Next to Charlie Brown's Great Pumpkin, my favorite Halloween TV touchstone is The Simpsons' annual "Treehouse of Horror" special, with Mad Magazine-worthy parodies of things that go "D-oh!" in the night. It's airing unusually early this year in advance of post-season baseball pre-emptions, but what better way to get in the spirit — and as a bonus for the 24th edition (Sunday, 8/7c, Fox), horror maestro Guillermo Del Toro has designed an elaborate "couch gag" opening sequence that's a kaleidoscopic homage to...
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"This whole thing feels like Christmas or something!" Participating in the Masters and Johnson sex study is the gift that keeps on giving for Dr. Austin Langham (Teddy Sears) on Showtime's Masters of Sex (Sunday, 10/9c).
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It's clear that anyone tuning into Masters of Sex expects to see, well, lots of sex. That doesn't necessarily mean, however, that viewers are using the series as some form of surrogate pornography, but rather are curious about how the series treats sex -- as smut? as science? as procreation? as titillation? In short, just how sexy is the sex on the show?
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All work and no foreplay makes Dr. William Masters anything but a dull boy.
With the assistance of a free-thinking single mother named Virginia Johnson, this renowned fertility specialist and pioneer in the study of sexual physiology challenges the repressive social mores of the late '50s, when Peyton Place is considered risqué and most people (according to Masters) "sit hunched in the dark like prudish cavemen filled with shame and guilt" when it came to thinking about sex.
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Let's start with a little pop quiz from Tuesday's leg of the TCA press tour. Guess which network president summed up his programming philosophy this way — "The enemy of good television is boredom and predictability" — the head of The CW or the leader of Showtime?
If you guessed the latter, it really wasn't much of a guess, was it? Because few things are more predictable than a new CW fall programming slate, which hardly seems new at all: not with a Vampire Diaries spin-off on tap — The Originals, which could hardly be less original — and a remake of the British series The Tomorrow People that looks like any number of interchangeable CW shows about moody teens with superpowers (minus the ability to credibly emote). While CW president Mark Pedowitz discussed plans to introduce a possible Flash spin-off within Arrow this season, and to spin off the way-past-its-prime Supernatural with a show about hunters and monsters set in Chicago, you'd be forgiven for thinking the network's initials now stand for "Clone World."
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