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

 
 
2020
Apr
30
 
 
Last week, I wrote about the scheduled episode, and its revelations about the sinister, conspiratorial “Memo 618.” But that episode didn’t appear. There was no conspiracy – just a one-week production delay, caused by stay-at-home cautions that had everyone sequestered in different places across the country. And while Robert and Michelle King and their post-production staff were figuring out how to complete their shows from a distance, they practiced by producing an explan
 
 
 
  
 
 
2020
Apr
30
 
 
SPECIAL PREMIERE: Here’s another limited-time-offer treat from England’s National Theatre. On its website and on its own YouTube channel, for one week beginning this afternoon, National Theatre At Home presents yet another televised stage production from its archives. Today they’re giving us a double treat: alternating showings of its 2011 production of Frankenstein, in which the two lead actors took turns swapping roles. One is Jonny Lee Miller, who played Sherlock H
 
 
 
  
 
 
2020
Apr
30
 
 
This retrospective special by The Paley Center for Media, produced in cooperation with NBC, salutes the much-loved NBC sitcom, which premiered in 2009 and presented its final episode in 2015. Or so we thought. But series creator Michael Schur came up with a way to present a new, reunion episode premiering tonight on NBC, just after this special. It’ll include footage from a tenth-anniversary event held at the Center’s Los Angeles wing in March 2019 (pictured). I should point out that
 
 
 
  
 
 
2020
Apr
30
 
 
SERIES RETURN: It’s a return only for this one special episode, for now – but boy, is this suddenly produced and announced “socially distanced” episode a welcome TV treat. (Not only welcome, but generous: It's also a benefit, for Feeding America.) Amy Poehler, returning as Leslie Knope, is worried, during this pandemic shutdown, about her Parks and Recreation friends and colleagues, and so she checks in with them, in and beyond Pawnee, by computer, five years af
 
 
 
  
 
 
2020
Apr
30
 
 
Television continues to play its part in the drive to reduce our attention spans to zero. Fortunately, some of the mini-content is not uninteresting...
 
 
 
  
 
 
2020
Apr
30
 
 
A new art form – we’ll call it “social-distance theater” – takes a big step tonight...
 
 
 
  
 
 
2020
Apr
29
 
 
Normal People might be the most revolutionary series on television this spring. Violating every rule of what viewers are said to crave these days, it’s a story about, get this, normal people...
 
 
 
  
 
 
2020
Apr
29
 
 
SERIES PREMIERE: The entire Season 1 of this new drama series, a co-production of Hulu and the BBC, is unveiled today on Hulu. Watch in a binge chunk, and you’ll travel briskly through a few years in the lives of its two young main characters. Daisy Edgar-Jones plays Marianne – a well-to-do Irish lass who usually is the smartest person in the room, and usually lets the others know it. Paul Mescal plays Connell, a working-class bloke who is almost as smart, and much more reserved. We
 
 
 
  
 
 
2020
Apr
29
 
 
Tonight’s new episode (with this series, Hulu is dropping new installments weekly, rather than all at once) is called “Phyllis & Fred & Brenda & Marc.” Presumably, that’s a sly nod to the late ’60s movie Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, a comedy-drama about would-be suburban swingers. Except in this hour of Mrs. America, these couples aren’t strange bedfellows at all: They’re combatants in an on-air TV debate –
 
 
 
  
 
 
2020
Apr
29
 
 
In tonight’s new episode, the vampires fear they’ve been victimized by an electronics curse (join the club), while the brood also decides to plan and carry out its first real target mission against others in their neighborhood.