James Poniewozik

Watching some upcoming episodes of HBO’s engrossing Rome recently, I saw something unusual for that show: a black man. The episode takes place in Egypt; the character is a Nubian soldier under King Ptolemy XIII. He has, by my count, one line, before being killed.

TV critics, understandably, have taken shots at the major networks for

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When Will & Grace announced it was doing a live performance for its season opener, Americans shared the same reaction: "Damn it! Will & Grace is still on the air! I owe the guy in the next cubicle five bucks!" Which is pretty much what NBC was going for. In a few short years, Must-See Thursday devolved into Must-Tape-While-Watching-CBS

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It’s a long-debated question which the public hates more, lawyers or journalists. But people at least hate lawyers better. Whatever their contempt for the legal profession, TV viewers never get sick of watching legal dramas, whereas the recent history of TV shows about journalists is the history of failure. Ink ran dry. Lateline

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On TV, to paraphrase Jane Austen, a young man in possession of a new sitcom is generally considered to be in no need of a wife. Not so on How I Met Your Mother (Mondays, 8:30 p.m. E.T., CBS). On the face of it, Mother is a pretty conventional sitcom. There’s a laugh track; there’s no single-camera movie look to it; there are young

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It’s probably an exaggeration to say that you’re either a Lost person or a Desperate Housewives person—considering the ratings, plenty of people must watch both. But I’m definitely a Lost person, and to know why you need only watch the season  premieres of both shows.

The Lost debut was excellent on a story level: it showed us

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Between the success of NBC’s Medium (which just won Patricia Arquette a Best Actress Emmy) and tonight’s debut of CBS’s Ghost Whisperer, we have learned an important lesson about the dead: they can be a real pain. Always with the nudging! Always with the demanding! "Tell my wife I love her!" "Avenge my death!" "Help me find my way to the

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There’s been a lot written about the number of spooky, scary dramas on TV this season (For example, Fox debuts the gory cop show Killer Instinct tonight, while Jennifer Love Hewitt sees the dead on CBS’s Ghost Whisperer.) And what’s scarier, to those valuable 30-something female viewers, than a ticking biological clock? That’s the fear

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So our long national crisis of uncertainty is over. We know what Martha Stewart’s Apprentice catchphrase is. "You just don’t fit in," she told the first ejectee, before writing him a "farewell letter"—presumably on stationery for which she felled and pulped the trees herself.

In most respects, Martha’s Apprentice is like Donald

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E-Ring, NBC’s new drama about the Pentagon, debuts at 9 p.m. tonight. As it’s scheduled against ABC powerhouse Lost, there is every likelihood it will be canceled by 9:15. But it’s worth looking at, anyway, if only as a case study in how TV can take a fascinating subject and work really hard to make it as boring as possible.

There’s

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On America’s Next Top Model, Tyra Banks is distinguished from other reality hosts by her willingness to get personal and put it out there — talking to the aspiring catwalkers about her flaws, her weight problems, the racial issues of the fashion world. You might cynically think those weepy sister-to-sister sessions looked like practice

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In last week’s TIME, I wrote about the two latest in a series of last-great-hopes-for-the-sitcom: UPN’s Everybody Hates Chris and NBC’s My Name is Earl, which debuts tonight at 9 p.m. You can read my praise for the funny, sweet-natured Earl there. But I have been thinking: people who follow the TV business, like me, talk a lot about what

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Apparently there is a home-field advantage in awards shows; as CBS took its turn with the Emmys, “Everybody Loves Raymond” walked off with the Best Comedy award. I was rooting for “Arrested Development,” of course, but took a perverse satisfaction that “Desperate Housewives” got upset. The undeserving beaten by the really undeserving — …