Creative risk-taking should always be applauded, especially in the conservative world of network television, and tonight NBC (in the particular person of its President Robert Greenblatt) and Executive Producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron pushed all their chips to the center of the table for a massive live production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s THE […]

  MOB CITY:  Wednesday 9PM on TNT As a writer and director, Frank Darabont has never been in a hurry.  His The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, The Majestic and The Mist all run over 2 hours (Green Mile is over 3), and his initial season of The Walking Dead had as measured a pace […]

  It’s too easy to play the Hunger Games/”from hunger” card, so let’s just say that with one endearingly goofy exception, host Josh Hutcherson was barely even a presence on one of the weaker SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE episodes of the season.  His–and the show’s–one notable bit was a post-Update piece in which he (mostly) lip-synched […]

  When the musical guest on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE is also the host (and isn’t Justin Timberlake), it’s usually a smart strategic idea to minimize the host’s comedy duties for the week.  But Lady Gaga, in her dual roles tonight, suggested such a knack for sketch comedy that one could easily have mistaken her for […]

  For Jay Pharoah and Kenan Thompson–but especially Pharoah–this week must have felt like alternate-universe SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, because with Kerry Washington as host, suddenly he was the show’s featured leading man, a situation he probably shouldn’t expect to see again anytime soon.  Washington herself was an enormously enthusiastic host, very funny (despite a certain […]

  Edward Norton, a very fine actor who’s shown occasional comic chops, is the oddest choice to host SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE in recent memory.  It’s been a long, long time since he was anywhere near the forefront of the pop culture zeitgeist, and he didn’t even have anything new to plug this week.  It would […]

  It’s relatively unusual for a movie star to host SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE without having something to plug, but this week Bruce Willis took the lead for his first turn since the days of the original Die Hard in 1989.  Willis rarely gets the credit he deserves for the range of his roles (the Die […]

  Lorne Michaels has never been happy when primetime overruns push the start time of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, and he must like it even less in the DVR era, when many people on the East Coast will miss the last 27 minutes of tonight’s episode forever.  But that’s the cost of airing college football on […]