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Spoilers for last night’s Modern Family below:
Little time for a big writeup because of (1) upfronts and (2) everything else upfronts have kept me from doing. But let’s take a moment to give credit to a nicely themed and executed Modern Family, which embodied some of the series’ best …
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The TV upfronts are a big fast car with no rear-view mirror. The shining vista of the future is extolled. The good times of the present are celebrated. And the flaming car wrecks of the past, littering the highway behind? Never happened! Moving forward!
CBS, to be fair, is doing well …
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It was final three night on American Idol, which meant that the show packed a whole nine songs into a mere two hours. In their penultimate performance, the trio were mentored by Beyonce. Who was irreplaceable? Who proved not to be ready for this jelly? Click the pix for my reviews:
Wagner’s Overture for Tristan und Isolde thunders its ominous beauty on the soundtrack, and a blond woman (Kirsten Dunst) in a bridal gown watches anxiously as birds fall dead from the sky. In a farther region of the sky, one …
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Spoilers for the season finale of The Good Wife coming up:
In a couple of recent Good Wife reviews, I expressed some misgivings over the show’s introducing Peter’s affair with Kalinda as a storyline. It’s not that it’s implausible, but the show has become much stronger and more complex than its original concept—i.e., political wife …
Within the hour, Richard Corliss will be posting his review of Lars von Trier’s (in my view, excellent) new film Melancholia, which had its world premiere this morning. But von Trier, the wildly talented, supremely maddening Danish director of such Cannes favorites as Europa/Zentropa, Breaking the Waves and Antichrist, topped himself for …
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Every spring, the daffodils bloom in April, kids start playing baseball again, and I get to type the sentence: “Emphasizing the stability of its lineup, CBS announced a fall schedule with just a handful of changes.” CBS is strong, and it is stable; it’s arguably the only TV network left able to put together a lineup like the Big Three …
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Spoilers for last night’s Glee below:
It has become my unofficial theory that episodes of Glee are good to the extent that they do not involve the adults in the cast. “Funeral,” however, upended this expectation, with an episode that saw the return of Actual Sympathetic Human Sue Sylvester, while all but putting the New Directions …
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When I interviewed Sopranos creator David Chase back in 2002—before the show’s first season since 9/11—he went on a tear about the theory, then popular among TV executives, that the terror attacks meant that people would want “comfort food” programming. “People are going to want less complexity, people are going to want more …
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Spoilers for last night’s How I Met Your Mother below:
Part of me is inclined to look at last night’s episode as the Arcadian Hotel—blown up, history, time to move on. There have been some strong moments in the past season of How I Met Your Mother—Marshall’s father’s death and Barney’s discovery of his own dad—but the series as …
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In recent years, ABC has been the announc-iest of the networks in upfronts weeks, unveiling copious amounts of new shows in good years and bad. (This is partly because it’s had schedule holes to fill but partly because it has a habit of announcing all its midseason shows, while other networks sometimes keep some of their midseason …
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Fox may not look it, but it’s getting old; the network is celebrating its 25th anniversary next season. While it continues to do well with American Idol, that show is a venerable hit, now in its 10th edition. Like a lot of people getting older, Fox likes to tell itself it still thinks young—that it’s the network of attitude and …
The mob scene of a couple thousand critics pushing and shoving, pleading and shouting, to get in; the hushed anticipation as the film began; and at the end, the belligerent booing answered by defiant applause. What stoked the …
