Nothing can separate the geniuses behind “Reno 911” from their own brilliance. From Bush to Biden, every iteration of the show is consistently hilarious. “Reno 911!: The Hunt For QAnon” extends the franchise’s long record of greatness, and that’s despite today’s crippling pressures of groupthink. Few comedic offerings have mocked the absurdity of post-Obama politics with much success. “It’s Always…
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“South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone had a golden opportunity to lampoon Covid hysteria with the two “South Park: Post COVID” made-for-TV movies released on Paramount Plus, which are part of 14 planned. Knowing how everything has transpired up to now, all they’d have to do is simply report what happened and in a way that showed how…
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Carrie, one writer to another, forgive me. It pains me to write this. I am a “Sex and the City” super-fan. I have watched and re-watched every single episode of every season of the OG. I’ve watched and re-watched both films. I even devoured every episode of the “Carrie Diaries,” a sweet, if one-dimensional window into Carrie’s origin story. So when my editors…
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Congratulations to Chris Wallace, who announced Sunday that after a lengthy stint anchoring “Fox News Sunday,” he will be leaving the channel. Reports are that he’s joining CNN, where presumably he can more openly live his truth as a Joe Biden supporter. I have no idea what Fox plans to do in terms of replacing Wallace, but can it please…
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The tedious genre of fourth-wave fulfillment porn hits a new low in “The Sex Lives Of College Girls.” It’s a sad statement on our culture that Mindy Kaling’s creative energy went from writing early episodes of “The Office” to writing this charmless burst of self-indulgence. It’s like she’s trying to prove Christopher Hitchens right. Fourth-wave fulfillment porn (see: “Booksmart,” “Brittany…
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When “Psych” premiered back in 2006, it was a modest success but many worried the off-kilter, tongue-in-cheek mystery-of-the-week comedy starring relative unknowns would get the ax. “We were still finding our niche,” recalls co-star Maggie Lawson in a video interview. “People really hadn’t seen that sort of hour-long procedural dramedy before. Thankfully, the network gave us time to find it.”…
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An old axiom states that no news is good news. For “Jeopardy!,” that mantra has certainly applied to the last several weeks. In August, the sense of stability and solidity the program cultivated over decades evaporated seemingly overnight. Within days of naming Mike Richards as its permanent host to replace Alex Trebek, it had to replace him as host for…
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Taylor Sheridan’s “Yellowstone” — a captivating, contemplative neo-Western drama and the Paramount Network flagship series — is beginning to embody its own premise and characterization, perhaps the most important of which is it ain’t goin’ nowhere, just like series patriarch John Dutton’s cattle ranch in Montana. Its fourth season premiere on November 7 drew a staggering 8 million viewers, a…
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Today’s biggest fans of NBC’s “The Office,” were watching cartoons when the show first debuted more than 16 years ago. Most of the Gen Z fans that fuel “The Office’s” cult following were introduced to the series on Netflix, several years after the show came to an end in 2013. Unsurprisingly, young fans lost their minds on Twitter when NBC…
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Before “Ted Lasso” took off, Apple saw “The Morning Show” as the crown jewel of its pitch to consumers. When Apple TV+ launched last fall, smack in the middle of the streaming wars, “TMS” was its centerpiece. Some critics felt that focus was misplaced. I didn’t get around to watching “The Morning Show” until this year. It seemed exhausting and…
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Less than two months before her death, Joan Rivers told a photographer Michelle Obama was “a tranny.” Asked for comment by CNN, Rivers passed along a statement that read in part, “The most gorgeous women are transgender,” and “if you think that’s silly, wait to you see what I say about FDR and Eleanor.” That was 2014. By the time Dave…
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Apple TV+ has been on the hunt for its own serialized fantasy drama to compete with HBO’s adaptation of “Game of Thrones,” and it may have just found it in bringing Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” to their streaming platform. If successful, it’ll be an impressive feat for a creative property once considered “unfilmable.” Ever since “Game of Thrones” redefined serialized fantasy…
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The two-episode season finale of “Rick and Morty’s” fifth season gave the viewers much of what they had been asking for all year. While the famously picky fanbase can never fully be satisfied, episodes nine and ten closed out the season with a bang, giving us plenty of adventure, excitement, and laughs while winding up several long-running plotlines and hinting…
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Picture a reality television series where contestants vie to be the wokest activist, one-upping each other with political correctness to be championed with a crown of social justice. (In this case, the prize also included a trip to the G20). Picture a performative jungle gym built to please an ailing society whose cities are replete with violence. Picture a nation…
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The long-awaited return of Bravo’s “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” underscores the creeping true-crimeification of the network’s popular reality fare. Like this fan-favorite season of the Beverly Hills housewives, RHOSLC promises to document in painful detail the legal drama surrounding one of its stars. It’s great television. The trend also emphasizes the salience of a major question dogging our…
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To borrow from Winston Churchill after the Battle of El Alamein, Tuesday’s news that Sony Pictures Entertainment had relieved Mike Richards of executive producing duties for both “Jeopardy!” and “Wheel of Fortune” does not represent the end of the long-running — and recently shambolic — “Jeopardy!” host audition process. Nor does it represent the beginning of the end. But it…
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Between the 2018 “American Meme” documentary and Paris Hilton’s 2020 “This is Paris” film, Hilton’s media exposure in the last few years has been extremely raw, even dark at times. With that in mind, a light-hearted, mindless cooking show does not seem like the natural next chapter for Hilton, and yet that’s exactly what Netflix’s “Cooking with Paris” is. In…
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It’s often hard to believe the hijinks on “Small Town News: KPVM Pahrump” aren’t scenes from “Reno 911,” right down to the dusty Nevada aesthetic. HBO plucked a too-good-to-be-true news crew of misfits from obscurity and brought their exploits to the small screen, producing a docuseries with as much entertainment value as political relevance. It’s fun and wholesome. For six…
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Circling back to the bloody crime scene on the ninth floor of a posh Manhattan apartment building, the no-nonsense police detective encounters a motley crew of amateur sleuths: a 20-something woman flanked by two men in their 70s, all residents of the Upper West Side property. They engage the detective about forensics until she stops them. “Look, this is suicide,”…
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Alex Trebek’s reign as host of America’s most-watched quiz show lasted 8,310 episodes over nearly 37 seasons. His putative replacement lasted but one day and five episodes. Just over a week after having been named the permanent host of the syndicated version of “Jeopardy!,” Mike Richards announced on Friday he would no longer remain in the role, but would continue…
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