Tuned In
Tonight, Top Chef returns to Bravo, with season 6, set in Las Vegas. Tomorrow, the show’s estranged big sibling, Project Runway, returns after a long, litigation-induced absence, on a new network (Lifetime) and with new producers.
My headline aside, it’s not like anyone has to choose between the two shows, which the networks had the …
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The first thing a TV critic notices watching the post-apocalyptic-scenario reality show The Colony (debuts tonight on Discovery) is how little use there is for TV criticism in a postapocalyptic scenario. The series, which throws together 10 people to survive holed up in a warehouse after a simulated epidemic has destroyed civilization, …
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Many reviews of Jada Pinkett Smith’s nurse drama Hawthorne, debuting tonight on TNT, mention that it’s difficult not to compare it, unfavorably, with Showtime’s Nurse Jackie. This is understandable, but it is unfair to this new series. Hawthorne would be terrible if Nurse Jackie never existed. It would be awful entirely on its own. Give …
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The business of food is the business of brand extension. If you have a successful restaurant, next comes the cookbook. The cooking show. The Vegas branch. The casual-bistro spinoff. The line of frozen dinners.
In that spirit comes Top Chef spinoff Top Chef Masters, debuting tonight on Bravo. If you are hoping for Top Chef Masters …
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While I and most other critics have been focusing on tonight’s Showtime debut of Nurse Jackie, the network also premieres season 5 of Weeds, something I usually look forward to every summer. And not just because it means another cheesecake publicity photo of Mary-Louise Parker every year. That said, I’ll admit that season 4’s …
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A lot of summer TV debuting tonight, and not enough time to review it, so it’s time to break out with the capsules:
Tosh.0: Given the unending success of FAIL Culture on the web—you’re probably familiar with FAIL Blog, or at least the various humiliating videos people have forwarded you from there—it’s surprising no one has come up …
Tuned In
Tonight, Jay Leno hosts his last Tonight Show. Last night, Prince and Billy Crystal saluted Jay, while he remembered some of his classic comedy bits. Question: does he really want to remind us of The Dancing Itos? In fact, watching the retrospective, I couldn’t help but think that a lot of that comedy would look awfully corny in the …
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If a show like Disney’s JONAS is review-proof, then Bravo’s The Real Housewives of New Jersey may be endorsement-proof: if you don’t like this Bravo franchise, than I probably can’t persuade you to try this installment. But while I don’t much care if I never see another installment of Orange County, Atlanta or even New York City, I …
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I feel as if I’m expected, on principle, to hate The Fashion Show, which debuts tonight on Bravo. It is certainly, whatever Bravo says, a shameless, tactical ripoff of Project Runway, which left Bravo and debuts this summer on Lifetime. That may be distracting to viewers. And it may well be a strategic mistake for Bravo’s larger …
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ABC is debuting a new cop drama, The Unusuals (above left), tonight; NBC is debuting a new cop drama, Southland, tomorrow. This has given many TV critics the idea to review both at once. My brief take: although the two shows are very different, they each leave me wishing I could somehow smoosh them together.
Tuned In
At the last minute last week, I shifted gears from doing a writeup for season 5 of Rescue Me in favor of reviewing In Treatment for the print TIME. Then other things came up, so I never got through my full batch of screeners of the Denis Leary show, which returns tonight on FX. But a quick recommendation: even if you got tired of it …
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ER gets ready to go off the air with its series finale tonight, amid much verbiage from people like me citing it as a sign of the end of the heyday of broadcast TV. It’s worth noting, though, that even in its diminished state, millions of people still watch ER. I just don’t know them, and except for some recent tune-ins out of …
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Tonight, MTV airs Pedro, its biopic about Pedro Zamora, the Real World season 3 housemate who was afflicted with AIDS and used the limelight—on the show and off it, until his death—to raise awareness of the disease. I never got around to doing a review, but MTV has been enlisting this big guns to promote the movie, including this …
