After a false start and a major overhaul,  ABC has finally rolled out their version of Life On Mars, and it has about as much life as, well, Mars.
The original is some of the best television you’ll never get to see. It’s the story of Sam Tyler, a tightly wound police detective who gets hit […]

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Chris Rock’s new stand-up special Kill The Messenger is a puzzling disappointment.
The HBO special is assembled from live performances on three continents - Johannesburg, South Africa; London, England; and New York, New York. Rock’s production company has thrown tradition and continuity out the window by attempting to seamlessly splice together performances from all three locations […]

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A&E’s remake of The Andromeda Strain was a blink and you’ll miss it affair. Once upon a time, a lavish 4 hour miniseries based on a Michael Crichton novel, and executive produced by Ridley and Tony Scott would have been a headline television event. Those days are long gone.
Whether this re-make disappeared off the radar […]

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In the science-fiction/fantasy genre, there are two types of zombies. The old school type is slow and uncoordinated, its body broken by decay; it mostly staggers around blindly and groaning incoherently. The new school type is fast and mean, running at full speed after fresh meat.
Television shows returning from cancellation can be lumped into the […]

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South Park is back.
After the mis-fire of last week’s episode, “Britney’s New Look” was a welcome return to form for Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The episode takes our gossip-obsessed culture to the edges of horror, equating our tabloid-television fixations with the ancient historical practices of human sacrifice. That absurd perversion of logic […]

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Every long-running show has its misfires. It’s unavoidable. And for a show like South Park that constantly swings for the fences, even a .400 batting average is remarkable. South Park usually averages one or two misfires a season (the tedious “Manbearpig” comes to mind), but the clinkers have always been redeemed by epic episodes like […]

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A decade from now, if you wanted an encyclopedic list of everything wrong with television in 2008, you’ll look no further than NBC’s backdoor pilot movie Knight Rider.The original series aired on NBC from 1982-1986, and quite frankly, it hasn’t aged well. Cheap production values, unsophisticated plots, and David Hasselhoff combined to create some first-rate […]

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In my previous piece on The Sopranos, I made the point that it was one of the most ambitious shows on television, and that the sixth and final season was coming to a conclusion with a blistering ferocity. Happily, the series finale lives up to all the expectations that one could have for the […]

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