SEASON PREMIERE: Damien Lewis and Paul Giamatti, as billionaire Bobby Axelrod and prosecuting attorney Chuck Rhoades, haven’t forgotten about how much they hate one another – but in this Season 2 premiere, there are other imminent foes and distractions as well. Most interesting, perhaps, is where Chuck’s now-estranged wife Wendy (Maggie Siff), who also has severed ties as a former valued employee of Bobby’s, will end up.

2017

Feb

CRASHING By David Bianculli

SERIES PREMIERE: Here’s a new series, created by and starring comedian Pete Holmes, that’s partly, wryly autobiographical, and has to do with an unsuccessful young comic who becomes adrift after catching his wife cheating, and ending his marriage. This premiere episode serves as a launching pad, but once it hits orbit, the design of Crashing has poor Pete “crashing” on the couches of various comics as he works his way through his emotional riptide and tries to find a work

2017

Feb

LAST WEEK TONIGHT WITH JOHN OLIVER By David Bianculli

Last week, John Oliver returned with a vengeance – or, at least, a brilliant stunt in which he established the early-morning cable news TV viewing habits of President Donald Trump, then introduced ads he and his staff had written and produced specifically to run on cable news shows in the Washington, D.C. market the next morning. They starred a drawling, friendly, aging cowboy, who, instead of hawking a mail-order type of catheter, was targeting a very specific audience – POTUS himse

2017

Feb

HBO'S 'CRASHING': A "SMALL" COMEDY MEASURES UP By Ed Bark

HBO’s Crashing looks at New York’s oft-dispiriting stand up comic sub-world, with Pete Holmes playing himself and determined to make it after all...

2017

Feb

HBO’S ‘BIG LITTLE LIES’ IS FILLED WITH BIG MYSTERIES By David Hinckley

HBO would love to ride Big Little Lies back to the top of the pay-cable drama mountain...

2017

Feb

PLANET EARTH MARATHON By David Bianculli

When the original Planet Earth miniseries was co-produced and presented by Discovery Channel a decade ago, that network took the astoundingly infuriating, wrong-headed and insulting step of replacing the narration by Sir David Attenborough with newly recorded narration by Sigourney Weaver. Nothing about Sigourney Weaver (her father, after all, was one of TV’s first visionary programmers, NBC’s Sylvester “Pat” Weaver), but swapping out the best nature documentary host on t

2017

Feb

THE LEGEND OF TARZAN By David Bianculli

This updated 2016 version of the Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan story died on the vine, so to speak – but with its leading players, it’s worth a peek as it arrives on HBO. Alexander Skarsgard, who co-stars in tomorrow night’s Big Little Lies on the same network, has the title role, and Margot Robbie, last seen as Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad, plays the woman who tames him, brings him to London, and understands him better than anyone. We may have different reasons for checking out

2017

Feb

BRITNEY EVER AFTER By David Bianculli

Not a recommendation: I’m just noting the arrival of this new Lifetime telemovie, in case you’re in search of a Saturday night Guilty Pleasure. It’s a made-for-TV biography of Britney Spears, starring Natasha Bassett as the pop star with the very public up-and-down private life.

2017

Feb

PLANET EARTH II By David Bianculli

MINISERIES PREMIERE: TVWW contributor Alex Strachan has made it a personal pet project to bang the drums for this mature documentary sequel, writing several different articles about it, which you can (and should) read in his TV That Matters columns here, here, and here. The sequel to Planet Earth, arriving in the States 11 years after the original, shows two things with jaw-dropping clarity. One is how far TV technology and mature filmmaking have come in the intervening years, because the images

2017

Feb

NETWORK By David Bianculli

Every time I show this 1976 movie to one of my classes at Rowan University, I’m astounded all over again at how prescient writer Paddy Chayefsky was, about everything. Everything from the corporate acquisitions of broadcast networks and the encroachment of bottom-line profits and ratings into their news divisions, to the rise of reality television and angry and unchecked TV public-affairs “personalities,” is in here, in a movie made more than 40 years ago. Peter Finch is brilli

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