No new fall TV has left me with more conflicted feelings and thoughts than American Horror Story, the new haunted-house saga from Glee‘s Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk.
Which means, among other things, that it must be doing something right: Provocation is a lot better than predictability, and the one thing you cannot accuse Horror Story of being is predictable.
Or maybe you can. I’ve marshaled some of my thoughts on this below: READ FULL STORY »
Watching Prohibition, you can almost hear Ken Burns knock back a shot of Bushmills, slam the glass on the bar, and yell, “Yee haw — let’s make us some television!” There’s a hot-cheeked vigor to this three-night production on PBS, crammed with history, revelation, drama, and opinion. It’s both an eye-opener to the past, and a remarkable metaphor for the woozy present we’re reeling through today. READ FULL STORY »
Watching the debut of New Girl, you may have been thinking, “I’ve heard these jokes before.” Oh, right: It was in the 21,875 commercials Fox offered in promoting the show, revealing punchline after punchline. Is there such a thing as too much promotion — specifically, promos that give away the best gags? Only the ratings will tell, but even if you hadn’t already downloaded it on iTunes or watched it on Hulu, I’ll bet a lot of you thought you’d seen much of this half hour well before it aired.
Not that Zooey Deschanel can or should be blamed for any of this. READ FULL STORY »
An absent Charlie Sheen stole the ninth-season premiere of Two and a Half Men from Ashton Kutcher without showing up. Much of the half hour was taken up with Charlie Harper jokes. He’d died in France, hit by a train; the early line “his body exploded like a balloon full of meat,” crafted by four writers including Chuck Lorre, made sure there was scant sentimentality over Charlie’s departure — Harper or Sheen. Kutcher made his entrance READ FULL STORY »
Talk about a comeback: Just as the SAMCRO boys get out of prison after 14 months, mount their hogs, and rumble home in the season 4 premiere of Sons of Anarchy, so does the series itself return, triumphantly, to its roots. After a third season spent making wobbly journeys back and forth to Ireland in an attenuated subplot that slackened the pace, SOA is back in its hometown of Charming, California, where there’s a whole world of trouble. READ FULL STORY »
Damages returns tonight. It will spend its fourth season on DirecTV, and feature John Goodman as its biggest-name guest star. Meanwhile, Arthur Frobisher — a.k.a., Ted Danson — has eluded death only to take over as boss at CSI this fall. READ FULL STORY »
President Obama is meeting with House Speaker (a.k.a., Head Of Household) John Boehner tonight, at roughly the same time a new episode of Big Brother airs on CBS, to try and negotiate a deal about some revised form of a deficit reduction package and raising the debt ceiling. The details of how this mismatched couple will resolve this are roughly as complicated as trying to figure out the new Big Brother rules about playing in teams of two, not as individuals, and which team to nominate for eviction. READ FULL STORY »
Just a quick heads-up: If you can, watch Hot Coffee on HBO tonight at 9 p.m. EST. Remember the 1994 court case of the woman who was awarded $2.9 million for spilling a cup of McDonald’s coffee on herself? It even became a plot point in an episode of Seinfeld. Well, you don’t know the half of it. READ FULL STORY »
When Law & Order: Criminal Intent brings the gavel down one final time tonight, an era will have ended: the entire Law & Order franchise will essentially be finished. Oh, sure, Special Victims Unit will come back this fall, but without Christopher Meloni and only a limited number of Mariska Hargitay appearances. The creepiest of the L&O spin-offs (all those pervs; all those children and women in jeopardy plots!), SVU exists primarily as manipulative Emmy-bait and tarnishes the Law & Order legacy. No, it’s Criminal Intent‘s departure on Sunday night that signals a singular TV institution’s end. READ FULL STORY »
