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

 
 
2015
Jul
17
 
 
This 2011 movie launched a lot of stars, or at least featured actresses who are much more famous now than they were four years ago: Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Bryce Dallas Howard and Jessica Chastain.
 
 
 
  
 
 
2015
Jul
16
 
 

Contenders for this year’s Emmy Awards were announced Thursday, with some nice nominations, but also with a few snubs that can be summed up in a single word: AAAAAARGH!...

 
 
 
  
 
 
2015
Jul
16
 
 

In Rescue Me, Denis Leary was great at playing a flawed, flustered yet innately likable guy. In his new FX series, Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll, he does it again – this time with music…

 
 
 
  
 
 
2015
Jul
16
 
 
Stephen Colbert is orbiting the desk of CBS’s Late Show, but isn’t scheduled to touch down until September. Meanwhile, every so often, he surfaces with a bit of video to remind us that he’s out there, and still very, very funny...
 
 
 
  
 
 
2015
Jul
16
 
 
Played once again at the classic course at St Andrews in Scotland, the first day of this year’s British open is televised live by ESPN – starting at 4 a.m. ET, and going all the way until 3 p.m. ET. The course is gorgeous (take that, this year’s parched and pockmarked U.S. Open), and so venerable, the first British Open played on this course was back in 1873. And at the time I write this, around 6:30 a.m. ET, both Jordan Spieth and Tiger Woods have gotten off to streaky starts:
 
 
 
  
 
 
2015
Jul
16
 
 
And another TV tradition bites the dust. Used to be, the Emmy nominations each year would be announced at 8:30 a.m. ET – to facilitate the morning TV shows, which would present them live. But this year, for the first time, the announcements are being held back to 11:30 a.m. ET, when there’s no live broadcast TV coverage scheduled. Why the change? Because it’s thought that the morning-show East Coast TV audience is less important, these days, than trending on Twitter and getting
 
 
 
  
 
 
2015
Jul
16
 
 
Last week’s doubleheader of a series premiere was a total, pleasant surprise, serving up the most mature and dramatically interesting CW series in years. It’s a British import from 2013, but still, make an effort to catch it. Each 30-minute episode presents two people on a date – different people in each installment, with some returning faces over the course of the series. Tonight’s first episode, for example, presents Oona Chaplin from Game of Thrones as Mia, whom we saw
 
 
 
  
 
 
2015
Jul
16
 
 
Tonight’s new episode is called “The State of the Union Is Not Good” – and packs together a series of crises in the Seventies to show why that decade was so tumultuous. Indeed it was. But even with the respective meltdowns of Watergate and Three Mile Island, the decade that takes bragging rights for that remains the Sixties. And that goes not only for the 1960s, but the 1860s as well. I’ve just saying…
 
 
 
  
 
 
2015
Jul
16
 
 
SERIES PREMIERE: Denis Leary’s new FX series, after the terrific Rescue Me, allows him to hit the same strong suits he explored on that firefighting series: the close-quarters camaraderie of guys when they tease and irritate one another, and the often very different perspectives and approaches of men and women in both professional and personal circumstances. In this new series, Leary plays Johnny Rock, a once, and briefly, famous rock singer, John Corbett plays his former lead guitarist, a
 
 
 
  
 
 
2015
Jul
15
 
 

It’s often a double-edged sword for fleshy comics playing sitcom dads. You’re expected to be pretty much a nincompoop... On the other hand you tend to get a svelte, smarter, comparative knockout for a TV wife...