Among traditional family comedies, few have done it better than CBS's Everybody Loves Raymond (Mondays, 9 pm/ET), which scored another classic in the April 9 episode, "The Canister." The situation couldn't have been more mundane — an argument between Marie (Doris Roberts) and Debra (Patricia Heaton) about an heirloom canister Debra insists she returned, forcing an apology from the domineering Marie ("There's your Easter miracle," says Ray). But when Debra is proved wrong, it escalates into a brilliantly observed farce about family dynamics and the balance of power between the women. The men? They don't stand a chance.
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There's no such thing as a normal family on Fox, from the long-running animated hits to the newer breed of live-action wackiness epitomized by Malcolm in the Middle. You probably wouldn't want to live in these homes, but visiting can be a scream.
Fox's savagely funny Titus (Tuesdays, 8:30 pm/ET), hitting its bitter stride in its second year, acknowledges its dysfunction up front. "In a normal family, a surprise means presents, cake and a party. In my family, doing something nice is seen as an attack," says star Christopher Titus in one of his signature self-lacerating monologues, shot in black and white in what looks like a prison cell.
You can't blame him for feeling primed for failure, given a womanizing, alcoholic dad (a ferocious Stacy Keach) who "has swallowed the soul of everyone he's ever loved," and a
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If not for bad taste, much of today's TV comedy would lack any flavor at all.
The sly subversiveness that distinguishes The Simpsons is being dumbed down into an anything-goes, gross-out mentality that confuses crudeness with cleverness. Case in point: WB's lame animated creep show The Oblongs (Sundays, 8:30 pm/ET), which tries but fails to achieve an Addams Family quality of macabre humor in depicting a clan of supposedly lovable mutants — the chipper dad lacks arms and legs — who live in a toxic wasteland.
In live action, no one panders more desperately than the groin-obsessed star of MTV's The Andy Dick Show (Tuesdays, 10:30 pm/ET). Dick settles for vulgar toilet humor as he shills for MTV by spoofing its franchise shows. Low point: his Tom Green impersonation, a case of a creepy guy who thinks he's funny acting like a creepy guy who thinks he's funny.
Sometimes sic
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How ironic for "Get Over Yourself" to be the title of the first single from Popstars's Eden's Crush, the made-for-WB girl group that can't stop whining tearfully about the grueling price of fame. A more self-absorbed gaggle of media creatures you couldn't hope to find ? although just as Popstars wrapped its first season, ABC resurrected its boy-band docu-soap Making the Band (Fridays, 8:30 pm/ET) for a second year. As newly dreadlocked Band member Jacob Underwood admits, "We were on TV, and we were famous before we were even a band. And we have to prove that we're for real." Good luck with that.
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The Sopranos isn't HBO's only notable achievement on Sunday nights. With the scheduling of weekly installments of its America Undercover documentary series (following each Sopranos premiere, at 10 pm/ET), the network's eclectic franchise now joins PBS's Frontline and ABC's Nightline as TV's most consistently provocative purveyors of nonfiction programming. Recent topics have included suicide, the anti-abortion movement and this week's typically offbeat but surprisingly nonlurid Naked States, about a photographer's nationwide trek to shoot nudes in public settings.
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Forget all notions of New York City as a concrete jungle. The Manhattan of CBS's complex crime drama Big Apple appears to be built on quicksand. In this impenetrable urban swamp of shifting loyalties and bureaucratic betrayals, cops, crooks and federal agents coexist about as happily as the current cast of Survivor.
Big Apple (Thursdays, 10 pm/ET) is the type of show critics typically drool over. It's dark, ambitious and impossible to pigeonhole, with a sterling cast delivering mouthfuls of pungent dialogue.
And yet, to quote the show's most colorful character, pugnacious detective Mike Mooney (Ed O'Neill), "None of this is a first for me so far."
While the multi-tiered narrative can be tough to follow, the details are naggingly familiar from scores of like-minded series and movies: the polyglot brew of Italian, Russian and Irish usual suspects; the friction between NYPD and FBI; the use of a strip bar as a front (i
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Out with Geena, in with Joan. Sounds like a fair trade in my TV playbook. Trading up, actually, in terms of enjoying genuine comedy.
It appears the networks can't kick their fixation on building new shows around established stars, despite this season's brutal treatment of brand-name celebrities from Bette Midler to Michael Richards. At least this spring's star crop is of a more offbeat variety, especially at ABC.
Among those testing the comedy waters: Denis Leary (as an acerbic cop in the terrific The Job), Damon Wayans (as a Cosby-like dad in My Wife and Kids) and now that gawky gamine Joan Cusack.
Giving an overdue rest to The Geena Davis Show, one of TV's most painfully ordinary star vehicles, What About Joan (Tuesdays at 9:30 pm/ET) is, in its best moments, a hyperventilating hoot, with a tone of neurotic hysteria set by the
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How do you parody a genre that's already so good at debasing itself? The low-budget independent film Series 7 parrots the style, rhythms and calculated hype of "reality" TV. "Real people... in real danger," barks the narrator of this fatalistic derby, where contestants literally gun for each other. Watching with a paying audience that laughed smugly as each player is exploited and manipulated (usually to death), I found the movie a sad reflection of what this type of television delivers best: cheap thrills at the expense of our own dignity.
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We may speak the same language, but something often gets lost in the translation when British series are adapted for an American audience. (Recent examples: Showtime's wildly uneven Queer as Folk and last season's NBC flop Cold Feet, the superior original of which now airs on Bravo.) NBC may have better luck with First Years (Mondays, 9 pm/ET), adapted from Britain's This Life (currently on BBC America), about young lawyers who share a house and occasionally a bed or two. NBC's version is glossier and much more earnest than the original, but it bears watching.
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Like a handsome postmodern Elvis in his sequined outfits and upswept hair, rock troubadour Chris Isaak projects a refreshingly funky aura of homespun, eternally boyish glamour. I can't imagine anyone else who could get away with a come-on line like, "I made some fresh Tang."
If Showtime's delightfully offbeat, fabulously hip The Chris Isaak Show (Mondays, 10 pm/ET) catches on, it could be the best thing to happen to the orange drink since NASA's Apollo program.
And while Isaak seems to be a throwback to an earlier era ? his unaffected randiness would have fit right in with the carefree Rat Pack ? The Chris Isaak Show is very much an ironic product of its times.
The show owes a creative debt to HBO's The Larry Sanders Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm, yet is more fanciful than either of those cynical Hollywood satires. Isaak's series blurs the line between edgy showbiz realism ? with amusing cameos by th
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