Spoilers for the penultimate Big Love coming up:
“When people join churches, they change. Not the churches.” —Bill Henrickson
Is there a puddle in front of my TV? “Exorcism” may well qualify as Big Love‘s cryingest episode of all time; it seemed as if hardly a character managed to get through a scene without red-rimmed eyes. Yet for …
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James O’Keefe, the controversial conservative activist and undercover-video maker, brought down NPR’s CEO this week after releasing a “sting” video of an NPR fundraiser meeting with fake Muslim “donors.” Now a video editor, having reviewed the full, two-hour film that O’Keefe also posted online, …
First we heard that Michael Chabon and wife Ayelet Waldman were developing a magicians-vs.-Nazis drama for HBO; now Showtime has enlisted its own award-winning novelist. Salman Rushdie (author of The Satanic Verses and Midnight’s Children, or ex of Padma Lakshmi depending on your frame of reference) is writing Next People, a …
Quick spoilers for last night’s American Idol elimination follow:
Per usual, I watched the elimination round of American Idol on extreme fast-forward—the only way it should be watched—so sadly, I have no insights on what must have been the absolutely stunning preview of Red Riding Hood. A few highlights and thoughts, though:
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Twentysomethings: welcome to old age! TeenNick—Nickelodeon’s teen channel, formerly The N—is planning to bring back a block of Nickelodeon kids’ shows from the 1990s in a late-night block, aimed at the original fans who are now college-aged, or older. Much older—like me, because …
Public broadcasting is one of the great bargains of government spending. For $400-odd million a year—the cost of a handful of Charlie Sheens—public subsidy gives us TV and radio networks that reach the most remote corners of a huge country. It also gives political culture warriors a convenient regular target to rally their base …
HBO announced today that it has signed Julianne Moore to play then-Alaska-governor Sarah Palin in its coming movie Game Change, a behind the scenes account of the 2008 election that dishes dirt on Republican and Democratic campaigns.* (The film is being directed by Jay Roach, who helmed HBO’s Recount, about the 2000 election’s …
Spoilers for last night’s Glee coming up.
This week’s episode of Glee was the one about sex, because apparently the other ones weren’t. Like many first awkward adolescent sexual experience, this one began clumsily, lacked subtlety, involved some embarrassing moments and included too many unwelcome visions of Academy Award® Winner …
Novelist Michael Chabon is developing a series for HBO, titled Hobgoblin, about magicians fighting Nazis in WWII.
Now keep in mind that the project—on which Chabon is teaming with wife Ayelet Waldman—is in an early, pre-pilot stage of development. So as with all such embryonic projects (Aaron Sorkin’s cable-news show for HBO, or the …
The cruel realities of TV-critic triage caused me to drop The Event after sampling several episodes this fall, but NBC’s aliens-in-Alaska drama isn’t done with us yet. It returned last night with a two-hour special airing that found the detainees at war with one another, introduced Virginia Madsen as a troublesome Alaska senator and …
Confirming something that I suspect most Americans thought had already happened, Warner Bros. Television announced that it is immediately terminating Charlie Sheen from Two and a Half Men, following the actor’s stints in and out of rehab, restraining orders, allegations of violence and rambling weeklong media bender.
The decision …
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NBC Universal is a good-news / bad-news story where TV is concerned: the broadcast network has a big name but low ratings, but it has a number of successful cable channels that pay the freight, The natural question is: how could you take a kind of show that has worked well for its cable …
Before you read this post, switch off that rerun of The Fugitive and watch last night’s Big Love.
“This is just so incredibly effed up.” —Ben Henrickson
Language, young man! It still startles me at times when I realize that Big Love is an adult HBO drama almost entirely without swearing. If you can gauge the seriousness of the …
