are good for something besides watching criminals be interrogated in jail. Several companies now manufacture special mirrors meant to be permanently mounted in front of TV screens that disappear once the set is turned on. This is a perfect look for televisions mounted over a fireplace shelving unit, or other wall space where a large mirror is a natural fit.

Show your appreciation of art by covering your TV with a painting when it’s not in use. For about seven grand, you can get your favorite still life imprinted on a screen that rolls up and down in front of the television – kind of like a window shade.

Image: Terren in Virginia

Green Acres was the place for me in the sixties, light years ahead of its time as a green comedy. A savvy businessman is fed up with the rat race of the concrete jungle, flees Park Place and whisks his dilettante wife to Hooterville to grow their own food, befriend local yokels like con man Mr. Haney and Arnold the pig and live a simpler, yet more abundant life. It was a hoot. Who in the Camelot era wanted to live with such sacrifices?

Years later, the earnest eco revolution has spawned a new brand of humor (it’s just that hip!) as we parody the seemingly all-consuming agenda, as in the Audi Green Police ad shown during the Super Bowl. It lampooned the campaign for reusable bags, keeping water consumption down and using low energy appliances. I thought it was poignant because we have gone to extremes at times with the monitoring of consumption. It takes extremes to save the planet, and if humor works, make em laugh!

In addition to the Audi ad, eco humor has seeped into various sitcom story lines and entertainment specials. Among my faves: Saturday Night Live’s Chewable Pampers (all great taste and no waste in eco-friendly containers); and F*ck The Earth Day with old coot Jack English: In the spoof ad for celebrating the day after Earth Day in April, he tells us to ignore the hippie alarmists and do what makes us feels good – like leaving the lights on, driving a hummer and pouring oil on a duck.

And then, there is the new breed of stand-up comics, finding unlimited material in the green lane.

Take Bob Hirschfeld, a self-described business satirist-turned eco satirist, who offers his Funny Green Business presentations at corporate conferences held by Forbes, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Cox Communication, Honda, and IBM to name a few.

Bob makes audiences laugh at the inconsistencies woven into the eco agenda pointing to well-intended solutions aimed at lowering our footprints. “I was at a bookstore where I got the book, 100 ways to Save the Planet,” he recalls. “Number one was buy less paper! So I returned the book.” He also takes harmless stabs at LED bulbs (how many dollars does it take to screw in a lightbulb?); the complexities of sorting plastics for recycling and the embarrassment of low-flow potties not really doing the job of flushing waste in just one flush – especially at dinner parties where your hosts question why you’re taking so long. You can watch his spiel here:

Convention Connection in Malibu, CA which books Bob and other acts, says it gets many requests for green speakers for events, and stand-up brand humor is an added bonus. “Any speaker or entertainer tries to look at the trends, and green is certainly in,” observes booking agent, Kiela Hine. “Humor for all times has tried to make light of things that are difficult and that is a good thing.”

Brings to mind the song Smile, Charlie Chaplin’s theme music for his last silent picture, Modern Times about a tramp struggling to live in modern industrialized society. The song asks, what’s the use of crying? If you light up your face with gladness, you will see the sun come shining through. If Chaplin only knew to what extent we have screwed the divine paradise we have been gifted. I can laugh about it here and there, Charlie. But it is hard to hide the sadness and just smile.

Images: Sitcoms Online, Edna Purviance

This week Green TV showed us two kinds of eco-disasters. An HBO drama tackled the environmental devastation in New Orleans and Planet Green exposed crimes against tigers.

“Treme” Shows Perseverance in the Face of Nature’s Fury

HBO’s New Orleans drama Treme may not seem like a straightforward choice for “I Want My Green TV.” But with everything that’s been going on in the Gulf with the BP Oil Spill, it’s hard not to think about the hardships the fine citizens of the Big Easy have endured over the last few years.

After all, the spill is not the first man made disaster to happen in New Orleans in 2005. Yes, Mother Nature sent Katrina but she didn’t build the insufficient levees. And there certainly are government agencies that could have chipped in then (and now) to help rebuild faster, more efficiently, and much more in tune with ongoing local environmental concerns – Brad Pitt and his Make it Right housing development aside.

Treme takes place in the aftermath of Katrina, and this week’s episode, “All on a Mardi Gras Day,” celebrated Fat Tuesday – almost six months to the day of the devastating hurricane. The show rode a lot of emotional ups and downs as characters embraced the spirit of the day while reconciling the recent devastation of their homes and families.

Every week, the series shows the delicate balance between the ugly truth of a city ravaged by environmental fury and the beauty of the healing power of human perseverance. As John Goodman’s character pointed out to his daughter, “It’s good to get out and see the destruction. It’s good. Get off the isle of denial every once in a while and be reminded how much of this city is still wrecked.”

Planet Green Doc Exposes Illegal Tiger Trade

This past weekend, Planet Green premiered the award-winning documentary, Dangerous Trade. In the hour-long film, a team of eco-crime investigators from the Environmental Investigation Agency (a sort modern day Green “Mod Squad”) investigate the seedy underworld of illegal tiger trades in China.

What they find is infuriating, horribly sad, and highly profitable. And there lies the reason why it doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. According to the doc, China is the largest consumer of tiger products for skins, taxidermy, and medicine. And apparently the military turns a blind eye to the issue for their own profit and political reasons.

Ironically, this is the Chinese Year of the Tiger and with three subspecies already extinct and only an estimated 3,100 of the glorious animals left in the world – yes, we said the world – ending the illegal tiger trade is more important than ever. This fall there will even be a Global Tiger Summit in Russia (who knew?!) to commit to taking action toward saving the tiger.

We’re guessing somewhere that Tony is screaming, “that’s grrrrrrreat!”

Tune in next time to see what’s cropping up on green TV.

Image: Tryburn