DAVID BIANCULLI

Founder / Editor

ERIC GOULD

Associate Editor

LINDA DONOVAN

Assistant Editor

Contributors

ALEX STRACHAN

MIKE HUGHES

KIM AKASS

MONIQUE NAZARETH

ROGER CATLIN

GARY EDGERTON

TOM BRINKMOELLER

GERALD JORDAN

NOEL HOLSTON

 
 
2017
Sep
25
 
 
SEASON PREMIERE: This is the Season 11 premiere of this incredibly successful CBS sitcom, easily the most visible and popular program continuing the multi-camera, filmed-before-an-audience format instituted so long ago by another CBS sitcom, I Love Lucy. Tonight’s program picks up where last season’s comedy cliffhanger ended: with Jim Parson’s Sheldon on one knee, proposing to Amy (Mayim Bialik).
 
 
 
  
 
 
2017
Sep
25
 
 
SEASON PREMIERE: This is Cycle 13 of this good-hearted reality competition show – and good-hearted is what makes it stand out from so many others, which is why it just won another Emmy as Outstanding Reality Competition Series. The earliest episodes of each cycle are among the best, because they’re full of discovery and surprise. This cycle, the four judges who will listen to the voices of the contestants, and judge them sight unseen, are always-there anchors Blake Shelton and Adam L
 
 
 
  
 
 
2017
Sep
25
 
 
Episode 7. Hold on to your historical seats. Tonight’s episode is titled “The Veneer of Civilization,” and it covers the period from June 1968 to May 1969. Just the summer of 1968 alone is one of the most tumultuous periods in our country’s history – I teach it, in my TV History & Appreciation class covering the 1960s and 1970s, and that summer alone because of the quantity and speed of tragic events. And this episode covers all that, then keeps going, in a mann
 
 
 
  
 
 
2017
Sep
25
 
 
SERIES PREMIERE: Because today is the official start of the 2017-18 TV season, CBS is following its season premiere of The Big Bang Theory with that show’s new prequel series, Young Sheldon. Jim Parsons, who plays Sheldon on Big Bang, is here as well – in voice, at least, providing his adult perspective of his own childhood, as this new series revisits his past. It’s a filmed show, as was The Wonder Years, and has a tone commendably similar to that superb period sitcom. It also
 
 
 
  
 
 
2017
Sep
25
 
 
SEASON PREMIERE: For the Season 2 premiere, this otherwise negligibly mentionable sitcom makes a major, noteworthy change. Leah Remini, who co-starred as Kevin James’ wife on King of Queens, joins Kevin Can Wait as his co-star on this show as well. Not as his wife – but as his former police partner, a role she introduced at the end of last season. Given this change, the character played by James on Kevin Can Wait wouldn’t have to lose his current TV wife, played by Erinn Hayes&
 
 
 
  
 
 
2017
Sep
25
 
 
SERIES PREMIERE: The high-concept idea behind This Is Us, looking at the same extended family through different generations, was last season’s biggest success for broadcast TV. It makes copycat sense, then, for similar ideas to find their ways onto the network schedules this season – and this new sitcom presents an unusual look at the same character, at very different points in his life, each played by a different actor. Jack Dylan Grazer plays the character of Alex Riley at age 14.
 
 
 
  
 
 
2017
Sep
25
 
 
SERIES PREMIERE: Jordan Klepper, the snappiest Daily Show correspondent to make the transition from Jon Stewart to Trevor Noah, gets his own show beginning tonight. Comedy Central executives weren’t happy enough with The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore (though I was), so here comes this new try at holding on to the Daily Show audience in the 11:30 ET time slot – a task that Stephen Colbert found so easy not so many years ago.
 
 
 
  
 
 
2017
Sep
24
 
 
SEASON PREMIERE: It was precisely 49 years ago today – on Sept. 24, 1968 – that CBS presented the inaugural telecast of a new TV newsmagazine, 60 Minutes. Created by Don Hewitt and co-hosted by Mike Wallace and Harry Reasoner, it not only has survived on TV ever since, but has generated a consistently excellent, usually unparalleled body of work in the TV newsmagazine field. To date, 60 Minutes has earned 20 Peabody Awards, 138 Emmys, and still manages, many weeks, to land installmen
 
 
 
  
 
 
2017
Sep
24
 
 
Ice-T and Soledad O’Brien, a reporting team you don’t encounter every day, collaborate on this two-hour special, which poses the long-unanswered question, Who Shot Biggie & Tupac? Don’t expect it to be answered tonight, either, necessarily. But here this special is, anyway…
 
 
 
  
 
 
2017
Sep
24
 
 
Part 6. This begins week two of the Ken Burns-Lynn Novick documentary miniseries The Vietnam War.  And though the five episodes to date have been remarkably instructive, powerful and emotional, these next five more than double down on everything. Tonight, for example, is the episode entitled “Things Fall Apart,” a title that refers to both sides of the war – beginning, in January 1968, with the country-wide attack known as the Tet Offensive. For a full review of tonight&rs