It would be hard to describe a TV series I would be more predisposed to like than BBC America’s Copper, debuting Sunday. …
tv weekend
Tuned InTelevision
TV Weekend: Animal Practice
When NBC announced its new sitcom Animal Practice—a.k.a. That One Show With the Monkey In It—plenty of critics, myself included, leapt into the trees to fling, um, stuff at it: so this is what it’s finally come to! In truth, …
Tuned InReview
TV Weekend: The Return of Sherlock
How is it possible that a show based on a set of stories that began in the 19th century could be the freshest detective show on television? Sherlock, the British rethinking of Sherlock Holmes, managed that in 2010 with crisp …
Tuned InReview
TV Weekend: Veep
Selina Meyer was a big deal, once. She was an influential senator. She was on the covers of national magazines, including the one whose website you’re reading right now. She ran for President, won the New Hampshire primary and …
Tuned InTelevision
TV Weekend: Last March of the Penguins?
Why do people love penguins so much? This weekend, Discovery’s Frozen Planet begins counting the ways.
Tuned InReview
TV Weekend: GCB
Since I posted earlier about my column on HBO’s movie Game Change, about Sarah Palin, we might as well make this Things People in Red States Might Be Offended By Day. Sunday night, ABC premieres GCB, a tongue-in-cheek soap set in …
Tuned InTelevision
Dead Tree Alert: The Beautiful Losers of Luck
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 …
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TV Weekend: Curb Your Enthusiasm Lives to Kvetch Again
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 past …
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TV Weekend: Falling Skies
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 of that.” (That it was able to put a human in …
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TV Weekend: Teen Wolf
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 like Liquid Television, an idea of “MTV animation.” And …
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TV Weekend: Back Upstairs Downstairs
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. I’ll agree …
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TV Weekend: Camelot and The Borgias
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 stabs at political …
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TV Weekend: The Killing
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 two …
