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Spoilers for last night’s Parks and Recreation coming up:
We could talk endlessly here about the cast of characters on Parks and Recreation, but one of my favorite things about the show is how Pawnee itself has become a character. Episode by episode, it’s developed into one of the richest fictional towns since Springfield, Wherever, …
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My column in the print issue of TIME this week looks at the success of the revival of The Game on BET, and how it suggests that the unfortunately-conventional wisdom of TV may be wrong: it may actually be good business to produce TV series featuring largely-minority casts, of the kind that …
Despite Alex Pettyfer’s sexy smolder, this sloppy, cynical attempt to build a young-adult film franchise never catches fire
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I promise to give up the meta-discussion of TV criticism after this week—I think—but there was one important issue that Josh Levin failed to address when critiquing the pitfalls of weekly TV-episode reviewing in Slate: It hurts your damn fingers. That is particularly the case on such a TV-heavy night as last night: we had the …
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I usually don’t bother reporting casting news on this blog, because I’d end up doing little else, but yesterday came reports that NBC had found actresses to re-create two iconic, if very different, classic-TV roles. In its remake of Prime Suspect, Maria Bello (A History of Violence) will reportedly take on the role of a tough, …
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Spoilers for last night’s finale of the Jeopardy IBM Challenge coming up:
Well, Homo sapiens, it was a great run. Two hundred thousand years! Yes, there was a war here and there and we caused a few extinctions and whatnot. But we developed language and mathematics, left crap on the ground that can be seen from space, and kicked the …
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As the debate over the federal budget intensifies in Washington, Republican lawmakers have targeted—again—funding for public broadcasting. Those who want to make the cuts would like the public to see them as taking on a group of privileged elitist liberals, who do not deserve …
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You would think, after a report came out of a horrific public assault against a journalist by a mob, people might be able to set aside their personal and political hobbyhorses for a few hours and not exploit the situation.
You would be wrong. Shortly after the news that Lara Logan was beaten and sexually assaulted in Cairo, Nir Rosen, a …
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Last night, The Good Wife aired its much publicized episode based on Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook and the controversies around the accuracy of The Social Network. (Emphasis on based on! I noted how conspicuously Diane referred to the plaintiff in the defamation suit as “a Mark Zuckerberg in the making,” so as to make crystal-clear that …
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Spoilers for last night’s Glee follow:
After Josh Levin’s essay in Slate, there’s been a lot of discussion this week about the effect that weekly online reviews of shows have on TV criticism. (Here’s my response to Levin’s piece; see also Myles McNutt’s and Alan Sepinwall’s responses if you’re curious, and Levin’s response to the …
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Spoilers for last night’s Jeopardy IBM Challenge coming up:
We can console ourselves with this: when our new computer masters take over, apparently very soon now, we can be assured that they will comprehend our pathetic natural-language pleas for mercy with a certainty of upward of 90%.
Monday night, Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy-playing …
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Disturbing news from Egypt: CBS News just issued a statement that reporter Lara Logan “was surrounded and suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating” by a mob while covering the downfall of Hosni Mubarak’s Egyptian government in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Friday. According to the network, Logan was separated from her crew …
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When networks program new shows, they often take into consideration “flow”—how well viewers will transition from one show into the new, hopefully compatible show. But there’s flow, and then there’s imitation so distractingly total that, in the case of CBS’s new Mad Love, the show might as well be called How I Met the Timeslot …
