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

 
 
2011
Aug
25
 
 
Louis C.K. Is about to wrap up his second season of -- I'm not sure of the right term -- dramedy? Performance art work? Stand-up documentary? A hybrid of all of them? Whatever it is, Louie (Thursday nights at 10:30 ET on FX) is something uniquely his. And it deserves credit as a TV milestone, for both its structure and its intent...
 
 
 
  
 
 
2011
Aug
25
 
 
Wow! When I first heard about Fox's new "Buried Treasure" (Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET), I thought: I'm going to love this show. It's Antiques Roadshow coming to houses like mine and justifying all those years of going to garage, church and yard sales. It's about everyday people picking up something for a dollar or a dime that is going to make them -- well, a millionaire...
 
 
 
  
 
 
2011
Aug
24
 
 
Bill Moyers will be coming back to TV in January, it was announced yesterday, with a weekly interview series called Moyers & Company, featuring one-on-one conversations with people other than the usual TV talking heads. I'm thrilled by that news, but PBS obviously isn't. The new Moyers show is offered not by the network, but offered instead to local member stations via the American Public Television distribution system...
 
 
 
  
 
 
2011
Aug
23
 
 
The latest edition of the PBS series P.O.V., premiering Tuesday night at 10 ET (check local listings), is a potpourri program called Short Cuts, an hour of six entertaining short films. They're all good -- but two of them, animated versions of conversations recorded for the oral history project StoryCorps, are gold. And it's gold that, like the Simpsons shorts originally featured on The Tracey Ullman Show, should be spun off into their own regular series. It could be the most popular, and profitable, and even important, new PBS series in years...
 
 
 
  
 
 
2011
Aug
23
 
 
Whoa! Man! Have you been watching this Little League World Series on ESPN? These 11-to-13-year-olds from all over the world are amazing. Tuesday night's Georgia-Pennsylvania game was 6-3 after the first inning -- and we'd already seen incredible slides and tags and almost-home-runs and down-the-line triples and overturned replay calls and just about anything else you could want in a baseball game...
 
 
 
  
 
 
2011
Aug
22
 
 
A front-page story in The New York Times Saturday warned against the newest unexpected wrinkle in the Internet: opportunistic entrepreneurs are offering to online retailers, as either writers or suppliers, cheaply priced positive reviews of their respective wares. Or, as the paper put it, "an industry of fibbers and promoters has sprung up to buy and sell raves for a pittance...Needless to say, I rate this cynical practice two thumbs down...
 
 
 
  
 
 
2011
Aug
21
 
 
The best thing about watching 1950s TV episodes is when they're still hysterically funny. The second best thing is seeing superstars before they were super, still working their way up to icon status. And the three DVD releases in our New This Week spotlight all qualify on one count or the other, as they salute Jack Benny, Betty White and Johnny Carson...
 
 
 
  
 
 
2011
Aug
18
 
 
[SUNDAY 8/21 UPDATE: As of Sunday morning, bids for some of the items written about here have increased substantially, with a week left to go in the auction. Samples: The Matt Bomer fedora currently stands at $710, the same price as the Piper Perabo shoes -- and that "cheep" Family Guy toy? It's now north of $150...]
 
 
 
  
 
 
2011
Aug
16
 
 
TVWW contributor Ed Bark, in his latest Uncle Barky's Bytes column, has beaten me to the punch by raving already about BBC America's new The Hour series...But I'm adding my own praises anyway...this period drama about the birth of a meaningful British TV newsmagazine in the 1950s clearly speaks to us both. The costumes may hint of AMC's Mad Men -- but to me, the closer comparison is to the brilliant 2005 movie Good Night and Good Luck...
 
 
 
  
 
 
2011
Aug
15
 
 
Lots to cover today: an excellent new HBO biographical study of Gloria Steinem, a new Eric Gould essay analyzing and presenting some of his favorite TV opening title sequences, and a salute to some Breaking Bad cleverness that most AMC viewers don't even get to see...