American - Writer | November 3, 1948 -
In city after city, newspaper after newspaper has diminished its staff of critics, sometimes to zero. Film and T.V. critics have been dropped and not replaced. Maybe they're deemed unnecessary because nobody cares if anything's good or not.
Tom Shales
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Late-night television is like the cereal aisle in the supermarket: too many choices. Also, too many 'different' brands that really aren't different at all.
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Maybe Larry Kings cannot thrive or even survive in a world where the norms for discourse are rage, vehemence and character assassination. King wanted to be liked, not feared; admired, not loathed.
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Why, on my mother's birthday, am I thinking about 'Father Knows Best?' At our house, mother knew best at least as often as father did, but then the title of the old sitcom, a homogenized portrait of American family life, was meant to be slightly sardonic.
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Maybe it's the hair. Maybe it's the teeth. Maybe it's the intellect. No, it's the hair.
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So it is that one side effect of the HD revolution has been the gratifying and edifying return of the nature documentary - films about the hugely varied forms of life that eat, sleep, stalk, mate, fight, thrive, suffer and struggle on our dear and embattled old Earth.
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A fellow with the inventiveness of Albert Einstein but with the attention span of Daffy Duck.
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Jimmy Kimmel still comes across like a guy who crashed a party and got caught at it, yet adamantly refuses to leave.
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In the best traditions of American comedy, from its beginnings through the crash-bang comedies of the 1990s and 2000s, Leslie Nielsen skewered the otherwise proper, did it with mischievous delight and convulsed audiences mercilessly.
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For those who don't like Dave Letterman, there's Jay Leno; and for those who like neither, there's Craig Ferguson; and if you're still feeling undertained, there's George Lopez and Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel and - let's see, did we leave out a Jimmy?
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If the networks can get audiences to tolerate pop-up promos by the dozens, maybe they'll start selling pop-up commercials, too.
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ABC's intelligently hilarious sitcom 'Modern Family' depicts a gay-male marriage in which both partners are refreshingly dimensional, believable human beings. The writers dare to make them flawed and thus fully delineated, but they're not flawed in the silly, stereotypical ways that once dominated such portrayals.
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