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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 …
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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 habit, …
Tuned InTelevision
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 …
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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), and requested that critics not mention the …
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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 a very, very good year for …
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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 first one they …
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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? …
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What’s the best yardstick by which to fairly judge the CW’s new remake of Melrose Place? The 1990s original? Last year’s remake of 90210? The CW’s other stable of soaps and teen dramas? (Please don’t say actual good television. I mean, we’re talking Melrose Place here.)
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Last night, Fox debuted More to Love, the dating show in which a plus-sized man sought a date from a bevy of plus-sized beauties. Like many reality shows, its premise scandalized some people before the show even aired; as in many such instances, the reality was much more tame. More to Love does not seem to be interested in making fun of …
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Maureen Ryan passes along the announcement from SyFy that the Battlestar Galactica prequel, Caprica, will debut on Jan. 22, 2010. (God, just typing “2010″ looks like science fiction.) The two-hour pilot will air at 9 p.m. E.T., then the show will move into BSG’s 10 p.m. timeslot.
Or you can watch the pilot now—since it was released …
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The first thing a TV critic notices watching the post-apocalyptic-scenario reality show The Colony (debuts tonight on Discovery) is how little use there is for TV criticism in a postapocalyptic scenario. The series, which throws together 10 people to survive holed up in a warehouse after a simulated epidemic has destroyed civilization, …
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While NBC debated whether to cut into Sharon Osbourne’s screen time on America’s Got Talent to air a Presidential press conference, it did have no trouble last night airing the embarrassing “news” program The Wanted. The series’ premise: a journalist and several counterterrorism and war-crimes experts seek out accused terrorists and …
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Last night saw a couple summer-TV debuts I didn’t get around to reviewing. We had the Jerry Bruckheimer drama Dark Blue, with the ever-loud Dylan McDermott, in which TNT strove to break the stereotypes established by FX and AMC and boldly prove that a cable network can make a cop show just as formulaic as anything the big networks can …
