PBS
Tuned In+Review | May 4, 2012

TV Weekend: The Return of Sherlock

By James Poniewozik

Thanks to inventive visuals and a captivating performance by Benedict Cumberbatch, Sherlock has figured out how to make thinking into a physical act.

Tuned In
Tuned In+Review | April 20, 2012

TV Weekend: Veep

By James Poniewozik
HBO

Veep is filthy and funny, but also broad and predictable; and Julia Louis-Dreyfus doesn’t quite fit her character. Still, you can’t say a show about the triviality of politics doesn’t feel timely.

Tuned In
Tuned In+Television | March 16, 2012

TV Weekend: Last March of the Penguins?

By James Poniewozik
BBC WORLDWIDE / DISCOVERY

Why do people love penguins so much? This weekend, Discovery’s Frozen Planet begins counting the ways.

Tuned In
Tuned In+Review | March 2, 2012

TV Weekend: GCB

By James Poniewozik
ABC/KAREN NEAL

ABC changed the title from Good Christian Bitches to GCB. The C’s in the audience probably shouldn’t be offended by this soap’s campy depiction of rich Dallas hypocrites, but I wish it were all a little more G.

Tuned In
Tuned In+Television | January 27, 2012

Dead Tree Alert: The Beautiful Losers of Luck

By James Poniewozik
HBO

In the print TIME magazine out now, I review (subscription required) David Milch and Michael Mann’s new HBO series Luck, which debuts Sunday and which I loved. Eventually. Yes, this is another critic flogging a cable drama by saying “It’s really good, but give it a few episodes.” And I’ll throw in another caveat—this is [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | July 8, 2011

TV Weekend: Curb Your Enthusiasm Lives to Kvetch Again

By James Poniewozik

Spoiler alert: in this season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, a lot of people get really mad at Larry David. All right, the spoiler alert is probably not necessary. When David and Jerry Seinfeld created Seinfeld, their mantra “No hugging, no learning” was a reaction against the good-hearted, sentimental sitcoms of the Cosby era. For the [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | June 17, 2011

TV Weekend: Falling Skies

By James Poniewozik

One of the hoariest  sci-fi tropes is the invading alien race that wants our women (or occasionally, to mix it up, our men). It never held up much to logical scrutiny; rare is the viewer who has, in turn, looked at a scary reptilian space creature and thought “mmm, I’d like to get me some [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | June 3, 2011

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+April 8, 2011

TV Weekend: Back Upstairs Downstairs

By James Poniewozik

Starting Sunday, PBS revisits a piece of its own history, with an update/extension of Upstairs Downstairs on Masterpiece. I’ll admit not being a rabid fan of the original in the first place, but TIME film critic Mary Pols wrote an appreciation of the original on its 40th anniversary, while looking forward to the new edition. [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | April 1, 2011

TV Weekend: Camelot and The Borgias

By James Poniewozik

I’ve had arguments over the years with friends and colleagues who liked The Tudors better than I did, and their disagreements generally boiled to the charge that I was holding the show to an unfair standard. Namely, more or less: expecting it to be good. The Tudors, beyond a lavish attention to detail and some [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | April 1, 2011

TV Weekend: The Killing

By James Poniewozik

The Killing, which debuts Sunday night on AMC, is one of those murder stories in which the only things possibly as sad as the death it documents are the lives that survive it. Yes, the title crime—the gruesome murder of Seattle teenager Rosie Larsen—is heartbreaking. But then there is the family she leaves behind, including [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+March 25, 2011

TV Weekend: Mildred Pierce

By James Poniewozik

As a director, Todd Haynes (Safe, I’m Not There) sometimes seems less like a filmmaker than an enthusiast: a collector, say, of a certain brand of out-of-production figurine (he cast his early Karen Carpenter biopic, Superstar, with Barbie dolls) or a passionate fan of a highly particular out-of-fashion design genre. His 2002 film Far from [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+January 21, 2011

TV Weekend: Portlandia

By James Poniewozik

Has there ever been a better-targeted show than Portlandia? A gentle sketch-comedy sendup (debuting tonight) of high-minded, laid-back, arts-focused, sustainability-oriented living in Portland, Ore., for IFC channel, it is, essentially, a comedy for people who watch IFC, about people who would watch IFC (if they owned televisions), on IFC. It’s regionally specific, but really also [...]

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Tuned In+January 14, 2011

TV Weekend: Last Chance at Love

By James Poniewozik

In its fourth season Big Love, HBO’s drama about plural marriage, had problems with plural storylines. As befits a show about big families, Big Love was never afraid to be expansive, developing a large cast and piling on story developments, but the torrent of can-you-top-this plot developments became almost comical. To his big-box housewares store [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | January 7, 2011

TV Weekend: Burgers and Sides

By James Poniewozik

This weekend, midseason-debut frenzy kicks into high gear, with several new shows debuting on Sunday alone. I’m on deadline for the print magazine, as well as trying to get some work done in advance before taking some time for personal business next week, so I don’t have time to review any of them at length. [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+October 22, 2010

TV Weekend: PBS's Sherlock and the Case of Mr. Baggins

By James Poniewozik

Though it’s not TV news exactly, there are enough fans of the original British The Office here that I should note that Martin Freeman (our friend Tim from Wernham Hogg) has been cast as Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit. It’s an exciting choice: Freeman has both the comic and dramatic ability the role needs, and [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+September 24, 2010

TV Weekend: Bored to Death

By James Poniewozik

To the great Sunday-night pileup that AMC and HBO have wrought, this weekend we add the return of Bored to Death.* There are a lot of things to love about the story of writer-turned-private-dick Jonathan Ames (Jonathan Schwartzman): the shaggy-dog hipster-noir stories, the highbrow-lit-meets-lowbrow-slapstick plots, the loving use of New York’s finest borough, Brooklyn. But [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+August 13, 2010

TV Weekend: You Might Want to C This

By James Poniewozik

Technically speaking, this is really TV Next Monday material, but I’ll be out next week, so a reminder: Laura Linney stars in Showtime’s cancer dramedy The Big C, debuting Aug. 16. You can read my impressions of the first three episodes here. There are some broad supporting characters and more than an echo of earlier [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+June 25, 2010

TV Weekend: Hung and Hangin' on HBO

By James Poniewozik

This Sunday, HBO returns the second season of Hung and the seventh of Entourage, two series that I continue to follow despite their considerable challenges, but for very different reasons. With Hung, the story of a Detroit-area male prostitute (Thomas Jane) and his pimp (Jane Adams), I feel that there’s a really good dark comedy [...]

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Tuned InComments closedJune 11, 2010

TV Weekend: Thrice Bitten

By James Poniewozik

The second season of HBO’s True Blood ended on a cliffhanger, as vampire Bill asked mortal-or-mostly-mortal (I think) Sookie (a.k.a. “Suh-key”) for her hand in marriage, then disappeared after she asked for a minute alone to think. The first three episodes of True Blood’s season 3 arrived a while back, with the entirely reasonable request [...]