”Top Model”: It’s no secret — the acting stinks A quick point of interest: When I woke up this morning I was in Scotland. Consequently, I hope you’ll pardon any lack of coherence within this recap, and know that if someone were to ask me to talk about deodorant in Catalan right now, it would not be pretty. That’s right: For the first time in TV Watch history, Whitney is experiencing what could best be called empathy.

Image Credit: Everett Collection; Kobal Collection; Everett Collection(3) In Rango, Johnny Depp voices a pet lizard who fancies himself an actor, only to find himself lost in the desert and drawing fire from the hardscrabble local critters with his tough-guy act. The comedy draws on Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns and Sam Peckinpah shoot-’em’ups for inspiration, but the film shout-outs don’t stop there. Director Gore Verbinski, who worked with Depp on the previous three Pirates of the Caribbean movies says Rango is kind of a “film within a film,” packed full of movie references because Rango is such a storytelling buff and sees everything through that lens.

The book is The Lager Queen of Minnesota, but this release could cement J. Ryan Stradal as the King of Midwestern novels. The author, who resides in Los Angeles but hails from hearty Minnesota stock, first made waves with his beloved Kitchens of the Great Midwest, a beautiful family novel that followed cooking habits through generations. There are similarities in Lager Queen (complex female characters, tragedies, and descriptions that will awaken all your senses), but this time the family’s legacy is rooted in beer, not casseroles.

J.K. Rowling is returning to the wizarding world to focus on one of Harry Potter's most twisted foes. According to a press release, J.K. Rowling will publish a 1,700-word piece of new writing on Pottermore next week. The work will center on Potter nemesis Dolores Umbridge, who was played by Imelda Staunton in the Potter films. The former Hogwarts professor was one of Harry's cruelest enemies; she was sentenced to life in Azkaban for her sadistic crusade to persecute Muggle-borns.

It's been almost 12 years since J.K. Rowling first declared that Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, Hogwarts headmaster and half-moon-spectacle enthusiast, was gay. TheHarry Potter author made headlines in October 2007—just a few weeks after the series' final book, Deathly Hallows, was published—by revealing that the white-haired wizard had, as a teenager, had fallen in love with his friend-turned-rival Gellert Grindelwald. At the time, Rowling's declaration was met with a mixed response: Some hailed Dumbledore as a triumph for LGBT representation, a major gay character in one of the most influential children's series of all time.

Thanks to six blockbuster movies from Peter Jackson, Middle-Earth is now one of the most recognizable fantasy landscapes ever, but it wasn’t always that way. The Lord of the Rings was first published in 1955, but it took until 1969 before the book was ever illustrated. Author J.R.R. Tolkien commissioned artist Pauline Baynes to create the first-ever illustrated map of Middle-Earth. To make sure she got it right, Tolkien himself annotated the map with all kinds of helpful geographic information (Minis Tirith is about the same latitude as Ravenna, for instance).

Dwight Schrute, by way of Rainn Wilson, always wanted to be an agent for the C.I.A. Now he’s facing down the C.I.A. as a new breed of terrorist in an alternate reality where Amazon’s Jack Ryan series crosses over with NBC’s The Office. Funny or Die put together this new mash-up video that fuses the two shows together, setting up a cat-and-mouse game with Dwight and John Krasinski‘s Jack Ryan. The result is Tom Clancy’s Jim Ryan, and paper company Dunder Mufflin is the war zone.

Here are two Jackie Collins books combined to form a romance-novel version of The Godfather. Nicollette Sheridan (Knots Landing) stars as Lucky, the ambitious daughter of an ambitious hood (Vincent Irizarry). Over three nights and six hours covering roughly half a century, Lucky grows from a randy teenager (Sheridan in a weird, down-to-her-backside, Crystal Gayle-style wig) into the imperious boss of an Atlantic City casino (Sheridan with normal hair in gowns slit up to her hip).

How do you celebrate your birthday if you’re Bruce Springsteen? By jumping on stage with pal Jackson Browne, apparently. Tuesday, the day before the Boss turned 66, he attended Browne’s show at Red Bank’s Count Basie Theatre in his home state, New Jersey. Though Springsteen watched most of the performance from the crowd, he joined Browne on stage and together they performed a 12-minute version of “Take It Easy,” which Browne co-wrote with The Eagles’ Glenn Frey in 1972.

One viewer who wasn’t charmed by TBS Superstation’s movie ”America’s Prince: The John F. Kennedy Jr. Story” was Jackson Browne. The singer/songwriter, who used to date ”Splash” star Daryl Hannah, objected to the movie’s insinuation that he assaulted her during their breakup, after which Kennedy came to her rescue. On Wednesday, the Associated Press reports, Browne’s attorney demanded that TBS pull the movie from circulation and not air it again until the ”false and defamatory” scenes were deleted.