Tuned In
A blog about television by TIME’s TV critic James Poniewozik.

Dead Tree Alert: Occupy Prime Time!

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October 14, 2011 at 3:35 pm
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CBS

My print column in TIME this week expands on an idea I wrote about in my review of Revenge: is "class warfare" really anathema to Americans, or is TV about class conflict—done the right way—appealing and entertaining? The column (as usual subscription-only) looks  at Revenge (basically, an anthology of bad things happening to evil rich people), the coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protests and the most popular new show of the season, 2 Broke Girls, which is all about the different backgrounds of street-smart Max and poor little former-rich-girl Caroline. (This week's episode, in which Max visited Caroline's dad's townhouse—"You have a museum in your closet?!"—was the show's best episode yet.)

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Next Week's TV Today: Watch Kelsey Grammer's Boss Now (If You Have Comcast)

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October 14, 2011 at 3:07 pm
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STARZ

A week from tonight, Starz debuts the ambitious Boss, starring Kelsey Grammer as a ruthless mayor of Chicago hiding a debilitating neurological disorder. But the Comcast subscribers among you can watch the entire pilot now (even if you don't have Starz) through the XfinityTV service. (I don't have Comcast myself so, full disclosure, I am taking their word that the link works.)

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TV Weekend: The Walking Dead Has Legs

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October 14, 2011 at 9:32 am
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AMC

By the end of its short first season, I was ready to put The Walking Dead on my list of "almost" shows: those series that had the potential to be great, but which for lack of execution or desire never actually got there. It had well-regarded source material (I haven't myself read the Robert Kirkman graphic novels)* and a terrific premise: a zombie apocalypse,  handled with complete psychological realism. The pilot was breathtaking—sweeping in its visuals, economical in its dialogue and unstinting in its dedication to show how actual people would respond to the potential grisly end of human life.

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The Morning After: A House Is Not a Home

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October 13, 2011 at 11:30 am
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FX

Brief spoilers for American Horror Story below:

For its second episode, American Horror Story (which I reviewed at length earlier) dialed back the crazy and the feverish imagery, but just a touch. At the same time, it gave us a bigger download of the house's history and mythology. For starters, the Harmon abode appears to be on the National Register of Horrible Murder Locations. (Assuming the show sticks to its flashback-opening structure, each episode would seem to begin like an all-murder version of Six Feet Under.) We learn, or see insinuated at least, that the house's past victims seem to be connected to its future hauntings. And we get some tantalyzing hints that—and this is based on no spoiler information—Constance is more deeply connected than she lets on to whatever is going on at the neighbors'. (Particularly interesting: her mention of having had a son, whom she "lost to other things.")

If all this still has you interested, I suggest hanging on at least until next week—the last, and my favorite, of the three episodes I've seen so far, which gets further into the characters' and the house's history. Despite some very mixed reviews (as I said myself, I'm fascinated by the show's insanity even if I can't defend it's whacked-out hyperactivity), it had a strong ratings debut, so I'm guessing some of you watched. Are you still haunted?

        

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My Rosie Serenade; or, You Don't Really Care for Music, Do You?

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October 13, 2011 at 10:51 am
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OWN

So yesterday in my review of the then-two-day-old The Rosie Show on OWN, I riffed on Rosie O'Donnell's quoting of her show's critical reviews during her monologue: "Just in case," I wrote, "it's Pah-nuh-WAH-zick.'" Rosie, and her head writer Karen Kilgariff, evidently took this as a challenge, and also discovered that my surname has the same meter as Leonard Cohen's classic "Hallelujah." Which really does not get used enough on television.

[Note: The video from OWN's website does not play well with TIME's blog platform, so until/unless our tech wizards come up with embeddable video you'll have to click this link to discover for yourself that nothing rhymes with "Poniewozik."]

Thanks to Rosie, I will never be able to see a sad montage on a TV show the same way ever again. But next time someone asks me how to pronounce my name, I can just show them this clip. TV really does change lives!

