The ever-vigilant Parents’ Television Council today registered its disgust with the maybe-rape scene in last week’s Rescue Me. From the press release: “News Corp. and FX have stooped to a new low by airing this highly offensive and sickening episode of Rescue Me.  Is this what FX considers to be entertainment – that rape is [...]

Every once in a while, even the omniscient, panopticon-like gaze of The Professional Television Watcher misses something. Last year, for instance, I didn’t review FX’s It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, which lacuna, being the standup guy that I am, I will blame on the fact that the early episodes were not that great. But as [...]

No sooner had Rosie O’Donnell been named to replace Meredith Vieira on The View then we started licking our chops in anticipation of the showdown: Rosie vs. Star Jones Reynolds, whose almost-instantaneous weight loss these past few months Rosie had charged publicly was the result of secret gastric-bypass surgery. We started counting the days until [...]

Last Tuesday, the antihero of Rescue Me may have gotten a little too anti for a lot of the show’s viewers. Firefighter Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary), arguing with his estranged wife (who is now dating his brother) over dividing their assets, hits her, throws her down on a couch, tears her clothes open, then—this is [...]

CRAIG FUJII/AP FILEAaron Spelling poses with the actresses from Charlie’s Angels in 1992 TV producer Aaron Spelling, who died Friday at age 83 of complications from a stroke, spent his adult life reaping the rewards of, and the punishments for, knowing exactly what people want. He produced more than 3,000 hours of TV—a world record—only [...]

Like the accidentally-frozen pizza-delivery guy who is its hero, Futurama has been revived in another era by technology. Only in this case, the technology is DVD and cable, not cryogenics. The undersung Matt Groening cartoon, cancelled by Fox in 2003, will air 13 new episodes on Comedy Central starting in 2008, after having enjoyed healthy [...]

Say this for Connie Chung: She has made any future TV network think twice about cancelling her shows. What MSNBC got for killing her minimally-rated talk show with husband Maury Povich, "Weekends with Maury and Connie," was nearly three minutes of Lynchian weirdness as the former CBS and CNN anchor stood on a grand piano [...]

I’ve bragged on this blog before about having the worst television set of any TV critic in America: a clunky 20-incher that dates back to the first Bush administration (41, not 43). Well, I’ve lost my bragging rights: I recently broke my home-electronics piggybank and became the owner of my first almost-big-screen plasma TV. (It’s [...]

CBS made it official today, announcing that Dan Rather is leaving the network for good after 44 years. The news was not a big surprise. Rather stepped down from the anchor chair last year, after the Memogate scandal, over a report based on suspect documents (which may or may not have been authentic) about President [...]

Yesterday I ran into my time.com colleague Tony Karon, who hails from one of the regions of the world where they play football with their feet, and he asked what I was planning on blogging about the coverage of the World Cup. My answer–nothing. For a simple reason: I don’t watch it. There. I said [...]

Because Time Inc. reader surveys indicate the most-read blog posts are those which detail what a TV critic got in the mail that day, allow me to share: I finally got ABC’s fall-pilot mailing. Good? Bad? We shall see, but ABC runs away with the prize for Most Threatening Legal Warning of the 2006-07 season: [...]

Call me an idiot, call me naive, but perhaps alone among TV critics, I actually expected Tuesday Night Book Club would be good. The CBS reality series, which debuted last night, follows a set of Arizona housewives as they work out problems in their families and love lives and dish about them over cocktails and [...]

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been getting DVD mailers of the broadcast networks’ new fall-series pilots. When ABC arrives, this week, I’ll have the full set of fall previews. Movie critics have the film-festival circuit. (Cannes! Venice! Toronto!) TV critics have the delivery guy. (DHL! UPS! FedEx!) You’d think that this would provide a [...]

Tonight, NBC debuts Windfall, a drama about a group of friends and strangers whose lives change after they split a $386 million winning lottery ticket. It’s an interesting premise–marriages are threatened, families feud, claims are challenged–and though it’s a little tepid and slow I might review it at more length in the regular season. Here, [...]

Fans of HBO’s Shakespeare-with-Tourette’s Western have reason to rejoice, or at least to mourn a little less: Deadwood will not be fed to the pigs after the season 3, which starts Sunday. Not exactly. After weeks of confusion, in which the network seemed ready to let one of its highest-rated and most-praised remaining dramas die [...]