The Daily Beast: "Smash: Anjelica Huston on Her Husband’s Death, Her New Role, and Whether She’ll Sing"

Over at The Daily Beast, I talk with Anjelica Huston about her husband’s death, her formidable character on Smash, and the “cult of murder” on television today. You can read my latest feature, entitled "Smash's Scene Stealer," here.

It is impossible to miss Anjelica Huston when she walks into a room.

In this case, the room was the bar at the Langham Hotel in Pasadena, California, a few hours before Huston was set to take the stage before a ballroom of television critics at the TCA Winter Press Tour to answer questions for her new show, the Broadway-set drama Smash, which premieres Monday on NBC.

With her raven Cleopatra cut, an armful of gently clanging bracelets, and her impressive height, Huston is unlikely to get lost in a crowd, but her considerable talents as an actress render that an impossibility. As she slinked into a club chair on a gray January morning, she exuded a sense of serenity and warmth that is deeply at odds with the troubled characters she often plays.

“Were you one of those kids I scared to death?” she asked, when the topic of The Witches arose; Huston starred in the 1990 adaption of Roald Dahl’s novel as The Grand High Witch, Miss Eva Ernst, and terrified a generation of young moviegoers when she removed her face to reveal a grotesque monster beneath the placid façade.

The Academy Award-winning actress, perhaps best known for her roles in The Royal Tenenbaums, The Addams Family, and Prizzi’s Honor, is no stranger to television—she starred in miniseries such as CBS’s Lonesome Dove, HBO’s Iron Jawed Angels, TNT’s The Mists of Avalon, and appeared in a seven-episode story arc on Medium in 2008—but it is the first time that she has taken on a series regular role. In the backstage Broadway world of Smash, Huston plays producer Eileen Rand, whose divorce from her lecherous husband has not only resulted in the freezing of her assets but the awakening of her sense of righteous vengeance.

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Smash premieres tonight at 10 pm ET/PT on NBC.

The Daily Beast: "Why I’m Tired of Top Chef"

Sometimes the things you once loved can disappoint you the most.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, entitled "Why I’m Tired of Top Chef," in which I take a look at the current season of Bravo's Top Chef, whose repetitive challenges, lackluster contestants, and Texas-sized problems have made watching this season a chore.

Everything is bigger in Texas, Bravo’s culinary competition Top Chef keeps reminding us, but the show, which airs Wednesday evenings, has never felt quite so irrelevant and predictable.

Now in its ninth season, Top Chef appears to be a pale imitation of its former self, a reality competition show that turned an often-mysterious world—the thought processes of highly trained chefs, their inspirations, and their imaginations—into something accessible and deeply understandable to the lay viewer. But that was before Bravo’s schedule was littered with various iterations of the Top Chef concept, variations that included pastry chefs, master chefs, and the original-flavor show that started it all. (A planned Top Chef Junior spinoff has wisely never seen the light of day.)

It seems that not a week goes by during the year that some form of the franchise is not airing … and by doing so, Bravo is swiftly running the Emmy-winning show into the ground. The Texas-based ninth season feels entirely tired, the result of overproducing, gimmicky challenges, sponsor tie-ins, and forced drama.

Continue reading at The Daily Beast...

The Daily Beast: "Smash's Big Broadway Bet" and "11 Secrets of Smash"

Fifty years after her death, the mention of Marilyn Monroe conjures up familiar imagery: that whispery voice, the platinum hair, her vulnerability. From Michelle Williams’s recent embodiment to yet another reissue of Monroe’s last photo shoot, she’s still inescapable, and always exerting a gravitational pull on popular imagination.

In this week's issue of Newsweek, you can read my latest feature, "Smash's Big Broadway Bet," which looks at NBC's musical-drama Smash, launching February 6th, through the prism of both Marilyn Monroe's cultural impact and the stakes that the show faces ahead. Will this end up being The West Wing with music or Cop Rock? I talk to creator/executive producer Theresa Rebeck, Anjelica Huston, and NBC entertainment chairman Robert Greenblatt.

On The Daily Beast, the piece gets a companion story in "11 Secrets of Smash," in which I take a look at several questions surrounding the show including: What would the Showtime version have looked like? Can this show save NBC? Is it based on a book? What does the future hold for the show? Plus, much more.

Smash premieres Monday, February 6th at 10 pm ET/PT on NBC.

The Daily Beast: "TV's Worst New Show: CBS' Rob"

There’s a new contender for the worst new show of the year in CBS’s Rob Schneider vehicle, Rob—it’s racist and unfunny. At the Daily Beast, I take a look at the truly terrible first episode in my latest feature, "TV's Worst New Show."

