You have to admire if not love the machine-like efficiency of CBS. The intricacies of Swiss watches and the metallic beauty of German engineering have nothing on CBS, the best-run network on television.
ABC is one of those networks you look at and think, "Hey, they’re doing great." Lots of people talking about their shows, old and new. Then the ratings rise up to disappoint.
Fox has finally completed its metamorphosis into CBS, after being CBS Lite for the last few seasons.
Bravo.
Now, in the past, sneering at Fox for growing up and becoming more staid was just misplaced bitterness that network television was becoming boring and vanilla – its last chance to be different was always Fox.
But nowadays, the two primary reasons for watching broadcast television are sitcoms and singing shows. And guess what? Fox has plenty of both!
The one thing NBC needs the most is patience. And when Robert Greenblatt took over the network after working some considerable magic at Showtime, it was the ingredient he said was the most important in resurrecting the former gold-standard broadcast network. This won’t be fast, he said. There are no miracle turnarounds.
This is a Spoiled Bastard. It contains spoilers. That's the point. If you haven't seen the episode, please come back when you have.
One of the themes that Matthew Weiner promised would play an important role in Season 5 of Mad Men is one that hasn’t been as sexy as all the enormous change going on. And that theme is selfishness. It certainly has been sprinkled into the first eight episodes, but Ep. 9, “Dark Shadows,” really should have been called, “The One With All the Selfishness.”
Welcome to The Power Rankings! for the week ending May 6. April showers (of blood, naturally) bring May, um, stability? Well, it doesn't roll off the tongue but it's mostly true. The only big entry this week and for a few more to come is Sherlock on PBS. More important, we haven't had quite the episodic quality fluctuations of the past, so things at the top are relatively solid.
Maybe there can't be enough Sherlock Holmes adaptations. Moviegoers still seemed intrigued by Robert Downey Jr. on the big screen, and with the triumphant return of PBS' stellar series Sherlock, the smart set gets its thoroughly modern adaptation. Sherlock first appeared on BBC, then PBS in fall 2010, and was an immediate critical darling.
Welcome to The Power Rankings! for the week ending April 29. So, what have we learned so far? If you answered, "We are in a time of great shows that do no take kindly to other great shows trying to out rank them, so there's blood," then yes, you guessed correctly. And if you wondered out loud who could possibly upset this Elite Eleven, then I'll tell you straight up that it's no one. We have the same Elite Eleven this week that we had last week, but they're in a new order.
This is a Spoiled Bastard. It contains spoilers. That’s the point. If you haven’t watched the episode in question, please come back when you have.
There were a series of gears seamlessly interlocking in “At the Codfish Ball,” an episode of Mad Men that very creatively dissected the way men talk to and interact with women and women talk to and interact with each other.
Welcome to The Power Rankings! for the week ending April 22. And if you think the bloodshed ends here, you're as insane as King Joffrey. Look, last week might have been the most competitive version of The Power Rankings! ever, and while we lost Justified to its season finale, one great sitcom retuned and the makings of another great one premiered. So, yeah, if you want blood, you've got it. Television is pretty competitively great right now. On my command, unleash hell!
In a rousing return to form, the “Far Away Places” episode of Mad Men was its most ambitious this season and one that, given the last couple of overly-obvious efforts, would normally cause serious worry about its ability to pull off not only an LSD episode – a cliché landmine if there ever was one – but also a fractured narrative, the deepening of current motifs and subtle transformations of character spread throughout the cast.
The lovably unkempt local, who hunted alligators with his brother on the popular History reality show, died after experiencing a seizure in his boat.
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THR has the complete guide to the 2012-13 television season for the five broadcast networks, including which shows will return and which ones are dead -- and what's coming up.
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Cookie-cutter work spaces? Not for these five behind-the-scenes show creators, whose private spaces reveal peeks into their psyches (Kurt Sutter’s real angry bird) and kooky passions (Elizabeth Meriwether loves "Law & Order: SVU"?)
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Among the 10 new series headed to the alphabet network are projects starring Vanessa Williams, Connie Britton, Anthony Edwards and Reba McEntire.
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Call it "Glee" for grown-ups if you must. But this behind-the-scenes look at casting and launching a broadway musical has more gravitas, excellent acting and an insider's knowledge of the competitive drive to stardom. A cable-quality drama that will be looking for viewers.
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