        

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TV Tonight: Community Rolls the Die

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October 13, 2011 at 8:39 am
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NBC

Community has always been a deeply but not broadly loved sitcom, and its fans may be justifiably nervous about its future given the season's ratings so far. (The show gave a meta-nod to these worries a few episodes ago, with Abed's anxiety over the prospects of Cougar Town: "Six seasons and a movie!") Well, if you've been waiting for an episode to recruit new viewers with, to urge your relatives, your Facebook friends and your actual friends to watch, it is tonight's, "Remedial Chaos Theory."

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Rosie O'Donnell, Queen of Dusk

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October 12, 2011 at 12:21 pm
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OWN

Rosie O'Donnell began the second night of her OWN network talk show, The Rosie Show, by reading a selection of reviews of the first night of The Rosie Show, for the audience to cheer or boo. I didn't review the first night, but this immediately put me in mind of my inborn advantage as a TV critic: having a surname that no one can pronounce.

There were some barbs (Linda Stasi of the New York Post dismissed the dancing-boys segment as "a bad Oscar skit") and some praise (especially from The Hollywood Reporter's Tim Goodman, whom she rewarded by posting his head shot and announcing, "Not only are you a brilliant writer, but you're a handsome man"—which he is!).

In truth, most coverage I've seen of the debut night fell somewhere in between, such as Mary McNamara's summation of it as "not-bad, pretty good, kinda funny, sort of smart," which seems just about right. The Rosie Show is nothing revolutionary, but it does as much as reasonably can be expected of a talk show in its first week, and—thanks to the experience of its star—has the feeling of a show that's been on the air for months longer.

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The Morning After: Parenthood, Now With More Parenthood

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October 12, 2011 at 7:42 am
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NBC

I will admit that, when it comes to Parenthood, I am part of the problem. It's always occupied a spot with me where I'm warm to the show but not driven enough to watch it live every week and thus blog about it. But I have to give NBC credit for sticking with the third season of a low-key, well-observed drama about people getting through ordinary people problems. Relatively ordinary, anyway. Last night's "Nora" introduced—spoiler alert, but as the title hints—a new baby to the cast with the birth of Adam and Kristina's baby; it also, I think, stretched believability with the subplot involving Julia talking her way into getting someone else's baby. (Julia's storylines have always been the weak spot of this show for me, however.) And I did love the early showdown moment for Zeek, brawlingest papa bear in Berkeley.

In all, though, I like how the storylines are coming together without becoming overly contrived on this show, and I really admire its dedication to the idea that—contrary to the title—growing up and maturing is a process that never really stops until you die. Any Tuned Inlanders still part of the Parenthood family?

        

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TV Tonight: Last Man Standing

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October 11, 2011 at 12:27 pm
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ABC

On behalf of the men of the world, I want to apologize to women for the existence of Last Man Standing, ABC's new Tim Allen comedy, if for no other reason than its existence seems predicated on the idea that I need to watch it to rediscover how to be a man. Also, I might as well apologize to the men of the world for it too. And while I'm at it, to any aliens in other solar systems who might receive the transmission of this sitcom, some years hence, whether you reproduce asexually or are divided among five genders who connect using some Avatar-like USB devices on your head-tails: dudes, our bad, really.

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The Morning After: Enlightened: What Is This Show, Anyway?

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October 11, 2011 at 9:55 am
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HBO

There are plenty of reasons to critique some of the half-hour series on HBO and Showtime (Weeds, Hung, The Big C) but the critique I've never gotten, nor had much patience for, is: "It's supposed to be comedy, but it's not funny enough!"

I know that classifying things helps make sense of the world, and as a writer I am familiar with the problem that you have to call things something. But it's at best arbitrary to decide that things that are a half-hour on TV are supposed to make you laugh, and things that are an hour are supposed to make you cry, and that a show that doesn't pick a side and fully commit to it is a failure. The movies have this problem to an extent, but at least in that genre there's some willingness to accept, say, a movie like Sideways, which is funny, and also is not funny, and ultimately is a story about some people, and either you like it or you don't.

All this went through my head last night re-watching HBO's Enlightened, a problematic, hard-to-classify but strangely compelling character study, whatever you call it.

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