Sarah Anne Lloyd, 2012.

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After weeks of scouring Seattle for the best take-out options to pair with television's best and brightest (and Pan Am), TV Dinner is calling it quits for the foreseeable future. The last featured television show was never in question, with HBO's critically acclaimed black comedy/one of my most favorite things in the world Eastbound and Down beginning its final season this Sunday. The question then became which restaurant could possibly carry the jock of one of the most bleak, yet manic comedies to come onto American airwaves for TV Dinner's last hurrah: would it be the Mariner-friendly Pyramid Alehouse? The also soon-to-finished Le Gourmand? The insufferably pun-enabling Facing East?

In a sudden flash of inspiration, I began to lament how I could have even contemplated other alternatives: it had to be Dick's Drive-In.

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Although 30 Rock provides a veritable swarm of options to continue the noble TV Dinner pairing tradition of just choosing whatever restaurant has a remotely similar name, I felt like show protagonist Liz Lemon's insatiable lust for sandwiches (thankfully) superseded any notion of having to eat at Rock Bottom. Therefore, this week's attention was turned instead to Fremont's own reigning meat and bread champion, Royal Grinders.

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Last week, TV Dinner featured a new show that didn't quite manage to dazzle in its early stages, but it wasn't to give the impression this column has sunk into some kind of fortress of TV luddism or that there genuinely aren't any promising new shows debuting this season. On the contrary, shows like Luck or Smash, NBC's (next) answer to Glee, are positively tearing their way through the hype rounds. Besides these two monosyllabic founts of potential, Showtime's House of Lies has also stepped up to the plate in style with a fantastic cast, a fresh concept and snappy dialogue. To be paired with the management consultant drama is yet another jewel in the International District's crown as top neighborhood for Chinese take-out in Seattle: House of Hong.

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Sarah Anne Lloyd, 2011.

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Here at TV Dinner, there is a conscious effort made to not only feature shows that are immediately relevant, but also to stray away from shows that look like they're going to collapse within the month. With scant exceptions, TV Dinner has strived to only look at shows that at least have a fighting chance into any lasting form of relevancy besides Highest Concept Mess of the Year. It's why I refused to look at shows like Work It or The Playboy Club, as obnoxiously satisfying as it'd be to pair either with Cowgirls Inc., these are shows that seem so singularly engineered towards failure that suspicions of elaborate tax fraud start to arise. That said, this week will take a look at the puzzling new FOX drama Alcatraz, which seems pretty thoroughly doomed from the beginning: but at least a special kind of doomed. It's the kind of failure that, given the right perspective, makes you appreciate the things that don't leave you with a tasteless, bloated feeling of disappointment -- for example, a spicy bowl of noodles from vegetarian Thai oasis In The Bowl.

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After a grueling TV-less holiday assuredly filled with human interaction, home cooking, and other domestic terrors, the entertainment business has welcomed us back into its warm, corporate-sponsored bosom for another fertile crop of watchable television. While there's no shortage of promising series premieres rolling out over the month of January, TV Dinner has decided to kick off 2012 with celebrating the second season of hipster catnip Portlandia, the sketch comedy show driven by Saturday Night Live cast member Fred Armisen and former Sleater-Kinney/current Wild Flag guitarist Carrie Brownstein. To pair with the cutting-edge comedy, we'll be taking a look at budding take-out titans Marination Mobile, who have only recently settled into their Capitol Hill brick-and-mortar, Marination Station.

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While languishing in a media atmosphere apparently devoid of any relevant or exciting television programming for weeks on end, TV Dinner has to apologize for completely looking over the few gems offered by the recent "Watch Other People Do Their Jobs" phenomenon that seems (hopefully) to have come to full fruition this year. You don't have to worry about hearing about the hundred mildly different spinoffs of Storage Wars or Auction Hunters or Bullshit No One Needs Round-Up here, but charming former pitchman Mike Rowe's long-enduring illuminations on society's most seemingly unbearable professions are definitely worth talking about. To pair with Dirty Jobs, I chose The Honey Hole, a small, utilitarian sandwich shop jampacked with charisma and given a name that definitely rivals Rowe's show as "Single Easiest Intellectual Property To Make a Porn Parody Out Of."

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Sarah Anne Lloyd, 2011.

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Last week, TV Dinner huddled up for warmth in the icy television oblivion of the holiday season with a thick gaudy blanket of indolent listmaking. With that out of the way, things seemed pretty grim in terms of coming up with any other relevant distractions, and the column was teetering dangerously close to actually having to cover last night's A Michael Bublé Christmas.

However, just in the nick of time, as if in penance for cancelling critical darlings Bored to Death and Hung earlier this week, HBO decided to throw us a warm parting shot in the form of an early premiere for its new David Milch-helmed horseracing drama, Luck, over a month before the season officially begins on January 29th. On account of Emerald Downs not being the first place that comes to mind when it comes to delicious, accessible take-out, as well as my insufferable need to make the absolute least thoughtful puns on this website, Luck will be paired with Belltown greasy spoon, The Lucky Diner.

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James Lee, 2010.

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It's most definitely still December. That means two things for certain when it comes to pop culture: there isn't a whole lot to watch on television, and you've probably been reading a lot of yawn-worthy, boilerplate "Best of 2011" lists lately. After this week's dramatic finale to Boardwalk Empire dropped my jaw, blew my mind and kicked my gawking ass through a window, I simply couldn't bring myself to sit down and dredge my way through Person of Interest or I Hate My Teenage Daughter or whatever crap the networks forgot to turn off before they went on winter vacation. Therefore, this week's TV Dinner will switch things up just this once in order to take a long, pleased look at the forces for sloth that reigned most triumphant in our fair city this year and celebrate them the best way we know how -- while sitting in front of a computer.

1. The Rise of Eat24Hours
If you live in Seattle, love eating food but hate talking to human beings, 2011 was a really good year for you -- and it was probably thanks mostly to Eat24Hours. Although the website itself was founded back in 2008, the online food ordering liason's scope positively exploded within Seattle this year, adding local favorites like Mae Phim Thai, franchise players like Quizno's or convenience-heavy delis like Deli Shez to their growing stable of restaurants.

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Sarah Anne Lloyd, 2011.

​As December ambles on and we wander through the grey, snowless cold without a whole lot of television to help snap us out of our collective lethargy, TV Dinner is here to melt away your winter woes with intriguing programming and convenient local eats. This week, TV Dinner will be looking at IFC's Onion News Network, the television show spawned by the immensely popular weekly satirical newspaper, alongside Italian food from Padrino's Pizza and Pasta.

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This is what it looks like When Tigers Cry... So, pretty underwhelming.

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As we carry on merrily into December, most watchable television has pretty much decided that it's going to treat itself to a holiday break after a sweeps month jam-packed with cliffhangers and celebrity cameos. 2012 may bring quality premieres like the final season of HBO's infinitely quotable Eastbound and Down as well as the rest of the third season of FX's Archer (featuring Burt Reynolds!), but until then we'll all just have to endure this frozen hell of reruns and new episodes of Hoarders. Since I have no intention of ever writing about Hoarders for any reason, this week's TV Dinner will reanimate AMC's thrilling mid-season finale of The Walking Dead that aired this Sunday, alongside drunken noodles and crying tigers from Downtown Seattle's Citrus Thai.

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