The media have lately been celebrating the remarkable comeback of the sitcom, which had seen better days. Modern Family continues to outperform itself; Community dazzles with its inventiveness; Suburgatory perfectly captures the suburbs-are-hell trope with wit and bite; Happy Endings has surprised many by becoming a hit; and CBS’s 2 Broke Girls is poised to become television’s most-watched comedy. But for all the talk about revitalized formats and audience engagement this past fall, this doesn’t account for Work It and Rob, two midseason comedy offerings that are so awful they may in fact be harbingers of the Fall of Man.

While this may be hyperbolic, Rob and Work It do symbolize how far the sitcom format has fallen, at any rate. It’s hard to perfectly capture the intense sense of fiery rage that I felt in watching these hackneyed and humorless failures. Both Rob and Work It are deeply offensive in their own ways, but the real crime is that Rob, which launches on CBS on Thursday, and its ABC sibling lack any real sense of humor. Work It had seemingly plumbed the nadir of the television comedy, and it seemed it couldn’t get any worse. Wrong! It can get worse, and does with Rob.

Rob—which was previously known as ¡Rob! but, for reasons known only to CBS upper management, the network dropped the upside-down exclamation point, making copy editors everywhere sigh with relief—stars Rob Schneider as Rob, a sad sack and OCD-prone gringo who marries Maggie, a drop-dead-gorgeous Mexican-American woman (Claudia Bassols), after dating her for only six weeks. Their wedding—which, naturally, takes place on the spur of the moment at a Las Vegas chapel—comes as a terrible surprise to Maggie’s sprawling family, who never envisioned her with a short, white husband. Hilarity, as they say, is meant to ensue.

Continue reading at The Daily Beast...

The Winds of War: An Advance Review of Downton Abbey Season Two

It's no secret that I'm a devotee of lavish British costume drama Downton Abbey, which recently wrapped its second season run on ITV in the U.K. and which finally heads across the pond this weekend, where it will again air as part of PBS' Masterpiece Classic skein.

In the last year or so since we last saw the Crawleys, viewers from all walks of life have discovered the irresistible joys of the sublime Downton Abbey, reveling in the spirit of unpredictability and historical detail that Julian Fellowes' creation has in abundance, as well as memorable characters, a winning blend of pathos and humor, plot twists, and star-crossed romances. Not since Upstairs, Downstairs has a period drama seemed quite so tangible and relevant, at once timeless and thoroughly modern at the same time.

Season Two of Downton Abbey is set two years after the end of the first season, as Britain--and Europe as a whole--is enmeshed in the First World War. On the winds of war, change has come to the stately house, and neither master nor servant has emerged unscathed as members of every class must adapt to their circumstances, which become greatly altered as the season wears on. (For more on what specific characters are up to in the second season, you can read this Daily Beast feature that I wrote in August, in which the actors and Fellowes tell me what Matthew, Mary, and the others are up to in Season Two.)

Just as the first season found Downton invaded by technology and new ideas as the Edwardian period came to an end, this condition-of-England story finds the war literally entering the halls of Downton as the house becomes a convalescent hospital for wounded officers and the Crawleys adapt once more to the tumult of transformation. Whether they bend or break under the strain is one of the major subplots of this second season, which revisits several major storylines from the first season--the doomed romance between heir Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) and Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery), the possibility of happiness between valet Bates (Brendan Coyle) and housemaid Anna (Joanne Froggatt), the machinations of Thomas (Rob James-Collier) and Miss O'Brien (Siobhan Finneran), the tension between Lady Sybil (Jessica Brown Findlay) and chauffeur Branson (Allen Leech), and the secret that Mary harbors, to name but a few--while introducing several new characters and new plotlines.

Tonally, this new season is vastly different than the one that came before. While we're given a few moments of domestic mirth that harken back to the early days of the first season, this is most definitely a war epic, with scenes of horror in the trenches of the Somme contrasting sharply with the dining room banter between Dowager Countess Violet (Maggie Smith) and her clan. There's a seriousness and darkness which permeate the second season. Pivotal matters--the whereabouts of a missing snuff box, for example--from the first season now seem woefully trivial in the face of war, death, and a lost generation. Which means that the stakes are now far higher for the Crawleys and their servants in Season Two of Downton Abbey, where the things that go missing are far less replaceable.

I've had the opportunity to see the entire British run of Season Two and the PBS version, which makes some (very) minor cuts in order to fit them into their allotted timeslot and which combines the first and second episodes and the seventh and eighth into two two-hour installments. (There are, as with Season One, no missing episodes, no matter what the British press might insinuate and I don't believe that any of the verbal grenades, tossed off so magnificently by Smith, are eliminated.) There is also the matter of the Christmas Special (so-called because it aired on Christmas Day in the U.K.), which will air here as the final episode of the season. (Fans foolish enough to illegally download the "Christmas Special" will be in for a rude awakening: it's set after the events of Season Two.)

