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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 …
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Justified returns tonight on FX. I’ve seen three episodes. I wrote a very brief review in this week’s TIME. I had plans to expand on that later. Best-laid plans, &c. Breaking news. Personal matters. Dog ate it. Volcano eruption. I shall gladly pay you on Tuesday, &c.
Anyway, Justified is back tonight. If you liked it last season, …
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Tonight, the lights go out in East Dillon, as DirecTV airs the last episode ever of one of the past decade’s greatest TV series, Friday Night Lights. Rather than re-invent the wheel, here’s another link, in case you missed it, to my farewell column last week, in which I wrote about …
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In Showtime’s comedy Episodes, a pair of British sitcom producers have lunch with Matt LeBlanc, who’s considering starring in a remake of their comedy about a headmaster at a boys’ school. LeBlanc notes that it sounds like The History Boys, and the more the couple try to explain the differences, the more it does in fact sound like that …
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Ideally, TV critics should judge new shows without regard to whether they run on cable or broadcast TV. In practice, our insider-y knowledge of the differences and the tensions between the two creeps in. Arguably, some cable shows get a pass for recurrent themes—the brooding antihero, &c.—that are every bit as much as overused as …
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Throughout its second season, Community has weekly redefined what its half-hour comedy can look like: there was a Christmas stop-motion episode, an Apollo 13 parody, a study-group mystery involving a stolen pencil and an honest-to-God zombie episode. Tonight, the show plays—literally—with its structure again by constructing an entire …
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As a critic, there are screeners I watch out of obligation, screeners I watch studiously and screeners I gobble up immediately upon getting them, like a starving man gorging himself on chocolates. FX’s Archer is in the last category, a hilarious animated spy parody (with voice talent including …
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What are you doing tonight? You are watching the best comedy on television, Parks and Recreation, as it finally returns to NBC after eight months off the air. (The rest of NBC’s new three-hour sitcom schedule—Comedy Night Frequently Done Right, Sometimes Not So Much, But What’re You Gonna …
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Say what you like about David E. Kelley’s body of work—and I’ve said enough over the years—I have to at least give him credit for basing a career on trying to upend our expectations of TV. But his new NBC drama, Harry’s Law, forces the question: when the way a particular writer “subverts” our expectations becomes the expectation …
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Do you like Grey’s Anatomy, but wish that the doctors’ private crises and personal issues were analogized to Third World suffering? Then you’ll love Off the Map!
The new medical drama from Grey’s creator Shonda Rhimes, debuting tonight on ABC, was probably a no-brainer for the network to pick up, because it combined elements of two of …
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[Special spoiler alert: The following review mentions certain plot points that, at first viewing, I thought would be spoilers, but that FX’s commercials and promotions have abundantly given away–specifically, where the story goes after the pilot episode. I didn’t give away anything I wouldn’t want to know in advance, but in the …
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A hectic January in TV—I am currently working through 13 count-’em 13 episodes of Lights Out—which means a lot of midseason triage. I decided, for instance, thatI wouldn’t bother with a longer review of V unless the show had markedly improved from last season. It hasn’t.
That’s not to say that the show hasn’t changed. Now fully …
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Very mild spoilers for tonight’s Community follow:
Do you know what a bottle episode is? You will by the time tonight’s Community episode, “Cooperative Calligraphy,” is done. The term describes an episode of a series done in a limited setting—say, the classic trapped-in-a-freezer scenario—to save money. (Example: Breaking Bad’s …
