Category: TV & Movies

  • Apple and original TV: a strategy teardown

    The world’s most valuable company is spending more than a billion dollars on new TV shows. The question is why? Last week, the New York Times published, “Apple Goes to Hollywood. Will Its Story Have a Happy Ending?,” a useful but incomplete article by John Koblin. The article is useful because it describes how Apple…

  • What the NY Times missed about “Rizzoli & Isles”

    Earlier this week, New York Times TV critic Mike Hale reviewed the opening of the seventh and final season of the TNT original cop show, “Rizzoli & Isles.” Here’s a relevant snippet: On television, as in life, comfort food comes in all sorts of flavors. There’s the tart apple pie of “NCIS,” the solid corned…

  • Where “Lucifer” on Fox goes off the rails

    “Lucifer,” the new midseason replacement show on Fox, doesn’t trust its audience. Episode #8 aired last night, and at this point the show is a basic police procedural with a celestial crisis (something bad will happen without Lucifer working as Hell’s CEO and main jailor) lurking vaguely in the background.  Tom Ellis is charming as…

  • A glimmer of hope for CBS’ “Supergirl”

    This TV season’s new “Supergirl” TV show confuses me. Over on the CW, producer Greg Berlanti has nailed both “Arrow” and “Flash,” but where those shows feel fresh and exciting “Supergirl” is forced and whiney. “Supergirl” oscillates between action and soap opera, rarely integrating the two. There’s too much talking among the characters but not…

  • The Girl in the Spider’s Web isn’t terrible, isn’t great

    Over the weekend I zoomed through the new David Lagercrantz novel, The Girl in the Spider’s Web, which is the not-written-by-Stieg-Larsson sequel to the Millenium Trilogy that started with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I’ll start with some thoughts about the book itself — so you have your spoiler alert — but I’ll wind…

  • High Fidelity, Pillow Talk, The Music Man: on technology and on ideas that rhyme, but then don’t

    Hey, this looks like a piece about old movies, and it starts out that way, but it’s also about how to think about technology. I even throw in a little Douglas Adams at the end. Ideas can rhyme like words do. When words rhyme, the rhyme helps us position ourselves inside a poem: we know…

  • Stewart, Cosby, Williams: Tough Times for U.S. Comedy

    Take heed, sirrah, the whip.    —King Lear to his Fool Jon Stewart’s farewell episode of The Daily Show last night proved joyful rather than sad as dozens of people whose careers took root and bloomed under Stewart’s watch turned up to celebrate and — despite his resistance — to thank him. For the under-30 crowd,…

  • Michael Wolff’s Just-Released Book is a Puzzler

    The dust-jacket of Television is the New Television: the Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age describes Wolff as a man with unparalleled access to powerful figures in media and the book as something that will change the reader’s thinking. Moreover, it frames Wolff as an archly bitchy writer with enemies who would…

  • Looking Back on “The Fall Guy” — an Aria of 80s Sexism

    The Lee Majors-crooned theme song from his old TV show “The Fall Guy” snuck into my head this morning.  It’s a stumper as to why or how this happened, and it proves only that I watched way too much TV in my youth. The series (about a stunt man who is also a bounty hunter…

  • Is Netflix moving away from binge viewing?

    American culture’s long nightmare has ended. Breath can release from empurpling faces across this mighty land: we now know Chelsea Handler’s next move. This morning, Variety broke the story: “Netflix Announces Chelsea Handler Talk Show to Debut in 2016: Comedienne to create new talk-show format and specials for streamer, after seven-year run on E!” How…