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ABC airs It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown tonight at 8 E.T. I don’t know if Charles Schultz ever read Albert Camus, but there’s something about the whole Peanuts body of work that espouses a kind of hopeful existentialism. The characters are in absurd situations; like Sisyphus, they are doomed to suffer the same failures over and …
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If I had gotten around to reviewing USA’s White Collar, which debuts tonight, I’d probably have said what I’d have said about USA shows like Royal Pains or Psych or Monk. It’s a light, funny caper. (The premise: a con man ends up working for the FBI to help them catch other con men.) It’s brisk and slick and fun and competently made, …
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As Jamie Weinman at MacLean’s has noted, there seems to be a little bit of a critical backlash out there against 30 Rock, which returns tonight on NBC. Having seen the first two episodes of the season, I both get the pushback and don’t get it. On the one hand, they show off the show’s brilliance at topical commentary and throwaway jokes, …
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Fringe is turning out to be even more like The X-Files than I suspected when it started—structurally, anyway, in that it’s breaking down between monster-of-the-week episodes, which I might enjoy but don’t feel compelled to watch right away, and mythology episodes, which focus on the overarching parallel-universe storyline and …
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Comedy Central, like any good targeted network with a young male audience, is constantly asking itself, What do guys like? Guys like comedy. Guys like the Internet. And guys like point-of-view porn and Girls Gone Wild videos. Ahem, so I’m told.
The channel has combined …
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Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton both starred in long-lasting hit comedies in the 1990s (Frasier and Everybody Loves Raymond). On Fox’s short-lived Back to You, they teamed up as news anchors, forming a kind of sitcom-star supergroup. Now they’re debuting back-to-back sitcoms on ABC, a symmetry that demands comparison. When two …
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The first few minutes of Trauma, the paramedic drama that debuts tonight on NBC, seems determined to show where the network put some of that money it’s saving with The Jay Leno Show. Depicting a crisis/rescue/disaster on a rooftop high above San Francisco, it starts with a guy getting fried …
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Words I would not have guessed last spring that I would be typing today: Dollhouse returns for a second season tonight. The series made an amazing mid-season creative course correction during its first run and surprised everyone by getting renewed (on low ratings but the strength of an intense fan base and healthy DVR replay). So I …
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When I pot post my Test Pilot first impressions of new shows over the summer, I make the point of stressing that they’re not reviews, because the pilots can be reworked before they’ve aired. That’s not a lie, but in the case of ABC’s FlashForward, the for-air pilot hasn’t changed from what I saw in June enough to change my initial …
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Tonight ABC debuts Cougar Town, a comedy based on the media trend of older women hooking up with younger men. Building a show around the concept of “cougars” is a bold, farsighted move that guarantees the show will remain timely and relevant for years. I hereby predict that Cougar Town will have the staying power of such …
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By Nielsen’s calendar it’s the first official night of the 2009–10 season (oh, typing that “10” makes me feel old). Which means a deluge of season and series premieres and no more freebies for Jay Leno. Among tonight’s highlights—or, well, at least lights, high or otherwise:
* I enjoy House but never developed a regular habit, …
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Besides tonight’s debut of Community, we also have the returns of The Office, Parks and Recreation and Fringe, which Fox has decided to add to my Thursday entertainment burden menu. After the jump, a little rundown of what to expect, and how I plan to handle blogging the heavy schedule of Thursday shows as the fall season kicks in.
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The Jay Leno Show debuts tonight at 10, and with it begins the biggest gamble in TV in years. In my cover story, I said he and his show would represent the (downsized, cheaper) future of TV whether it succeeded or failed.* Which is just as well, because I absolutely suck at predicting whether anything will succeed or …
