All 21 episodes of ‘Gilmore Girls’ Season 1 (2000-01), ranked
TV review: It’s about a mother and daughter, but also so much more as Amy Sherman-Palladino breaks through with a hit.
Family Drama
First episode impressions: ‘Parenthood’ Season 4 (TV review)
“Parenthood” (9 p.m. Central Tuesdays, NBC) starts Season 4 with a combination of a pitch-perfect life threshold yarn (Haddie goes off to college), a funny family-dynamic oddity (Crosby finds his son praying) and a believable issue […]
‘Margaret’ brings viewers into troubled characters’ worlds, and New York City (Movie review)
Ostensibly the story of a teenager (Anna Paquin) seeking justice for a woman killed in a bus accident that she feels partly responsible for, “Margaret” (2011) evolves into an immersive treatise on people’s inherent inability to relate […]
Ron Swanson: TV’s greatest libertarian character ever? (Commentary)
Since I’m venturing into politics with this post (which will eventually be about television), I’ll admit my bias up front: I’ll be voting for the Libertarian Party ticket of Johnson-Gray in November. But I think anyone who’s […]
R.I.P. Dick Clark. And I miss ‘American Dreams’ (TV commentary)
I was shocked — pleasantly so — to find the first reference to “American Dreams” only five paragraphs into the Associated Press’ feature obituary on Dick Clark, who died on Wednesday at age 82.
(Hopefully not) a fond farewell to ‘Parenthood’ (TV review)
I don’t spend too much time anymore worrying about whether a show will be canceled; I take the “enjoy it while it lasts” approach to everything. So Season 3’s penultimate episode of “Parenthood” took me off […]
‘The Descendants’ another low-key masterpiece from Alexander Payne (Movie review)
I just got done reading Chuck Klosterman’s novel “The Visible Man,” which deals with the nature of reality. In a wider sense, all pop entertainment deals with the problem of reality, because fiction is the […]
First episode impressions: ‘Parenthood’ Season 3 (TV review)
I detest the phrase “something for everyone” because 95 percent of the time when an event claims to offer “something for everyone,” it doesn’t interest me in the least bit. “Parenthood” (9 p.m. Central Tuesdays on NBC) […]
Fond farewell: ‘Friday Night Lights’ (TV review)
I’m not married and I know that if I ever lived in Texas I’d die from the heat, yet I always respected “Friday Night Lights,” TV’s best show about marriage and best show about Texas. On Friday […]
Where have all the epic season finales gone? (TV commentary)
For as long as I can remember, TV has served up an epic season finale or two every May. In recent years, up until 2010, there were the season-enders of “24” and “Lost.” Before that, […]