It is very possible to make a good TV show about a bad TV show. On 30 Rock, for instance, TGS manages to stay on the air every year, but what we see of it—”Zis machine has too many farts in it! It’s going to explode!”—does not suggest a classic.
My Generation, premiering on ABC tonight, is about a bad documentary. A film crew …
A new addition to our hall of shame: the just-announced title for the followup to ‘Sharknado’
You know the drill: it’s Premiere Week, and I’m asking you to weigh in on last night’s series premieres and series returns, including the various shows I never got around to reviewing here. (Among them last night, the new legal dramas The Defenders on CBS and The Whole Truth on ABC—not to mention Undercovers, the return of Cougar …
If you’re a newcomer to this blog and you’ve been reading my reviews of the new TV season this week, I would forgive you for thinking that I’m a cynical crank who hates everything. Believe me, writing my reviews this week, I feel like a cynical crank who hates everything. But as I say like a broken record, I don’t believe in grading on …
A confession: I liked Cavemen. Not “liked” in an ironic way. Not “thought it was not so terrible, considering how bad it could have been.” I thought that, despite a rough start, ABC’s much-mocked 2007 sitcom was actually a sharp and very funny comedy, even though it was roundly pooh-poohed for originating in a series of Geico …
American Idol today officially announced its new judging panel: singers Jennifer Lopez and Steven Tyler, with holdover Randy Jackson. And it did it in classic Idol results-episode style, with a stage reveal that suffered from technical problems and told us something we all more or less already knew after stringing us along forever.
The …
The running theme of this fall season has been that the broadcast networks have been focusing on simple, easy-to-follow shows, ceding more involved, serial shows to cable. (The couple of exceptions have had mixed results so far: The Event premiered well, Lone Star became a falling star.) That means a lot of new shows this season that …
As I did yesterday, and as I plan to for the rest of Premiere Week, I’m giving you the Morning After thread to give your first impressions of last night’s premiering and returning shows. Last night saw the debuts of Fox’s Gerund Twins—Running Wilde and Raising Hope—as well as the debut of ABC’s Detroit 1-8-7, which I wrote a column …
Spoilers for the second-season premiere of Glee coming up:
If there was one thing season one of Glee trained us for, it was never to know what was coming next. The show could go from scattershot and goofy to assured and transcendent within a week, from wacky fantasy to heartfelt realism between commercial breaks, in a heady rush as if …
I say this often enough that I should make it an annual boilerplate disclaimer: when I say that I like a show, I’m not predicting it will be a hit. It’s not snobbery, and it’s not not snobbery; they’re just two entirely different issues. There are great shows that have broad commercial potential (Lost) and great shows that are by …
Say you create a sitcom that you’re really proud of. You like it, critics like it, it develops a loyal fan base. It has its run and goes off the air, maybe sooner than you’d have liked, sooner than your fans would have liked, before you’ve had a chance to really tell all the stories you’d have liked to tell.
What do you do? You can …