Image Credit: Gavin Bond/NBC
You knew going into it that The Golden Globes were bound to be funny. Nearly every joke told or stunt pulled by hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler was solidly, often exceedingly, funny, from Poehler’s line “When it comes to torture I trust the woman married for three years to James Cameron” to Fey’s admonition to Taylor Swift to “stay away from Michael J. Fox’s son” — startled-looking, handsome Sam Fox, this year’s Mr. Golden Globe. READ FULL STORY »
The new year brings new TV shows, some of them imminent. Having viewed a few of them, seen bits and pieces of others, and banking on the track record of the producers, stars, and networks of others, I’ve put together a little video review of three of them I’m particularly looking forward to. READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Jordin Althaus/NBC
Here’s the thing: You’re not going to laugh very much, I’m guessing, at the 1600 Penn that premieres tonight. The debut lumbers along like the pilot for a complex drama, as though it had to carefully delineate each member of a wacky White House family headed up by Bill Pullman’s President, Jenna Elfman’s First Lady, her stepson played by Josh Gad, and the family’s other kids. But the show gets better; by the third episode, I liked the characters and I was laughing. READ FULL STORY »
Below, my picks for some of the best TV shows of 2012, in handy video form.
Anyone who reads this blog regularly can probably predict a few picks. I’ll tell you in advance that I stuck to a list comprised of regularly scheduled series, no arch stunt-picks, like the Presidential election coverage or some wheezy old anti-Here Comes Honey Boo Boo rant. Upbeat, that’s my motto! READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: David Giesbrecht
So Ben’s engagement present to Leslie was a personal meet-and-greet with her sex-object-idol, Vice President Joe Biden. His teeth bright enough to light the Parks and Recreation set, Biden proved to be a good actor — or rather, a good reactor (hey, that’s how John Wayne defined the job anyway), to Leslie’s nonplussed yet turned-on reactions. READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Jordin Althaus/NBC
“Whitney is taped in front of a live studio audience,” said Whitney Cummings at the start of Wednesday night’s second-season premiere of Whitney, apparently in an effort to prove that, yes, there really are human beings that laugh at Whitney. READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Edward Herrera/ABC; Peter Stone/ABC Last Man Standing
Image Credit: Greg Gayne/Fox
The women at the centers of New Girl, Ben and Kate, and The Mindy Project are all intelligent, funny people who, in their various distinctive ways, use ditziness and “girly”-ness to their advantage, flummoxing the more dense specimens of manhood they encounter. Where Lena Dunham offers the nimble mumble-realism version of this sort of woman on her HBO show Girls, these network girls (and I include the female creators, show-runners, and writers also involved in that phrase) are working with a big mass audience, one that needs to be won over more broadly, if you don’t mind my saying so. The Halloween episodes of these three shows demonstrated what I’m talking about. READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Karen Neal/ABC
There are certain kinds of shows that invite automatic derision, none more so than the high-concept sitcom. From My Favorite Martian to My Mother the Car through Holmes and Yo-Yo and Work It to ABC’s The Neighbors, the intentional silliness of the premise is an automatic turn-off to a lot of people. The key word there, though, is “intentional”: You don’t make My Mother the Car thinking you’re creating a brilliant satire of man’s dependency on the automobile. And Bosom Buddies was a potentially awful idea (which Work It copped), but was redeemed by the budding talents of Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari, among others. Similarly if not as successfully, the knowing creators of The Neighbors clearly want their show to serve as something more than a series of sight-gags and verbal gaffes, this time from a bunch of aliens who’ve moved into a suburban enclave. READ FULL STORY »
The Mindy Project and Ben and Kate, both of which premiered on Tuesday night flanked by a pair of new New Girl episodes, are the most promising of sitcoms in a fall season that’s not big on promising new sitcoms. If that seems like faint praise, it’s more like the sound of me hedging my bets, because while I was charmed by both, I recognize that the quality could rise or fall quickly. READ FULL STORY »
