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30 Rock and Twenty Good Years: Scripts 2, Actors 0

It is the actors or the script? It’s the eternal question that comes up when deciding whom to credit or blame for a TV series, play or movie, and while each is obviously a collaborative medium, it’s an interesting game to determine whether a bad script can defeat good actors, or vice versa, or vice versa both ways in reverse.

For the

Kidnapped Goes Gentle Into That Good Saturday Night

Saturday night, Elton John and Bernie Taupin once told us, is all right for fighting. Unless you’re a TV show; moving to Saturday means it’s time to give up the fight. This is the fate of Kidnapped. Shortly after NBC announced that the much-touted, little-watched new serial would end after a run of 13 episodes, the network today said the

Lostwatch: Welcome to Otherville

SPOILER ALERT: The following post contains what could well be spoilers, if I were able to make any sense of the plot points.

In the first seconds of season 3 of Lost, we learned the most important fact yet about the Others: They have CDs. In a flashback scene reminiscent of the season 2 opener, newcomer Other Juliet pops a CD into her

Aaron Sorkin: The Shyamalan of TV

As a professional snobby, elitist critic, I am not in the habit of saying that the masses are right. But I make an exception when they agree with me, and they seem to have come around to my side on the massively overrated Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, the new self-aggrandizement vehicle from The West Wing’s masterwriter, Aaron Sorkin. …

Dead Tree Alert: Tuesday Night Football

Tonight on NBC, Friday Night Lights, one of the best dramas of the fall, with the potential to be the best, period. See my review in the Sept. 25 print version of Time, or without risk of paper cuts here.

I won’t elaborate much on my review except to emphasize that, although the show is about a West Texas high school football team (a

To Catch a Legislator

There’s always a TV angle. On Friday, Florida congressman Mark Foley shocked the political world when he announced his resignation, after reports emerged that he had sent sexually suggestive e-mails to teenage pages. On Friday night, NBC once again won the 18 to 49-year-old demographic ratings race in the 9 p.m. slot with its successful

Psycho Killer, Qu'est Que C'est

If you watch only one police procedural on TV–and you probably should watch only one police procedural on TV–make it Dexter (Showtime, debuts Sunday), in which Michael C. Hall of Six Feet Under plays a serial killer who channels his impulses into finding and murdering other murderers. Hall is creepily appealing. The show’s meditations

Lostwatch: Premature Explication Edition

SPOILER ALERT: There are no spoilers in the following post about Lost, because the new season doesn’t start until next Wednesday. Although who knows? Maybe I’m lying! Maybe there are spoilers! Maybe you should read anyway to find out! You’re so totally going to, aren’t you?

Last night I watched the pre-season clips episode of Lost,

Ugly Betty: A Pretty Picture

OK, let’s get it out of the way: No, she isn’t ugly. In Ugly Betty (Thursdays, 8 p.m.), ABC’s charming, peculiar comic telenovela, fashon-magazine assistant Betty Suarez (America Ferrera) is only TV ugly, which is to say, she has dark hair and doesn’t disappear when she turns sideways. But that’s the point: playing a smart, optimistic,

Crazy Christians, or Christian Crazy?

Last night NBC aired the second episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, in which a fictional broadcast network made the principled decision to air a skit–titled "Crazy Christians"–despite boycott threats from religious groups. In what is either a great irony or a brilliant marketing coup, the network is in the middle of not one but

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