As was made thumpingly obvious in its super-sized premiere, how much you enjoy Downton Abbey‘s third season is, more than ever for this series, predicated on just how much of an Anglophile you are. You have to be willing to go pretty thick into the weediness of British property rights and privilege, and to realize that as much as we have great affection for the Crawleys, they — like real people we love and put up with, such as family members — have their blind spots, their objectionable beliefs, their frustrating set ways. For instance, we don’t have to turn a deaf ear to anything as (to most of this family’s way of thinking) crassly complex as the struggle for Irish independence in order maintain the illusion of the Crawleys as a clan to care about. Me, I was amused as always, and was also perfectly content to feel irritation periodically mixing with my enjoyment of these toffee-nosed twits, these occasionally creepy-Crawleys. READ FULL STORY »
Buckwild premiered on Thursday night, preceded by the usual this-is-the-end-of-civilization condemnation/hype that greets any well-promoted MTV reality series featuring youthful humans. But after watching the two back-to-back initial episodes, I’d say MTV’s main problem is that these West Virginia kids may be a little too likable to get all huffy and self-righteous about. READ FULL STORY »
began our new year with a new episode that may have had you tearing up before the opening credits. In the space of a few minutes, the show went from raucous laughter (courtesy of the Braverman women, out on the town for a night of boozy revelry, culminating in Kristina’s excellently impudent question to Sarah as to who has the bigger endowment, Hank or Mark?) to hushed poignancy. READ FULL STORY »
Interviewed on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday morning, President Obama told host David Gregory that he thinks the “fiscal cliff” will be avoided in “the next 48 hours”; he also addressed questions about gun control and the attack in Benghazi. Perhaps because he was interviewing the President in the White House, David Gregory refrained from waving around a gun magazine to illustrate any point.
Obama referred to some of his policy opponents in Congress as “folks can’t say ‘yes’ to good offers.” Gregory responded, “What is it about you, Mr. President, that is so hard to say ‘yes’ to?”
Obama’s response was basically a verbal shrug: “The way [the Republicans] are behaving is that their only priority is making sure that tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans are protected. That seems to be their only overriding, unifying theme.” 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 »
The Kennedy Center Honors ceremony, broadcast on CBS on Wednesday night, is the annual event in which celebrities in various fields get all gussied up, travel to Washington, D.C., rub shoulders with the President, and hear exalting speeches about themselves. This year, the testimonials were laced with traces that don’t often make it into a taped TV awards-show final cut: frankness, near-brutal honesty, and almost tearful love. READ FULL STORY »
Jack Klugman, who has died at 90, was a TV-star anomaly — not conventionally handsome, with the jagged voice and hangdog demeanor of a character actor, and a performer who was as comfortable being part of an ensemble as he was a lead actor. His two signature roles — sloppy sportswriter Oscar Madison on The Odd Couple and shrewd medical examiner in Quincy, M.E. — were as different as could be, yet Klugman was expansively comfortable as both of those men. READ FULL STORY »
One of the most lovely things you can watch during the holiday season is the 1987 film of Dylan Thomas’ “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” starring the late Denholm Elliott. It’s a faithful yet playful adaptation of Thomas’ work, a narrative poem conceived as a radio play, and the film is at once appropriately sentimental about Christmases past and tartly realistic about the Christmas depicted in the film’s present. It stands in contrast to so much Christmas entertainment that is either gloppy or pious; Elliott, as both narrator and lead actor, provides a vinegary crispness to the role of nostalgic grandfather.
But here’s the thing: A Child’s Christmas in Wales is difficult to find. READ FULL STORY »
He asked for it: On Sunday morning’s Meet the Press, National Rifle Association president Wayne LaPierre said, “If it’s crazy to call for putting police in and securing our schools to protect our children, then call me crazy.” Okay, Wayne. You’re crazy. And you kinda sound like a more militant Carly Rae Jepsen. READ FULL STORY »
Here, as I do every year, I follow up my TV Top 10, which you can find here and in the new, print issue of EW, with my picks for numbers 11 through 20. Some of you have said these are consolation prizes, but that’s not so. There’s so much good television, that for a few years, I was stuffing my Top 10 with entries that allowed for multiple shows (“Best Thursday-night sitcoms,” for instance, allowed me to sneak three shows into one number – those were the days, eh?) until that started to become unwieldy and ridiculous. (Besides, as a part-time music critic, I like the “Top 20” phrase, with its roots in pop-music radio.)
11. Parenthood (NBC) Monica Potter’s Christina cheating death; Ray Romano trying to get Lauren Graham to cheat on Jason Ritter – great stuff. Julia and Joel adopting Victor – not so great. A show like Parenthood is always going to have trouble juggling its subplots and servicing its large cast, but this season it came damn close to broadcasting its best season ever.
12. Luck(HBO) It got better with each succeeding episode; Dustin Hoffman’s was just one of many finely shaded performances (along with a couple of gleefully over-the-top ones). It’s too bad this series got sidelined; the Michael Mann-David Milch production seemed headed for a victory lap if it had had a chance to run for a second season.
13. Fringe (Fox) The alternate-universe versions of my beloved characters never grabbed me the way the originals did, but this season made a good, strenuous effort to return to the fundamental dynamic that made this series so close to great: Its abiding notion that you take family where you can find it, and that that connection is humanity’s greatest source of love, fear, power, and vulnerability.
14. Sons of Anarchy (FX) Kurt Sutter’s take on Shakespeare is becoming more rigorous, more true to its source, yet also more exaggerated, with each season. This time around, he grounded the inherent absurdity of bikers-with-a-conscience (well, a few of them) with imaginative touches such as a finely drawn character for guest star Jimmy Smits to play.
15. Archer (FX) Dirty, slapstick, suspenseful, complex – what started out as a cartoon of James Bond plus The Man from U.N.C.L.E. has become its own unique piece of animated art.
16. The Walking Dead (AMC) Killin’ zombies: The stripped-back new mandate for the series cut away virtually all of its ponderous, moralizing flab while leaving the heart of its reason to exist – to ask, what does it mean to be human? – intact, throbbing with life.
17. Southland (TNT) The police procedural as a series of morality plays, free of preachment as well as cynicism. Probably the action series most mindful of morality, and willing to dramatize examples of it.
18. Hunted (Cinemax) If creator Frank Spotnitz was going to make a spy series about a woman who could pass as both a nanny and a bad-ass, he certainly was a witty man to cast Melissa George, queen of the lippy pout, in the role. She dove right into this satisfyingly knotty series, executed the fight scenes well, and reminded us why they used to nickname this channel Skinemax. No mean feats at all. READ FULL STORY »
