Image Credit: Michael Parmelee/NBC
Tonight on Law & Order: SVU, you can watch convicted rapist Mike Tyson portray a victim of rape. It’s a perfectly competent performance, even if it doesn’t require Tyson to do much more than be a variation on himself, a tough man who tends to speak, in public, in a soft voice. (Though he does one growling “Get outta here!” quite convincingly.) Still, this is stunt-casting operating at a nervy level of cynicism. READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: BET
May I make a brief recommendation that you watch tonight’s second episode of Real Husbands of Hollywood? This new fake reality, semi-scripted, all-funny, feels-true show debuted to big ratings on BET last week. It deserved its large audience. Led by Kevin Hart, Real Husbands spoofs Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise while getting at some truth — namely, that this reality-TV genre is a ridiculous sham that only needed (a) a slight push to make the ridiculousness hilarious, and (b) it’s time men were made to look as foolish as women do on the Bravo shows. READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: HBO
There’s a lot on TV tonight — the Golden Globes, new episodes of The Good Wife and Downton Abbey, the season premiere of Girls — but let me urge you to try and catch the second-season premiere of HBO’s Enlightened. This half-hour co-created by co-stars Laura Dern and Mike White is extraordinarily good: funny and moving and constantly surprising. READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Sundance Channel
If you’ve never seen The Staircase, the eight-part documentary about accused wife-murderer Michael Peterson, you’ve got to watch it tonight on the Sundance Channel. It’s that rare long documentary about a tabloid crime that becomes a deep exploration of death, the justice system, and the very process of making a documentary film. READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Giovanni Rufino/CBS
Tonight, Elemetary returns with its second episode, and with it, a fresh challenge. Its premiere was a ratings hit, and a solid pilot. Now, it has to prove it can come up with another plot as twisty as its first, and do some work in further delineating the modern Sherlock Holmes played by Jonny Lee Miller. READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Douglas C. Pizac/AP
Tonight’s edition of PBS American Masters, titled Johnny Carson: King of Late Night, offers a well-edited description of why Johnny Carson is held in such high esteem as late night’s most influential host, even as it carefully avoids any hard questions about Carson’s talent or originality. READ FULL STORY »
Smash concludes its first season tonight, and we’ll see who gets to take center-stage, Megan Hilty’s Ivy or Katharine McPhee’s Karen, to portray Marilyn Monroe in the show’s Broadway-show-within-a-TV-show, the don’t-call-it-a-bomb Bombshell, previewing in Boston. READ FULL STORY »
Sherlock returns tonight for a second season on PBS’ Masterpiece. Before the first series premiered, I had been dubious: A modern Sherlock Holmes, adapting to new technology with a Watson who blogged the Great Detective exploits? That seemed dubious. READ FULL STORY »
Sunday nights are getting more crowded with good, essential stuff every week: It’s time to start picking and choosing what you’ll watch in real time, what you’ll DVR for later viewing, and what you might just give up on because it’s just too much TV.
Mad Men. Game of Thrones. The Good Wife. The Killing. READ FULL STORY »
Image Credit: Richard Foreman/ABC
So have you been watching GCB? Do you think it’s improved since its premiere, or settled into a more comfortable groove as a satirical look at the unwarranted piousness of a group of wacky Dallas denizens? Do you think having Newt Gingrich single the show out as an example of the media’s “anti-Christian bias” is valid? READ FULL STORY »
