PAY-PER-VIEW SPECIAL: The last time I paid for a pay-per-view boxing event was 20 years ago, in 1997. That’s when Mike Tyson, in a WBA Heavyweight Championship rematch against Evander Holyfield, bit Holyfield’s ear in the third round and was disqualified – but only after biting Holyfield’s other ear. At a $50 fee to watch then, that worked out to more than $15 per round. Tonight’s bout between Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor, by contrast, is going for a steep, u

2017

Aug

SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE By David Bianculli

Tonight’s Saturday Night Live is a repeat from January of this year – specifically, Jan. 21, 2017, the day after the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump. The guest host that night was Aziz Ansari, and he delivers an appropriately topical and memorable opening monologue. Also very, very memorable on this show: a cold open featuring Beck Bennett killing it as a shirtless Vladimir Putin, crowing “Hooray, we did it,” and an apolitical sketch in which Ansari is in bed wi

2017

Aug

THE DIFFICULT RISE AND PAINFUL FALL OF WHITNEY HOUSTON IN ‘CAN I BE ME’ By David Hinckley

Don’t go looking for a hero in Can I Be Me, a new documentary on the too-short life of Whitney Houston...

2017

Aug

THE TICK By David Bianculli

SERIES PREMIERE: For a goofy, spoofy comic-book superhero, the Tick is surprisingly persistent. First there was an animated TV show based on the comic book in 1994, then a very funny live-action version of The Tick, starring Patrick Warburton in the title role, in 2001. And now, on Amazon, comes a new live-action version, in 2017. That’s one TV series version of The Tick per decade, for three consecutive decades. Which begs the question: Huh? Regardless, this version – six episodes o

2017

Aug

DISJOINTED By David Bianculli

SERIES PREMIERE: This is not a recommendation. Chuck Lorre and David Javerbaum are behind this new Netflix sitcom, which stubbornly – and in this case, not at all effectively – continues the multi-camera, live-audience approach to situation comedy. Kathy Bates plays the owner of a legal California marijuana dispensary, but though the setting is new for a sitcom, the characters, and jokes, are anything but. Even with some animation thrown in, this new sitcom deserves to be thrown out.

2017

Aug

WHITNEY: CAN I BE ME? By David Bianculli

Showtime’s latest music documentary looks at the life, the music, and the unfortunate early death of Whitney Houston – who, this documentary shows, masked a lot of sadness in her life, onstage as well as off. For a full review, see David Hinckley's All Along the Watchtower.

2017

Aug

REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER By David Bianculli

Today’s scheduled guests include Jesse Jackson, Frank Bruni, and Paul Begala.

2017

Aug

JAY THOMAS 1948-2017 By David Hinckley

Jay Thomas played the in-your-face wise guy so well, on morning radio and national television, it almost seemed like a misprint that he was born in Texas and not New York...

2017

Aug

WEEKEND UPDATE SUMMER EDITION LIVE! By David Bianculli

Every week on this half-hour Saturday Night Live summer spinoff, one bit has leapt out as the one most discussed, and remembered, the next day. Two weeks ago, on opening night, it was Alex Moffat and Mikey Day as, respectively, Eric and Donald Trump Jr. Last week, it was Tina Fey, suggesting an unusual “sheet cake” method (pictured) -- "sheetcaking" -- of coping with the upsetting news from Charlottesville. And tonight, who knows? All I know is, I’ll be watching. Colin Jost and

2017

Aug

FLASH GORDON By David Bianculli

This 1980 big-budget, comic-book sci-fi movie isn’t very good, but it’s fun – and oddly, it seems to improve with age, at least in terms of its campy soundtrack by Queen. This film arrived in cinemas a few years after the first Star Wars movie, and when TV already was littered with such garishly colored sci-fi ripoffs and retro offerings as Battlestar Galactica (the original, terrible one) and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century – which, like Flash Gordon, was a remake of a c

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