FOX
Tuned In+Review | 176 days ago

TV Tonight: I Hate My Teenage Daughter

By James Poniewozik

Let me use my own hack-y little joke to sum up the major problem with this pleasureless Fox comedy: it should be called We Hate Every Character on Our Own Sitcom

Tuned In
Tuned In+Review Television | 216 days ago

Starz’s Politics Drama Boss: Powerful But Messy, Just Like Its Subject

By James Poniewozik
Starz

The dramatic grimness comes quick and often in Starz’s new show starring Kelsey Grammer as a Chicago Mayor

Tuned In
Tuned In+Tuned In | 246 days ago

ABC’s Revenge: Are You Ready for Some Class Warfare?

By James Poniewozik
ABC

Earlier this week, President Obama put forward a deficit-reduction plan that, pointedly, involved raising taxes and closing loopholes for the wealthiest Americans. Republicans, as they often have when facing a proposal that picks on the richest, widely labeled the Obama plan “class warfare.” I’m interested to see how this argument plays out politically, because I [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Tuned In | 248 days ago

TV Tonight: 2 Broke Girls, Playboy Club

By James Poniewozik
Playboy_HORIZ

Tonight brings the debuts of two network premieres, CBS’s 2 Broke Girls and NBC’s The Playboy Club, which I covered in my roundup in this week’s TIME of series focusing on female characters. It’s a busy season, and neither pilot has changed from their original versions in ways that would significantly shake my preview Test [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Tuned In | 253 days ago

TV Tonight: Up All Night, Free Agents

By James Poniewozik
NBC

Reviewing a new TV series can be part detective work and part psychic reading. You try to not only judge the finished pilot you’re looking at, but get a sense of where it’s come from (the history of its talent or influences, any source material), intuit where it’s heading next (from the performances, the writing/direction [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Tuned In | 254 days ago

TV Tonight: Ringer

By James Poniewozik
CW

When I previewed the pilot of The CW’s twin-noir thriller Ringer earlier this summer, I wanted to be charitable. Partly because, like many of you, I suspect, I loved Sarah Michelle Gellar in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But also because the pilot seemed more technically rough than most—a lot of awkward greenscreen and splitscreen effects [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 356 days ago

TV Weekend: Teen Wolf

By James Poniewozik

Say what you will about what MTV: it is a channel that has always known what it is, even if “what it is” changes every three years or so. In its early years, there was a distinct idea of what an MTV video looked like. There was, with Beavis and Butt-Head and Daria and experiments [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 665 days ago

See It Now: The Big C

By James Poniewozik

When I began watching the first three episodes Showtime sent of The Big C, debuting August 16, I was struck by how thoroughly that network has defined what “a Showtime comedy” is. For starters it’s around 50% drama. There’s a blend of mordant humor, sex, a well-known female lead, a glossy, often suburban setting that [...]

+TV Networks | 696 days ago

David is Now Goliath: Entourage's Urgent Quest to Remain Relevant

By Steven James Snyder

Entourage returned Sunday night – a fact that, in previous years, would have been cause for jubilation around my house. But over the last few seasons, what used to be a witty, cutting, edgy observational drama about four young friends navigating the halls of Hollywood power has instead become a sort of male-oriented Sex and [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 967 days ago

TV Tonight: Hank and The Middle

By James Poniewozik

Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton both starred in long-lasting hit comedies in the 1990s (Frasier and Everybody Loves Raymond). On Fox’s short-lived Back to You, they teamed up as news anchors, forming a kind of sitcom-star supergroup. Now they’re debuting back-to-back sitcoms on ABC, a symmetry that demands comparison. When two sitcoms stars once united [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 969 days ago

TV Tonight: Trauma

By James Poniewozik

The first few minutes of Trauma, the paramedic drama that debuts tonight on NBC, seems determined to show where the network put some of that money it’s saving with The Jay Leno Show. Depicting a crisis/rescue/disaster on a rooftop high above San Francisco, it starts with a guy getting fried in an electrical accident and [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 973 days ago

TV Tonight: Can FlashForward Get Lost?

By James Poniewozik

When I pot post my Test Pilot first impressions of new shows over the summer, I make the point of stressing that they’re not reviews, because the pilots can be reworked before they’ve aired. That’s not a lie, but in the case of ABC’s FlashForward, the for-air pilot hasn’t changed from what I saw in [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 974 days ago

TV Tonight: Cougar Town

By James Poniewozik

Tonight ABC debuts Cougar Town, a comedy based on the media trend of older women hooking up with younger men. Building a show around the concept of “cougars” is a bold, farsighted move that guarantees the show will remain timely and relevant for years. I hereby predict that Cougar Town will have the staying power [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 974 days ago

TV Tonight: The Good Wife

By James Poniewozik

The first scene of The Good Wife (debuts tonight, CBS, 10 p.m. E.T.) is something you’ve seen before: Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) stands stock-still next to her husband Peter (Chris Noth) as he’s resigning the office of state’s attorney in a sex and influence-peddling scandal. The next scene includes something you haven’t seen, but probably [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 976 days ago

TV Tonight: House of Pain

By James Poniewozik

By Nielsen’s calendar it’s the first official night of the 2009–10 season (oh, typing that “10″ makes me feel old). Which means a deluge of season and series premieres and no more freebies for Jay Leno. Among tonight’s highlights—or, well, at least lights, high or otherwise: * I enjoy House but never developed a regular [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Television | 979 days ago

TV Weekend: Private Eye-rony; Also, Curb’s Return

By James Poniewozik

It’s a tricky Sunday coming up for fans of finer television everywhere. The Emmys (hosted by the suddenly ubiquitous Neil Patrick Harris) are on that night. Mad Men, refusing to take a breather even for its likely slew of awards, airs an original episode. And HBO debuts a strong new comedy—Bored to Death—while Curb Your [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 979 days ago

Archer's Secret (Agent) Debut

By James Poniewozik

It’s not often that I get a PR pitch from a network asking me not to write about a new show it’s debuting. But last week FX wrote to say that it was sneak-peeking the first episode of its animated spy comedy Archer (starring the voices of H. Jon Benjamin, Aisha Tyler and Jessica Walter), [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 979 days ago

Dead Tree Alert II: Modern Family

By James Poniewozik

My other piece in this week’s TIME is a review of ABC’s Modern Family, which is neck-and-neck-and-neck with Community and Bored to Death (about which a little more later) for my favorite new show of the fall. (You notice a trend? As much as people constantly cry the death of the sitcom, this has been [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 981 days ago

Community: Chevy Chase Is On Fire

By James Poniewozik

I get to the set of NBC’s Community a little bit before sunset, the night they are going to set Chevy Chase on fire. The new comedy—about a misfit study group at a community college—does its location shooting on a real campus in Koreatown. Tonight, they’re shooting some nighttime shots for the second episode (the [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 982 days ago

Jay Leno: It's Not the Tonight Show. It's, Um, the Ten-ight Show

By James Poniewozik

The Jay Leno Show, NBC has been telling us all summer, was “comedy at 10,” not simply a second Tonight Show. Instead, what we got was a monologue, a couple taped comedy bits, an interview, a musical act, another interview and Headlines. Somebody refresh my memory: what was The Tonight Show again? Because clearly I [...]