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

 
 
2017
Aug
13
 
 
This week’s installment is called The Information Age. It’s about how technology, including the personal computer, changed our world in the 1990s and beyond. Take, for example, Google, the search engine service that was launched in 1998. You can look it up…
 
 
 
  
 
 
2017
Aug
13
 
 
I don’t mean to be critical, but last week’s epic battle sequence was really dragon. And this week, we learn not only who emerges from that battlefield victoriously – but, in at least one prominent case, whether Jaime emerges at all. Last week, in the very last shot, he wasn’t emerging – he was submerging.
 
 
 
  
 
 
2017
Aug
13
 
 
Last week’s season premiere was all about teasing – teasing the still-secret revelation about what happened to Ray, his wife and his family since the time we last saw them, and teasing the imminent arrival of Susan Sarandon as this year’s season-long guest star. This week, thanks to some extended flashbacks, the teasing continues. But I’m not complaining.
 
 
 
  
 
 
2017
Aug
13
 
 
This week’s installment is called Politics Aside, and looks at the many ways comedy has influenced politics over the ages. I haven’t previewed this installment, but here’s hoping Mark Twain, Will Rogers, Mort Sahl, That Was the Week That Was, and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and Pat Paulsen (pictured), among other early political-comedy pioneers, all get credit where it’s due.
 
 
 
  
 
 
2017
Aug
13
 
 
President Trump is on vacation this week. John Oliver isn’t.
 
 
 
  
 
 
2017
Aug
13
 
 
CNN’s The History of Comedy is focusing in on political comedy this week, and one of their early citations is the late Pat Paulsen, who ran for president in 1968 as a gag as part of his stint on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour... that’s evident here in a performance art-like split screen of him answering a question two ways...
 
 
 
  
 
 
2017
Aug
12
 
 
Endeavour is back. Dark clouds hang over Oxford as a new season of cerebral murders begins...
 
 
 
  
 
 
2017
Aug
12
 
 
The 2017 PGA Golf Championship moves to the weekend – and to CBS, which begins Saturday coverage at 2 p.m. ET. Before that, three hours of earlier live coverage are available on TNT. But the leaders arrive later in the afternoon – if the rain doesn’t.
 
 
 
  
 
 
2017
Aug
12
 
 
SERIES FINALE: This Katherine Heigl series has been hiding in plain sight, as CBS has been burning off first-run episodes on Saturday nights all summer. Summer TV? Saturday night? That’s broadcast TV’s idea of an unwanted, unwatched gulag. If episodes of Doubt fall in a forest, and no one is tuned in to watch, did they really drop at all? At any rate, tonight CBS presents the season’s concluding two episodes back to back, which presumably include a verdict in the legal case tha
 
 
 
  
 
 
2017
Aug
12
 
 
In 2001, Newt Scamander published a fantasy book called Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. It sold well – especially when it was revealed that Scamander, the hero of his own story, also happened to be the pen name of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling. There was no such mystery surrounding this 2016 movie, but by then, anything connected to Rowling and Potter, no matter how tangentially, sold like magical hotcakes. Set 70 years before Harry became a student at Hogwarts, Fantastic Beast