Two SNL events happened this weekend, one you’re probably aware of and one that didn’t receive nearly as much attention. I’m writing about the SNL 40th anniversary special on Sunday night, but also NBC’s interesting decision to rebroadcast the very first SNL ever the Saturday night before. SNL 40th Anniversary Special…This was 3 and a half hours…
Category: TV Reviews
Series Finale: So Long “Parenthood,” I’ll Miss You…Plus, Ranking the Seasons
I get sad just thinking about it, but a majority of my favorite shows have either gone off the air recently or will be going off in the next six months. I’m talking about everything from the dearly departed “Breaking Bad,” “Southland,” “Futurama,” “Eastbound and Down,” “Fringe,” and the more recently deceased “The Newsroom” to the don’t-let-the-door-hit-you-on-the-way-out “Boardwalk Empire,” the…
TV Reviews: “Broad City” and “Man Seeking Woman”
Two millennial-courting comedies that just might become the next big cult hits… Broad City…In a perfect world, this would receive the attention that “Girls” does as it may actually be a technically “better” exploration of Brooklyn female friendship, and is certainly a lot funnier. The new season began with a classic sequence of Ilana and…
TV Reviews: “Galavant” and “The Good Wife”
After a couple of weeks where scripted television more or less took a vacation—when the only new episodes of TV available are “Mulaney” and some On-Demand-only episodes of the cancelled “Selfie,” you know things are rough—it seemed to come back last night as CBS and ABC decided to be TV networks again. Galavant…I have a…
TV Reviews: The Season Finales of “Homeland” and “The Affair”
I won’t lie, these weren’t the best season finales, but I think the seasons as a whole were incredibly strong, with both shows firing at the top of their game. It’s almost shocking that both of these shows were on Showtime rather than HBO. The Affair…The show revolves around the gimmick of subjective storytelling, as…
TV Review: Good Riddance to Craig Ferguson’s “The Late Late Show”
It’s not that Craig Ferguson is a bad guy, it’s just that he’s not a very funny or interesting or interested guy. What I mean by interested is that he had a bad habit of having a very narrow focus, and diverting each interview to his “safe zone.” I don’t think I saw one person he interviewed where he…
TV Review: “The Colbert Report” Series Finale
It was sad to see him go, but I loved watching him leave. I have no idea why CBS chose the best satirist on television to succeed exhausted late night host David Letterman and thus deprive us of the sharpest, most hilarious, and unapologetically political talk show on television. Letterman usually looks like he’d rather…
TV Review: “The Newsroom” Series Finale
The under appreciated, wrongly-maligned Aaron Sorkin drama came to a close last night, and I might be the only reviewer in America sad to see it go. [“Newsroom” was a little too hard on voyeuristic/vulture-istic new media to get most blogs behind it, and old media felt pitifully defensive about the show telling them how…
TV Review: “Sons of Anarchy” Final Episode
It was a long, drawn-out final season that definitely suffered from some serious padding. [Each episode was usually 90 minutes, and sometimes longer than that.] Since the entire season’s plot was mostly about revenge for the events of season 6, and not many new characters/storylines were introduced it felt like stalling until we finally got…
TV Review: “Gracepoint” Series Finale
All’s not-so-well that ends not-so-well on this mediocre Fox drama. True, I haven’t seen the BBC’s version (called “Broadchurch”) but others have said that this American version is sometimes a scene-for-scene remake, and has been a pretty faithful adaptation, and it makes me wonder why that show became such a phenomenon. Anyway, the show wasn’t…
TV Reviews: “Eaten Alive” and Rogen/Franco “Naked and Afraid”
Two stunts, but only one of them was intentionally fake… “Eaten Alive”…Everyone else has already ripped this special to shreds…and they were right. It was two hours long with about ten minutes of real action. The first hour was total padding, and it was only at the very end of the second hour that we…
“Peter Pan Live” Does it Soar?
I can’t say Peter Pan Live totally soars, but I will say that it seems like an improvement over last year’s The Sound of Music (all ten minutes of that that I watched). I finished “Peter Pan Live,” so it’s definitely better in that regard. All in all, I thought it was enjoyable, cheesy, and…
TV Review: Inside the Fascinating Starz Series “The Chair”
“The Chair” is a reality competition series—-and I know that sounds awful, but keep reading—-where two different first-time directors are given the same movie script and asked to make their own versions of it. [I told you! Plus, it’s got Project Greenlight’s Chris Moore, who’s clearly channelling Danny McBride as he casually drops hilarious truths…