MIDSEASON RETURN: Now that Star has ended its freshman season, Empire returns for a new round of high-octane drama, the second half of Season 3 – and just watching the network promo, featuring Taraji P. Henson’s Cookie walking in slow motion with the fierceness of a lioness on the prowl, carrying a baseball bat like Beyoncé in her Lemonade video, is enough to get you to press “Record” for this midseason opener. For a full review, see David Hinckley's All Along the Watchtower.
In this week’s episode, while the White House is in crisis mode, what’s left of the new administration and its supporters focuses less on the problems at hand than on the sources of potentially damaging press leaks. Isn’t it great to watch prime-time broadcast scripted television just to get away from it all?
This is the penultimate episode of Season 1 of Legion. At this point, I can’t understand, much less explain, exactly what’s going on – but I know that, each episode, things get not only more complicated, but even more interesting…
These days, watching Samantha Bee begin her show is like watching Reggie Jackson stroll up to home plate during his glory days with the New York Yankees. It seems like each week of headlines gives her some fat new pitches at which to swing – and lately, she’s really been hitting them out of the park.
David Bianculli has been a TV critic since 1975, including a 14-year stint at the New York Daily News, and sees no reason to stop now. Currently, he's TV critic for NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and is an occasional substitute host for that show. He's also an author and teaches TV and film history at New Jersey's Rowan University. His 2009 Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of 'The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour', has been purchased for film rights. His latest, The Platinum Age of Television: From I Love Lucy to the Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific, is an effusive guidebook that plots the path from the 1950s’ Golden Age to today’s era of quality TV.