For the past few years, I’ve been doing a year-end list of 10 best episodes as well as 10 best TV series. I resisted doing the episodes list at first, because I’m lazy and because there’s too much out there for me to pretend my …
Mitt Romney’s Toughest Crowd… Fox News?
In this week’s print TIME, Joe Klein has a cover story on Mitt Romney’s inability to close the deal with Republican primary voters. For months, the polling trendline has looked like this: Romney has been cruising flat on the moving sidewalk of his campaign, while watching Rick Perry, then Herman Cain, and now Newt Gingrich rise past him …
A Second Look At: American Horror Story
Ghost stories are not usually stories about ghosts. They’re stories with ghosts, stories around ghosts, stories in which ghosts figure. There might be an interesting backstory to the ghosts, but the story itself, generally, is …
HBO Signs David Milch and His New Partner, William Faulkner
HBO announced today that it signed a new contract with one of its favorite writers, David Milch, who created Deadwood, John from Cincinnati and various projects that never made air for the network, and whose horseracing drama Luck debuts next month. (A sneak preview will air Dec. 11.) In connection with the deal, the network has also …
TV Tonight: I Hate My Teenage Daughter
When you create a new sitcom, and it is not very good, and the title begins, “I Hate…,” you can pretty much expect every TV critic in America to come up with their own play on the title to express how much They Hate This …
Bored to Death Finale: Family Affair
Quick spoilers for the season finale of Bored to Death below:
Last night was the last episode of Bored to Death‘s season three, and perhaps, depending how HBO reacts to the ratings, the last of the series. I’ve always quietly …
The Morning After: With New Sex Allegations, The Cain Trainwreck Adds Another Car
I don’t yet know how history will remember the Herman Cain candidacy for President, but the pizza king /erstwhile GOP frontrunner has given us what I believe is a first in Presidential campaigning: the candidate went on a cable-news show yesterday evening and scooped his own accuser on a charge of a 13-year extramarital affair. Asked …
TV Tonight: The Sing-Off Sings Itself Off
The most important show on television, The Sing-Off, ends its first regular-season outing—and, if I’m to guess from the ratings, possibly its last—tonight with a live finale. As I wrote earlier, together with Top Chef it’s …
Hey, Twitter, the Governor Is Totally Gonna Tell the Principal on You
Earlier this year, Rep. Anthony Weiner showed us how an elected official can make himself look like an idiot over tweets that he sends to the electorate. Now Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback has demonstrated how an elected official can …
Boardwalk Empire Watch: Unjust Deserts
SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, stop pricing out autographed Ty Cobb baseballs in eBay and watch last night’s Boardwalk Empire.
God does not take bribes. This moral certainty at least we learned in last night’s …
The Morning After: A New-Old Peanuts Special, and Other Thanksgiving Leftovers
My Thanksgiving involved cooking most of the holiday dinner in Brooklyn and driving it to my mother-in-law’s house in New Jersey: smoking a turkey, cutting it in pieces and foil-wrapping them, and stuffing them into a cooler packed with towels for insulation. It was a job not unlike transporting an organ for transplant, or disposing a …
Turkey Day TV: Ice Age: A Mammoth Christmas
It’s not often that an animated children’s special answers a question of broad religious import, but Fox’s Ice Age: A Mammoth Christmas, debuting Thanksgiving night, pulls it off. Santa Claus, it turns out, came before Jesus. At …
No More Lives to Live: Prospect Park Abandons Plan to Save ABC Soaps Online
Soap opera fans suddenly have two fewer things to be thankful for today. Prospect Park, the production company that made an eye-opening deal to rescue cancelled ABC soaps All My Children and One Life to Live, issued a statement …