When Will & Grace announced it was doing a live performance for its season opener, Americans shared the same reaction: "Damn it! Will & Grace is still on the air! I owe the guy in the next cubicle five bucks!" Which is pretty much what NBC was going for. In a few short years, Must-See [...]

It’s a long-debated question which the public hates more, lawyers or journalists. But people at least hate lawyers better. Whatever their contempt for the legal profession, TV viewers never get sick of watching legal dramas, whereas the recent history of TV shows about journalists is the history of failure. Ink ran dry. Lateline flatlined. Deadline? [...]

On TV, to paraphrase Jane Austen, a young man in possession of a new sitcom is generally considered to be in no need of a wife. Not so on How I Met Your Mother (Mondays, 8:30 p.m. E.T., CBS). On the face of it, Mother is a pretty conventional sitcom. There’s a laugh track; there’s [...]

It’s probably an exaggeration to say that you’re either a Lost person or a Desperate Housewives person—considering the ratings, plenty of people must watch both. But I’m definitely a Lost person, and to know why you need only watch the season  premieres of both shows. The Lost debut was excellent on a story level: it [...]

Between the success of NBC’s Medium (which just won Patricia Arquette a Best Actress Emmy) and tonight’s debut of CBS’s Ghost Whisperer, we have learned an important lesson about the dead: they can be a real pain. Always with the nudging! Always with the demanding! "Tell my wife I love her!" "Avenge my death!" "Help [...]

There’s been a lot written about the number of spooky, scary dramas on TV this season (For example, Fox debuts the gory cop show Killer Instinct tonight, while Jennifer Love Hewitt sees the dead on CBS’s Ghost Whisperer.) And what’s scarier, to those valuable 30-something female viewers, than a ticking biological clock? That’s the fear [...]

So our long national crisis of uncertainty is over. We know what Martha Stewart’s Apprentice catchphrase is. "You just don’t fit in," she told the first ejectee, before writing him a "farewell letter"—presumably on stationery for which she felled and pulped the trees herself. In most respects, Martha’s Apprentice is like Donald Trump’s: two teams [...]

E-Ring, NBC’s new drama about the Pentagon, debuts at 9 p.m. tonight. As it’s scheduled against ABC powerhouse Lost, there is every likelihood it will be canceled by 9:15. But it’s worth looking at, anyway, if only as a case study in how TV can take a fascinating subject and work really hard to make [...]

On America’s Next Top Model, Tyra Banks is distinguished from other reality hosts by her willingness to get personal and put it out there — talking to the aspiring catwalkers about her flaws, her weight problems, the racial issues of the fashion world. You might cynically think those weepy sister-to-sister sessions looked like practice for [...]

In last week’s TIME, I wrote about the two latest in a series of last-great-hopes-for-the-sitcom: UPN’s Everybody Hates Chris and NBC’s My Name is Earl, which debuts tonight at 9 p.m. You can read my praise for the funny, sweet-natured Earl there. But I have been thinking: people who follow the TV business, like me, [...]

Apparently there is a home-field advantage in awards shows; as CBS took its turn with the Emmys, “Everybody Loves Raymond” walked off with the Best Comedy award. I was rooting for “Arrested Development,” of course, but took a perverse satisfaction that “Desperate Housewives” got upset. The undeserving beaten by the really undeserving — that’s Emmy [...]

Not surprisingly, the Emmys gave a tribute to the three network news anchors who left the air this past year: Peter Jennings’ death more or less required it, and it would have looked rude to then omit Tom Brokaw. But that left Emmy in the position of having to retrospectively honor Dan Rather, who left [...]

Somewhere in the halls of the television academy, staffers are desperately trying to figure out how to continue giving the Best Comedy Supporting Actress Emmy to Doris Roberts even after “Everybody Loves Raymond” goes off the air. I suggest they consider making reruns in syndication eligible. It would be nice to see her face off [...]

The most ironically funny part of the Emmys, and in fact of any awards show, is the credits reels produced by the nominees for the Comedy and Variety Writing category. Ironic because the hilarious reels generally come in the middle of a laugh-challenged program that makes you think, if stars from throughout the business can [...]

So Emmy threw us a curve for Best Supporting Actor, Comedy. Well, kinda. Not that either of the most deserving actors won: Jeffrey Tambor of “Arrested Development” or, especially, Jeremy Piven of “Entourage.” But the more surprising of two less-deserving actors won: Brad Garrett rather than Peter Boyle of “Everybody Loves Raymond,” who noted loudly [...]