> NBC’s WHITNEY hasn’t really had much of a midseason break, but tonight marked its move from a cushy home on Thursday night, where it aired behind the network’s only hit, The Office, to the much more challenging job of opening Wednesday nights and clearing the way for new sitcom Are You There, Chelsea?  So […]

  A guy–almost always a middle-aged white guy–walks out onto a stage and delivers a 10 or 15 minute stand-up routine about current events, to the cameras and a live audience of a few hundred people.  Then he sits behind a desk and for another 10 minutes or so, he does a pre-scripted (sometimes pre-taped) […]

  Add to Louis C.K.’s remarkable list of recent achievements the ability to intermittently brighten up a routine episode of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE. They weren’t all gems, but a couple of tonight’s sketches were among the season’s best so far.  Chief among them was “Lincoln,” which wasn’t just a letter-perfect parody of Louie, but one […]

  If The Avengers were an episode of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, it might be something like the first hour of tonight’s show, a veritable all-star brigade of special guests and beloved characters presented for the celebratory return of Host Supreme Justin Timberlake (and the spottier last half-hour had its moments, too). SNL and Timberlake have […]

  Lorne Michaels has controlled the post-Tonight Show slot on NBC for more than 20 years (and with Jimmy Fallon’s ascension, he now has The Tonight Show in his portfolio as well), and for the third consecutive time, he’s pushed a Saturday Night Live veteran through that door with tonight’s debut of LATE NIGHT WITH […]

    It wasn’t so long ago that the announcement of an epic period love story starring Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen as war correspondent Martha Gellhorn and legendary novelist Ernest Hemingway, directed by Philip Kaufman, the man behind The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Henry & June, premiering at the Cannes […]

  The political comics of America owe a heartfelt “thank you” to Mitt Romney for his “47%” bungle that became public this week.  (So do the Democrats, but that’s another story.)  Jon Stewart has been going to town on it all week, and tonight’s inaugural SNL WEEKEND UPDATE THURSDAY of the season used it as […]

  The second 2-hour chunk of the newly anointed most popular scripted show in the history of basic cable, History’s HATFIELDS & MCCOYS, was much like the first episode:  a strong opening hour followed by a second that didn’t quite live up to it.  Oddly, Hour 4 even failed for many of the same reasons […]