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 […]

> Thursday night brought a mother lode of returning serialized dramas to broadcast TV, with both ABC and CW returning to duty.  Let’s start by looking at ABC’s 10PM PRIVATE PRACTICE, airing a fresh episode for the first time since a 2-hour special on November 17. WHERE WE LEFT OFF:  As usual, there was all […]

  Did anyone, anywhere, expect LIZ & DICK to be something other than junk?  Lifetime’s TV-movie, with its stunt casting of Lindsay Lohan as Elizabeth Taylor, was calibrated to get train-wreck eyeballs (it might as well have come with a TMZ tie-in) and it certainly may succeed at that.  There’s some justice to this, since […]

  The unquestionable highlight of tonight’s SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE was brief but heartfelt:  the tail-end of Weekend Update, as Amy Poehler, Andy Samberg, Fred Armisen (wordlessly, as wandering sight-impaired former NY Governor David Paterson) and, inevitably, Bill Hader’s Stefon, all trooped in to bid farewell to co-anchor Seth Meyers on his way to take over […]

    THE NEIGHBORS:  Wednesday 9:30PM on ABC   WHAT IT’S SAYING:  You know how Tessa on Suburgatory thinks her neighbors are all, like, weird?  These neighbors are weird.

> Tonight’s Grammy Awards were inevitably somewhat haunted by the awful loss of Whitney Houston barely 24 hours earlier, a tragedy that seemed to have been going on for a decade yet was still shocking when it came to its fruition.  Nevertheless, the show found time to include innumerable music numbers, some of them saluting […]

  SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE usually benefits from having a host with the confident comic talent that Melissa McCarthy brings to the table, but even with a 3-week hiatus in its pocket, the writing staff came up with little that was up to her level.  The result was a very long 90 minutes. Almost everything that […]

  COMMUNITY:  Episodes 1 & 2 now streaming at Yahoo Screen The first two episodes of COMMUNITY‘s Season 6 are less meta than you’d expect.  Make no mistake, they’re plenty meta, with montages about montages, and much discussion of whether Shirley (Yvette Nicole Brown, now on The Odd Couple) has been “spun off” from Greendale […]