'Downton Abbey' Gets Cooking
Downton is heating up! Last night's episode marked the arrival of a new servant to the Abbey crew, a fine-lookin' fella named Jimmy Kent who has caught the eye of everyone both upstairs and downstairs.
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We've been watching inauguration activities for some six hours now. Wolf Blitzer has basically been muttering a tone poem since 11 a.m., Chris Matthews has snapped his tether and is floating around the studio, and Brit Hume spent the morning reminding us, with no small amount of hope in his gravelly voice, that second terms are often hobbled by unforeseen catastrophes.
Downton is heating up! Last night's episode marked the arrival of a new servant to the Abbey crew, a fine-lookin' fella named Jimmy Kent who has caught the eye of everyone both upstairs and downstairs.
Today we recap American Idol's second episode, a Chicago auditions installment that featured, among others, a terrible stutterer who sings like a dream.
American Idol is back on! Join us as we recap this season in song-based competition.
Last night wasn't just a night of teary triumph in Hollywood. It was also a night of teary heartbreak in rural England, as the second installment of Downton Abbey's third season aired on PBS and further punished an already terribly mistreated character. Read no further lest ye want spoilers.
Downton Abbey has, despite its elegance and period delicacy, perhaps entered into its own version of a perilously self-aware phase, too keenly cognizant of the Downton craze at the expense of fostering what created the craze in the first place.
The show rings remarkably false — even for an MTV reality show, even for the supposed successor to Jersey Shore — especially in contrast to the show's supposed mission, which is to shed a light on backwoods kids who just don't give a good god darn.
Let's not call it revolutionary, but as an excuse to talk about the show one last time, let's at least say that Gossip Girl did, in some strange way, make its little mark on this big, broad culture of ours.
Lost amid the flurry — nay, blizzard — of Homeland chatter this season was Showtime's other Sunday night series, Dexter, which had an amazing run up to and including its own season finale Sunday night.
Good grief do I hate Bravo's new reality show Start-Ups: Silicon Valley and boy oh boy can I not wait to watch every single episode.
For the TV-obsessed among us who got our power back after a long post-Hurricane week, Sunday night was a return to new programming after a tedious drought. And, oof, what a welcome back it was. Three big shows — Boardwalk Empire, Homeland, and The Walking Dead — featured shocking deaths last night.
If you didn't watch last night's Homeland because you were too busy watching the same hurricane news repeated over and over again for hours, stop reading now!
Last night was the second season premiere of FX's grim, gunky, 'n' glorious American Horror Story, a show so shamelessly filthy and melodramatic that it's almost heartwarming. This season, though? Well, based on last night's episode, it seems like we're mostly dealing with gore and ghoulishness.
Oh thank god. Or thank whatever demon sent the zombie plague to Earth on AMC's The Walking Dead, because last night's season three premiere blessedly built on the action of the season two closer and ratcheted up the jangly tension even more.
Hey did you guys watch the premiere of Arrow last night? What's that? You don't know what Arrow is? Oh, ha, sorry, let me call it by its street name: Shirtless Man Show.
Every network TV season includes a best show you're not watching — last spring it was the sturdy but forgotten Prime Suspect, and this season it just might be The Mob Doctor, a Fox drama that's struggling and looks to soon be sleeping with the fishes. (No more mob jokes, I promise.)
What irked us so much about Ben and Kate wasn't so much Ben and Kate as a standalone show, per se, but rather the bigger whole that it represents. Meaning, boy oh boy are we getting sick of these single-camera comedies about quirky people doin' quirky things.
I suppose I'm weak for only being able to last a day of this convention trying to be neutral about the whole thundering affair. Try as I might to be non-partisan, to view these things as spectacle rather than affirmation of policy, last night it became impossible to do that. No, what I saw last night frankly chilled me to the bone.
In purely theatrical terms, you have to admit that the Republican National Convention's Night Of a Thousand Speeches was a pretty solid show.
Bellyaching about The Newsroom and True Blood are hallowed traditions. And yet we keep watching, episode after episode. Why? Well, because of season finale episodes like the one that aired last night. Just when we think we're done with the show, they go and reel us back in at the last minute. The jerks.
Last night was the premiere of the first half of Breaking Bad's final season. Anticipation ran high among the show's devoted fanbase, ourselves included, so how did the episode measure up? Pretty well!
Last night HBO premiered its new video collage documentary Me @ the Zoo, a strange and depressing look at Mr. Leave Britney Alone himself, Chris Crocker.
Last night AMC's The Killing finally solved the Rosie Larsen murder after two seasons of frustrating red herrings, plenty of turgid emoting, and lots and lots and lots of rain. Was the conclusion satisfying? Yes and no.
