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TV Tonight: Canterbury's Stale

The long legs of the law. / Miranda Penn Turin/FOX Julianna Margulies returns to series TV tonight in Fox’s Canterbury’s Law (is it just me or does that title sound Canadian?), a legal series that you might call Damages times Rescue Me minus the good writing. From my review-blurb in this week’s Time: The season [...]

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Corporate Press Release Theater: L Is for Leaving

Showtime announced today that The L Word will end after its sixth season. I gave the show a few chances its first couple of seasons, but I never thought its writing and characters lived up to its ambitions (or maybe I just thought its ambitions were greater than they actually were). But I’ve known a [...]

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SNL: 3 A.M., No Pillow

The media has apparently stopped picking on Hillary Clinton enough for Saturday Night Live’s liking, because this weekend’s cold-open skit opted instead for a parody of Hillary’s 3 A.M. ad, showing a new President Obama flummoxed by a nuclear crisis and the White House furnace: Where the previous two debate skits were solidly pro-Hillary, or [...]

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The Return of My Annoying Voice

Expanding further on the Poniewozik public-radio empire, I was a guest this weekend on NPR’s On the Media, talking about the cultural importance of Dungeons & Dragons and holding forth on my own junior-high-era dorkosity: A correction, by the way. During the interview, Bob Garfield asked me to recall a character I played from my [...]

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Wire Watch: The Body of an American

The Wire catches its last murder. / HBO photo: Nicole Rivelli SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this, crack open a tub of cottage cheese for lunch and watch the last episode ever of The Wire. What is closure, anyway? People complained that The Sopranos didn’t give it, but its abrupt ending gave closure better than [...]