The “major announcement” that Stephen Colbert promised this week has come to pass. He formally transferred his super PAC to Jon Stewart during Thursday night’s Colbert Report. In so doing, Colbert is able to enter the Republican presidential primary in South Carolina, his home state. (A campaigning politician is legally prohibited from simultaneously running a super PAC.) A graphic appeared onscreen screaming, “I’m doing it!” READ FULL STORY »
Work It made its sad little debut on Tuesday tonight, for a half-hour that ABC might have given over to coverage of the Iowa caucuses. Not that ABC deserves any special criticism in that latter regard — NBC might have saved the Republic two hours of idiocy if it hadn’t aired the 13th season premiere of The Biggest Loser. READ FULL STORY »
This is always a wonderful time of the year for The Late Show with David Letterman. It’s when Letterman invites old friends onto the show, a period when friendship and honest sentiment occasionally nudge aside the movie stars plugging their holiday releases. READ FULL STORY »
Homeland finished up its first season on Sunday night with an expanded episode that pushed the parallel narratives of Claire Danes’ Carrie Mathison and Damian Lewis’ Nicholas Brody to extremes that worked as both cliff-hangers and as provocative revelations. READ FULL STORY »
“It’s time to sell out,” host China Chow told the remaining six artists on this week’s Work of Art. Of course, some would say they sold out when they signed on to Work of Art. But what sounded like a banal idea — exploring, as Simon de Pury said, the “art versus commerce” conundrum by having the contestants make art, sell it on the street, and then display it in the gallery ended up with one of this series’ livelier episodes. READ FULL STORY »
So many subplots, so little time. Sons of Anarchy closed out its strong season with a finale that was both magisterially dramatic and oddly hasty. The final episode of season four began with Lincoln Potter getting the FBI ready to close in on the Sons of Anarchy’s summit meeting with the Irish Kings. 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 »
It’s always nice to have a person on a reality show with whom a viewer can identify, who speaks on camera the thoughts you’re having in your head. In the case of this week’s Work of Art: The Increasingly Fruitless Search for the Next Great Artist, that person was Lola, who responded to the careful, thoughtful critique of Simon de Pury by saying, after he’d walked away, “Whatever. I don’t care what Simon says.” READ FULL STORY »
