MINISERIES PREMIERE: This British import, which aired there last fall, is a drama about the impending slow march into a second world war. The year is 1939 – and while England is at war already with Germany, the U.S. is practicing isolationism, until the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor in 1941. But overseas, World on Fire shows us the escalating conflicts through the eyes of British citizens and soldiers – and, significantly, also through the eyes of an American journalist in E

2020

Apr

THE WALKING DEAD By David Bianculli

This week’s episode, called “The Tower,” technically is the penultimate installment of this Season 10 – but since the final episode is being withheld until production and post-production can be completed if and when Hollywood, and Atlanta, return to show business as usual, this is it. The Whisperers, angered by the fate of Alpha and the discovery of her head on a pike, are on the move, in a very specific direction. And it’s a warpath.

2020

Apr

WESTWORLD By David Bianculli

So far, Season 3 of Westworld has been almost all about the women – especially Dolores and Maeve, two powerful women, or androids, taking control of their own actions and destinies. But tonight, we return to one of the central male figures of the series to date, whose future is similarly in flux. And perhaps his identity, too…

2020

Apr

HOMELAND By David Bianculli

Last week’s episode ended jarringly and ominously, with Carrie running away from Saul, and fleeing with her Russian friend, rather than return to America in handcuffs and under armed guard. Tonight, she’s considered “In Full Flight,” the title of tonight’s installment – but Saul knows better, and it seems only what she can do, and find, may stop the new President’s planned, and potentially disastrous, invasion of Pakistan.

2020

Apr

THE WINDERMERE CHILDREN By David Bianculli

PREMIERE: On the same night PBS dramatizes the beginnings of WWII in World on Fire, it also presents a dramatization set at the end of that same war. The Windermere Children tells of the time, in 1945, when England opened its doors to an estimated 1,000 young Holocaust survivors, and dispatched them to safe havens, places where they could learn English, be educated, fed, and generally reclaimed as human beings. Some 400 of those young people were sent to the affluent Calgarth

2020

Apr

LAST WEEK TONIGHT WITH JOHN OLIVER By David Bianculli

Last week on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, the host, returning from virus-dictated hiatus to present his HBO show from his own home, ended the program by sharing his discovery of footage from a vintage local public TV fundraising auction. Very vintage, as in 1992, and very local, as in York, PA. A local artist, Brian Swords, had several works up for bid, and Oliver was fascinated by them, because one series of paintings depicted human-like rats in amorous embraces. One painting,

2020

Apr

1968: BOSTON AND JAMES BROWN USE TV TO CURB MLK-RELATED UNREST By TV WW

On this day in 1968, Boston city leaders used an impromptu live concert telecast to curb civil disturbance in the wake of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination...

2020

Apr

1970: CBS CANCELS 'PETTICOAT JUNCTION' By TV WW

On this day in 1970, CBS cancelled the sitcom, Petticoat Junction...

2020

Apr

DIRECTED BY PETER BOGDANOVICH By David Bianculli

There aren’t many critics who have gone from analyzing movies or TV to writing and directing them – but the best of that small list is impressive indeed. It includes French writer-director Francois Truffaut, who famously interviewed Alfred Hitchcock for a film-by-film dissection in Hitchcock/Truffaut, and brilliant British TV writer Dennis Potter, who began as a television critic before writing such epic miniseries as Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detec

2020

Apr

THE UPSIDE By David Bianculli

Based on the French film Intouchables, this 2019 drama pairs an unlikely duo of actors: Bryan Cranston, playing a wealthy and cranky quadriplegic, and Kevin Hart, playing an ex-con hired to assist him, who ends up offering a new outlook on life. It may sound like a sort of Wheeling Mr. Daisy – but Cranston and Hart, separately and certainly together, deserve a moment of your attention, to see how they’re approaching this American adaptation of the French screenpla

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