Howdy folks! Who among us watched the big premiere of the new, updated Dallas on TNT last night? We certainly did, and boy is that a soapy, self-serious affair. Which doesn't mean it's bad, exactly.
Because of some trick of fate or due simply to poor timing, both HBO's Game of Thrones and AMC's Mad Men aired big, game-changing episodes right smack dab in the middle of the Memorial Day holiday weekend. Awfully sneaky, guys!
Last night ABC debuted its new summertime easy-tainment show Duets, which, alas, is not a series adaptation of that curious Gwyneth Paltrow/Paul Giamatti/Huey Lewis karaoke movie.
Well, dear friends, we have finally reached the end. Another season of hoax game show American Idol has reached its confetti conclusion and we are all the richer for it. Or we are at least not poorer. We are hopefully financially the same.
Last night was American Idol's sneak attack Tuesday night Finale Part One, a brisk and efficient hour that wasted very little time.
HBO's Girls is not exactly the show we thought it was a month ago. It's still about a general narcissistic, mostly clueless, selfish ambition that many young people possess but are too lazy to realize, but it's also just, I dunno, about a few characters in a nice, quiet, mostly humane way.
Fitting of the Top Three elimination night, exactly three things happened on American Idol last night. Let's discuss them and then go about the rest of our days, content in the knowledge that we have almost made it to the end of this life-changing journey.
Top 3! Home visits! Judges' Choice! Boy, we have almost reached the rickety end of this thing, haven't we? But we're not there yet. We're close, but we've no cigars. While we wait for the glorious, glitter-stained end, let's talk a little about what happened last night.
Last night was Glee at its Glee-est, a two-hour orgiastic explosion of feelings and plotlines and songs and guest stars and more feelings.
Last night was the big season finale of Smash, wherein America found out, finally, who was going to play Marilyn in the big Marilyn Musical and probably other things happened like intrigue and romance and, who knows, maybe Debra Messing took her shirt off again. The point is: We didn't watch. Why? Because we were watching the motherfreakin' Bachelorette instead. Yes, it's back.
Last night two veteran series reached their ends, one for just the season, the other forever.
We are now two short weeks away from the end of this Idol madcappery, as the fourth place finisher was named last night and now only three remain.
Damned interminable Idol!
As the regular TV season winds down, a desperate scramble begins, a race toward the upper edges of the dial, to seek out alternative programming to keep us entertained.
When we watched the first couple of episodes 2 Broke Girls, that sitcom all about Brooklyn living in the Great Recession that, back in the fall, we thought it got a lot of things wrong. In some ways it's satisfying to report, after its one-hour season finale, the show has gotten even worse.
As HBO's wonderfully intricate Game of Thrones gets further and further into the dense and expansive world that George R.R. Martin has created, it's inevitably going to become harder to follow.
As has been said before, democracy just doesn't work. It just doesn't.
Last night's American Tune Bag was a strangely dark episode, one full of angry songs and pained singing, a blast from the turbulent past that overcame our brave, noble tributes and reduced them to the small quivering children that they are at heart. Well, mostly. There was some good singing! But it all felt tinged with a bit of madness, didn't it?
Whoopi Goldberg began a multi-episode guest stint on Glee last night, playing an imperious admissions representative from the drama school of Kurt and Rachel's dreams, so that was kind of fun.
Monday night remains a petty bleak night for television. What were we to watch to while away the hours? Well, in our case it was on demanded episodes of ABC's Missing. Turns out that show is really fun.
As the days grow longer and the weather (for the most part) warmer, there is one terrible thing happening. Yes, network seasons are wrapping up. For example, The Good Wife, smart sudsy show that it is, ended its third season last night. We're gonna miss it!
Well, we are now down to the top 5! Which means we are so close I can almost taste the confetti.
Last night's Top Six episode of American Singing Competition began what I fear are the two or three most languid weeks of the season (other than auditions, naturally): The Top Six Creep really doesn't end until there are about three people left and the show starts to get exciting again.
Last night PBS aired the first installment of a new Frontline documentary called "Money, Power, & Wall Street," which was about, as you might imagine, that whole big ugly messy thing that happened in the financial sector a few years ago.
Yes, it was just last week that we were gushing lamely about Uma Thurman's guest starring role on Smash, but we're going to gush lamely some more.
One way that Game of Thrones fans have wooed skeptics to their cause has been to insist that, though the show is fantasy, it's not, like, all wizards and spells and crazy creatures and all that.
Last night was, truly, the most shocking rose ceremony in Idol history.
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