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 […]

    HATFIELDS & MCCOYS, already a blockbuster hit, kept its best and most compelling hours for last.  Although the conclusion of the 6-hour tale, directed throughout by Kevin Reynolds and with this installment written by Ted Mann and Ronald Parker, has its share of tense confrontations and large-scale action, it dwells more on the […]

    THE NEW NORMAL:  Tuesdays 9:30PM on NBC   WHAT IT’S SAYING:  A new kind of family sitcom:  gay couple, surrogate mother, her daughter–and her bitchy, bigoted (but, you know, funny) grandmother.  Grandma’s practically Sue Sylvester!  And what a coincidence, Sue’s creator Ryan Murphy is behind this too.

> The networks have proclaimed their Fall schedules, the new series have been (partially) unveiled, so… what now?  What will actually be worth watching when network TV comes back to life in a few months?  SHOWBUZZDAILY is here to help you out.  The good news is that since virtually all TV series are available these […]

  No one could seriously imagine that the TV remake of ROSEMARY’S BABY would come close to Roman Polanski’s 1968 masterpiece, so let’s get the obvious over with in a single paragraph.  (The amazing thing, really, is that it’s lasted this long without an inferior reboot being made, although there was an awful 1976 made-for-TV […]

  It felt like 12:55AM for the entire last half-hour of tonight’s SNL, and that wasn’t a bad thing.  Every post-Update sketch had the kind of oddball conceptualism that’s usually reserved for the last minutes of the show, and while the sketches didn’t all work, they had more imagination and wit than just anything that […]

  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 […]

  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) […]