In 2001, Trey Parker and Matt Stone created That’s My Bush!, a relatively mild sitcom about the new President, and cultural critics everywhere took notice. Was it disrespectful? Could this be good for a nation still divided over the election recount? Six years later, Comedy Central is debuting Lil’ Bush: Resident of the United States, [...]

ABC: BOB D’AMICO Test Pilot is a semiregular feature this summer sharing my first impressions of the pilots for next fall’s shows. These aren’t reviews, since these pilots can be rewritten, recast and retooled before airing, and the shows that eventually get on the air can prove much better or worse. But, premature opinions are [...]

This week’s endless arguments about The Sopranos reminded me of a question I’d been thinking about lately: Is it possible for a show to have a finale so bad–or for that matter, several seasons so bad–that they retroactively destroy your perception of the show’s overall greatness? TV shows, unlike movies, are fluid things: your opinion [...]

HBO Everyone thinks of Big Love as a show about a guy with three wives. They forget that it’s also a show about three women who have two wives and a husband. By their belief system–shared more deeply by some of them than others–Barb, Marge and Nicki are as much married to one another as [...]

Because too much discussion of The Sopranos finale is never enough, we’re turning over this space this morning to LA Times columnist and TIME contributor Joel Stein for a Special Guest Post about the big finish. (We’ll offer equal time to Charles Krauthammer just as soon as he sends us something.) Take it away, Joel: [...]

…at least for today. Tonight is the return of Big Love, a favorite HBO drama that has gotten a raw deal from critics who relegate it to also-ran status. Another TV critic–I think it was Salon’s Heather Havrilesky–once argued that Six Feet Under got short-shrifted as too “soap-opera,” which is to say, code for “too [...]

The review copies of John from Cincinnati I got from HBO had no opening credits or music. So last night, after the great blackout of ’07, I watched them for the first time, like you did once we all stopped screaming at our TVs. I don’t have anything to change about my mixed-to-disappointed review. (About [...]

SPOILER ALERT: Do I really have to warn you? HBO photo: Craig Blankenhorn So let’s cut to the (David) chase. I thought the ending was beautiful. Judging from the comments already pouring into the Television Without Pity forums (and my neighbors screaming curses into their Brooklyn backyards at 10:01 last night), you didn’t. Consider this [...]

Sean, Butchie and John hit the beach. / HBO photo: John P. Johnson This week in TIME, I also review John from Cincinnati on HBO (scroll down). Bottom line: don’t get your hopes up. But even if this David Milch series doesn’t live up to Deadwood, it’s rich and intelligent enough that it isn’t really [...]

My Culture Complex in the print TIME is a little redundant for readers of this blog, as it’s about the court decision overruling the FCC on “fleeting expletives,” which we already chewed over on Tuesday. My magazine column, though, focuses more on the irony of Bush and Cheney, who came to office on the shoulders [...]

Late in last week’s Lost summer seminar thread, Chaddogg put forth a plausible, and kinda creepy, season-4 opening scenario: I really think the opening of Season 4 will be upon Naomi’s ship, and probably in the “captain’s” office/room. He’ll be seen (his body, that is, not his face) pouring himself a whiskey (maybe the same [...]

It’s official: Jericho has been resurrected by CBS, seven episodes for next season. Says this afternoon’s memo from Nina Tassler (read the whole thing at the CBS Jericho board, and thanks for the link, Becca): To the Fans of Jericho: Wow! Over the past few weeks you have put forth an impressive and probably unprecedented [...]

Regular readers of this blog know that Tuned In Jr. and Tuned In Jr. Jr.–like the good alternaparent progeny they are–are fans of They Might Be Giants, and that we have a regular ritual of cruising for TMBG videos on YouTube. In the course of surfing, we’ve come across a strange genre: the burgeoning field [...]

Excuse the hed, but we’re all about search-engine optimization here, and apparently mentioning “Jericho” is all you have to do to get a rush of traffic to a TV blog. The news: The LA Times gets confirmation of the Jericho-resurrection talks from the producer. The bad news: The deal would be for only eight episodes [...]

CBS This is the first installment of Test Pilot, a semiregular feature this summer sharing my first impressions of the pilots for next fall’s shows. These aren’t reviews, since these pilots can be rewritten, recast and retooled before airing, and the shows that eventually get on the air can prove much better or worse. But, [...]

TV Week is reporting what would be a stunning turnaround if it pans out: Jericho may be un-cancelled after all. Fans of the show, infuriated by the postapocalyptic serial’s cancellation in mid-cliffhanger, have bombarded CBS with complaints, as well as box after box of peanuts, in order to persuade the broadcaster to bring their show [...]

I’m on deadline for the print TIME today–busily cutting down tiny little trees and fashioning them into words for the magazine–but I wanted to point you to yesterday’s appeals court decision striking down FCC indecency fines, which is a potentially huge step in reversing the FCC’s post-Janet indecency campaign. While the case specifically challenged “fleeting” [...]

Interesting item in today’s New York Times about a small but telling change at the Museum of Television and Radio: it is no longer a museum, much less one of television and radio. Beginning today, the midtown Manhattan institution is being rechristened as The Paley Center for Media. You can quibble with the new name, [...]

Photo: Aardman Animations Ltd. I have no idea. But I already have watched the screener for CBS’s Creature Comforts (8 p.m. E.T.), and you could do a lot worse with a summer half-hour. Based on a British series that was in turn based on a short film by Nick Park (Wallace and Gromit), the show [...]