I sure hope you didn’t skip 24’s literally explosive Night 2—seriously (as Shonda Rhimes would say), how dark is this new season already?—for the Golden Globes Monday night. All the flowing wine seemed to have loosened and thickened nearly everyone’s tongue, resulting in long speeches that combined with a sluggish pace and an epic number of ads to push the show beyond the 11 pm/ET cutoff time. (You know an awards show is badly time-managed when the seriously big winners are forced to hurry through their speeches.)Anyway, to have had a good time, it looks like you really did have to be there this year. And partake of the bubbly.Imagine the collective yawns and groans across the land when that international bummer Babel (this year’s overly contrived Crash) took home the best drama trophy, handed out by Arnold Schwarzenegger on crutches that could have been a symbol for the whole wobbly though star-studded evening.But enough about movies, with this except...read more
"What's with all the carnage lately?" a viewer e-mailed me recently. He has a point. The body count on TV this season has been unusually high.
For some, these tragic twists seem like cheap stunts, a real turn-off. For me, they're a reason to tune in. Not because I'm blood thirsty. But on shows where the stakes are high — shows like 24, Lost, The Shield, The Sopranos, even a fantasy like Smallville — I expect to be taken out of my comfort zone into a world where bad things can happen at any time to characters we care about.
Facing mortality is essential to any morality play. When Shannon was fatally shot by Ana Lucia on Lost, it cast a pall of suspicion and grief over the merging of the survivors. When Smallville's Clark Kent lost his beloved father figure Jonathan to a heart attack, it was a necessary rite of passage for this superhero-in-the-making.
Nowhere has the death rate been higher than on 24read more
Question: Is ABC just not airing the Charlton Heston version of The Ten Commandments this year? I'll give the new version a run, but this is kind of something I look forward to every year. I do understand there is a DVD, by the way.
Answer: Consider this a public service: To steal from my upcoming review, the best thing I can say about the deadly dull and completely unnecessary new remake of The Ten Commandments is that ABC hasn't given up on running the 1956 classic version. My advice: Skip the new miniseries when it airs April 10 and 11, and wait until Saturday, April 15, when the Charlton Heston version airs. And yes, a 50th-anniversary edition DVD of Cecil B. DeMille's Oscar-winning spectacular has just been issued, packaged with DeMille's earlier (and by some accounts superior) 1923 silent version ...read more