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 …
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TV Tonight: Sons of Anarchy Goes Back to Cali
The third season of Sons of Anarchy was, shall we say, divisive. The chief issue that divided fan from fan, critic from critic, and creator Kurt Sutter from people who criticized creator Kurt Sutter was the season’s long sojourn …
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TV Tonight: The Hour
AMC may have had a hell of a time figuring out whether to bring Mad Men back, for how much money and at what length, but other networks are not hesitating (despite the show’s relatively paltry ratings) to put their own versions of Mad Men on the air—or, at least, their own versions of social and personal drama set in a highly …
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TV Tonight 2: One Last Alarm Sounds for Rescue Me
Together with Damages, one more landmark cable drama returns this evening: Rescue Me, in which Denis Leary and Peter Tolan have confronted the aftermath of 9/11 with black comedy and/or comedic drama since 2004. I have mixed feelings about the series: for a couple of seasons it was a searing, fearless examination of loss and …
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TV Tonight: Torchwood: Miracle Day
I remember once watching a sketch* about an all-you-can-eat restaurant that hid a horrible secret: the diners were not allowed to eat all they wanted to, but rather forced to eat all they could physically hold. The premise of Torchwood: Miracle Day, the Americanization of the British Torchwood series that debuts tonight on Starz, is a …
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Louis CK Interview, Part 2: Money and Mortality
FX’s Louie, the dark-comic vision of Louis CK, returns for a second season tonight. (Also, the season-one DVD just came out; see above for a probably-NSFW deleted scene.) My feature on the comedian and the new season is in this week’s TIME magazine, and part one of the (lightly edited) transcript of our interview went up yesterday. …
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TV Tonight: Wilfred: Man's Best Frenemy
Full disclosure: I am a sucker for the man-befriends-nonhuman-creature genre of sitcoms. So when I first caught wind of Wilfred, an adaption of an Australian comedy about a man who sees his neighbor’s dog as a six-foot guy in a dog costume, my tail began wagging involuntarily. Maybe this would fill the Greg the Bunny-sized hole in my …
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TV Tonight: Men of a Certain Age
In my column last week on the “manxiety” trend in the new fall shows, I singled out TNT’s Men of a Certain Age as one example of a series taking a subtle, non-insulting look at what it means to be a man. Focusing on three guys pushing 50—played by Scott Bakula, Andre Braugher and Ray Romano—it focuses on the trio’s wrestling with …
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TV Tonight: The Voice
Tonight, NBC debuts The Voice, the American Idol knockoff from Mark Burnett. (Not to be confused with Burnett’s American Idol knockoff Rock Star.) The Voice, from the previews, is a singing competition, but it differs in its hook: the panel (Christina Aguilera, Cee Lo Green, Adam Levine and Blake Shelton) first rate singers with their …
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TV Tonight: Friday Night Lights' Last Season (Again)
If you didn’t watch it on DirecTV last year and earlier this year, or if you didn’t buy the already-available DVD set earlier this month, you can start watching the fifth and final season of Friday Night Lights via good-old-fashioned rabbit-ears broadcast TV tonight.
I absolutely loved the third season of FNL (its first on DirecTV) …
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TV Tonight: Reiser Falls
Paul Reiser is returning to NBC tonight, and with that I hereby pledge to make this the last time I will use the NBC “Make it 1997 again by science or magic” reference from 30 Rock. Frankly, though, the time period that The Paul Reiser Show made me think of first was not the mid-’90s glory days of hit sitcoms like Mad About You. It …
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TV Tonight: Parks and Rec Is Back!
TV’s reigning best sitcom, Parks and Recreation, returns tonight with the episode the rest of season 3 has been building toward: the Parks department attempts to pull off the Harvest Festival, on which its future depends. I don’t want to spoil much about what is the season’s best episode yet—and I know I just said that about “Media …
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TV Tonight: What Is the Birth of Skynet, Alex?
Tonight on Jeopardy, Watson, a computer programmed by IBM, will challenge the program’s two biggest human champions to see whether man or machine can dominate the field of recalling arcane facts about Potent Potables. Here’s an overview of how Watson and the competition will work; to understand the larger implications of artificial …
