The title I Hate My Teenage Daughter gets it wrong: It should be called I Fear My Teenage Daughter. This rabbit-y sitcom, which premiered on Wednesday night after The X Factor, doesn’t seem to know what it wants to do: ridicule middle-aged moms, champion them, or dump on teenage girls. READ FULL STORY »
The thematic line over the course of this week’s Sons of Anarchy was, “Do you love me?” Jax asked it of Tara. (She responded in the affirmative, but not before uttering a line that could have come from a great rock & roll/R&B song, like the Shangri-Las’ “Leader of the Pack”: “If I could stop, I would.”) Later, Tara would demand, “Gemma, tell me you love me,” love posed as a test of truth, a test that Gemma did not pass as we saw Tara looking deep into the devious woman’s eyes. Tig told Clay, “I love you, Clay, I do,” shortly before doing something stupid — but in the poetic sense, romantically, extravagantly stupid — to avenge Clay’s shooting. READ FULL STORY »
The Walking Dead closed out its mid-season last night, and things were not looking good for our protagonists, or for the series. The show has turned into a nighttime soap with occasional appearances by deceased but moving, flesh-rotting, flesh-eating cameo monsters. If I had to choose between another scene of Shane looking belligerent while talking in that affected drawl or one of zombies crawling all over him and eating Shane as he looks belligerent while talking in that affected drawl, I’d choose the latter. (It’s what he deserves after what he did to Otis anyway.) READ FULL STORY »
Lady Gaga proved her mainstream outreach on a holiday evening with A Very Gaga Thanksgiving, a 90-minute special that dialed back the wacky fashion-sense and “little monster” talk in favor of Tony Bennett and making construction-paper turkeys with third-graders. READ FULL STORY »
It’s a measure of how much we can become involved with the characters of Parenthood that the current Adam-got-kissed-by-Rachel storyline is so irritating — in a good way. By that I mean, it’s successfully designed to make you argue with anyone who also watches the show. Was it a mistake, last night, for Adam to tell Kristina about the kiss? Was Crosby the rare voice of sensible realism in telling him he should clam up and let the indiscretion pass? How dumb was Adam to promise to fire Rachel and then not follow through, his sin of omission so easily discovered by his wife? READ FULL STORY »
Once again, Sons of Anarchy upended my expectations this week. I had figured that the episode just before the start of next week’s two-part, season finale might just be a putting-things-in-place hour; the setting of a few traps; a building-up of dread. Well, this edition, titled “Burnt and Purged Away,” was all that, and quite a bit more. Including READ FULL STORY »
Kelly Ripa began the post-Regis Philbin era by breaking out new coffee cups and a new logo: Live! with Kelly. “Oh my gosh, that was abrupt,” she said when the applause died away quickly after she was first announced. This energetic self-deprecation will serve her well. Jerry Seinfeld was the guest cohost, a perfect choice since he is funny and has absolutely no designs on taking Regis’ place permanently, and therefore exhibited not a trace of audience-pleasing desperation. READ FULL STORY »
Batman: The Brave and the Bold wraps up its run on Friday evening with a terrific send-off, a comic-book fan’s delight: a wittily self-conscious half-hour that finds Bat-Mite trying to get The Brave and the Bold cancelled by turning it into an awful show, to make way for what he really wants — “a darker Batman series!” The fact that that sentiment comes from the voice of Paul Reubens as Bat-Mite only makes it more satirical. READ FULL STORY »
