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

 
 
2020
Jun
18
 
 
The CBS version of the quiz show To Tell the Truth debuted today in 1956...
 
 
 
  
 
 
2020
Jun
17
 
 
This day in 1954 marked the final telecast of the NBC detective drama, Martin Kane, Private Eye...
 
 
 
  
 
 
2020
Jun
17
 
 
I recommend this 1944 comedy a lot. That’s because I watch it a lot, almost every time it’s televised, even though I own a copy on DVD. There’s something about it: Cary Grant’s cartoonishly broad performance in the leading role, and the craziness of every character around him, from his doting but homicidal elderly aunts to another relative who thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt. All this, and Peter Lorre, too – but maybe I love it so much because Grant plays a critic
 
 
 
  
 
 
2020
Jun
17
 
 
This first movie in the Tarzan series, starring Johnny Weissmuller as the Ape Man hero of the Edgar Rice Burroughs stories, was released in 1932. That was just before the censorious Hollywood Production Code slapped filmmakers with very conservative rules – and because this Tarzan movie is pre-Code, it affords its audience a look at Maureen O’Sullivan, as Tarzan’s civilized jungle companion Jane, that only one other pre-Code film in the series would permit.
 
 
 
  
 
 
2020
Jun
17
 
 
So far in this final season, this ABC series has spent its time on Earth, but in the past – specifically, the pre-WWII 1930s. The climax of last week’s episode had the team making a time jump back to the future – but they didn’t just far enough. As tonight’s episode begins, the S.H.I.E.L.D. crew finds itself visiting the mid-1950s – an excuse to film and frame tonight’s program in black-and-white film noir. Or, at least, the black-and-white mon
 
 
 
  
 
 
2020
Jun
16
 
 
A whole lot of folks, presumably, are almost as saturated with COVID-19 coverage on television as they are by the restrictions COVID-19 has laid on them in real life...
 
 
 
  
 
 
2020
Jun
16
 
 
MOVIE PREMIERE: This documentary is about one of the premier film critics at a time when the movies arguably were at their most expressive and experimental. Pauline Kael had a bestselling collection of essays and reviews of films, and wrote from her powerful perch at The New Yorker for a generation, rhapsodizing and arguing at length about Bonnie and Clyde, Last Tango in Paris, and Nashville, to name just a few of her influential reviews from the 1960s and 1970s. I
 
 
 
  
 
 
2020
Jun
16
 
 
This new American Masters documentary could be a few notches more insightful – anyone watching the documentary, in this current age, may well ask some questions this program never does, about whether Mae West’s predatory sexual on-screen persona is any more laudable for being a gender-reversal on typical bedroom and boardroom lotharios. But as a stage and screen pioneer, especially in the days just prior to the stifling Hollywood production code, West stands alone, and conf
 
 
 
  
 
 
2020
Jun
16
 
 
A lot. And this new Frontline documentary deconstructs the history to answer that question. It’s a question Frontline poses in the past tense, but the going wrong is still very much with us – which makes this particular era, like this particular documentary, a present tense experience. Check local listings. For a full review, see Alex Strachan's TV That Matters. 
 
 
 
  
 
 
2020
Jun
16
 
 
SPECIAL PREMIERE: What to do when you have a finished script for a show, but can’t gather the cast, in this socially distanced period in time, to film it? Some shows have staged remote, Zoom-meeting-type table reads, letting actors recite their lines as though performing in a radio play. Tonight’s One Day At a Time Animated Special takes another approach: It has the cast of One Day recording its scripted lines, as in a radio play, but then fleshes out that soundtr