Last night, a couple of characters finally “violated the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act.” If you catch our meaning.
TV Tonight: The Americans
FX’s Cold War thriller about a deep-cover Soviet spies in the suburbs is the thriller you’d expect but also an intriguing study of marriage as partnership.
Enlightened Watch: Consider Levi
In a beautiful episode, Amy’s ex goes to rehab, proving that you can lead a man to water, but he has to find the turtle himself.
The Office Watch: Lowering the Boom Mic
Well, things got real there awfully quick.
Dead Tree Alert: 30 Rock–It Peacocks TV So Much
The whole series, and last night’s episode, portrayed TV as a business, a farce, and, the one thing that gave sense to its neurotic characters’ lives.
American Horror Story: Asylum Shows Its Big, Bloody Heart
Though the series might seem all style over substance, the finale of AHS: Asylum showed genuine sympathy for the monsters it created.
The Taste: Do Cooking Shows Really Need the Voice Treatment?
ABC’s cook-off is promising, but for a show that’s “all about the food,” it has plenty of gimmicks
The Following: Bloody Awful
The Following, which premiered to much hype on Fox last night, seems to believe the recipe for ambitious cable-style drama is Karo syrup plus red food coloring.
Girls Watch: White People Problems
Lena Dunham’s show addresses complaints about its racial homogeneity with a scene that’s funny and perceptive, but feels distractingly contrived.
Who Cares If Lance Armstrong Is Sorry?
When we frame the sleazebag-apologia interview as mainly a p.r. exercise in showing remorse and winning redemption, the sleazebag has already won.
The Morning After: The Carrie Diaries Re-Virginizes Itself
Think of this Sex and the City prequel as a kind of superhero origin story, with couture instead of kryptonite.
Girls Watch: Don’t Tell Me You Love Me
The night Girls picks up a Golden Globe as Best Comedy, a scene-setting season premiere shows that there’s a fine line between being in love and obnoxiousness.
TV Tonight: Banshee
The hyperbloody new Cinemax drama is not a terrible show. At times it can be entertaining. But at best it’s terribly, entertainingly superfluous.