After watching all of Season Two of Downton in the fall, I was lucky enough to watch that gorgeous final episode on Christmas Day, and I can easily say that it's the best installment of the entire season, a gripping and triumphant episode that not only ties together the plot threads of the second go-around but also tantalizingly sets up the direction for the third season and pays off some of the somewhat meandering plots from this one.

Which brings me to some of the issues I had with Season Two. I'll preface this by saying that Downton Abbey is a full head and tails above the rest in every respect, even when it (momentarily) falters, and that I love this show dearly, with an obsessive zeal that means that I'm watching with laser-like intensity. With regard to Season Two, there is a sense of soapy repetitiveness to some of the storylines that can, at times, bring the pacing to a screeching halt. Kitchen maid Daisy (Sophie McShera) gets saddled with a storyline that feels as though she's doing the same verbal two-step for six episodes straight. Likewise, the romance between Bates and Anna--one of the best elements of the first season--feels almost maudlin when every time they express how happy they're about to be, their dreams get dashed on the cobblestones. The effect feels rather like the start-stop-start-stop of a stalling engine, with neither storyline able to get out of neutral and move forward with any sense of momentum.

However, both storylines are serviced better in the finale/Christmas Special than they were throughout Season Two, with that episode providing closure--in both a narrative and emotional sense--to both story arcs. I don't want to spoil any major plots here (the series is far too good to come to it knowing everything that's going to happen), but I will say that the final episode resolves both in a promising and intriguing way that's truthful to the characters and their situations. It also removes the faint whiff of character assassination that's coming off of Robert (Hugh Bonneville) after the last third of episodes. Again, I don't want to give things away but I was puzzled as to why Fellowes would chose to go this route, just as I was unsure as to why the self-righteous Isobel (Penelope Wilton) had been transformed into such a shrill harpie in the second season and the entire point of a potentially historically-accurate but painful fraught episode that revolves around the letter "P," and Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael).

Which isn't to say that I disliked the second season, because I certainly didn't, but after the dizzying heights of Downton's precise and perfect first season, the second season does suffer slightly in comparison. However, these are minor quibbles in a season that's also filled with some superlative performances, particularly from Stevens, Dockery, Bonneville, and others. The new characters, including Zoe Boyle's Lavinia Swire and Iain Glenn's Sir Richard Carlisle, fit into Downton Abbey beautifully, providing a new sense of heightened tensions within the drawing rooms and broken hearts of the Crawleys. Both provide the latest obstacles to the potential union between Mary and Matthew that the series has been hinting at since its very first installment and Boyle in particular is to be praised for making Lavinia wholly sympathetic and almost saintly in many ways. Many shows would have gone the route of making Lavinia easy to hate, but Fellowes and Boyle imbue Lavinia with a refreshing innocence and steadfast devotion that makes her quite easy to love.

And that's what we're left with in the face of war: how love unites us and keeps us going, even in the most difficult of times. But it's not always romantic love that keeps the home fires burning; it's also love of one's job and pride in one's work (I'm thinking of Jim Carter's devoted butler Carson here) and familial love, as well as love of a particular place, even when it seems as though things are changing forever. With Season Two of Downton Abbey we're invited to see the resilience of the human spirit and heart amid troubled times. But hope, as they say, springs eternal as well. And within Downton Abbey, the future--or the past--has never looked better.

Season Two of Downton Abbey begins Sunday, January 8 on PBS' Masterpiece Classic at 9 pm ET/PT. Check your local listings for details.

Justified, Downton Abbey, Shameless, and More: What to Watch on TV This Winter

With the return of Justified, Downton Abbey, and Shameless, and the launch of Touch, Luck, and others, I take a look at what’s coming to your TV this winter over at The Daily Beast, in my latest feature, "What to Watch on TV This Winter." (To get right to my thoughts on the 18 shows included and bypass the intro, you can click here.)

January brings some fresh opportunities for the broadcast and cable networks to try and lure you back with new and returning programming. Among the highlights: costume drama fiends will be lined up for the Jan. 8 return of British drama Downton Abbey; FX’s Justified returns for a third season of Kentucky shootouts on Jan. 17; HBO’s cult comedy Eastbound and Down returns on Feb. 19; auteurs David Milch and Michael Mann unite for HBO’s Luck, launching Jan. 29; and Kiefer Sutherland returns to television with Fox’s Touch, which will get a preview broadcast on Jan. 25. (It officially premieres on March 19.)

Absolutely Fabulous, the outrageous British cult comedy that gave the world the fashion-obsessed Edina Monsoon (Jennifer Saunders) and Patsy Stone (Joanna Lumley), will celebrate its 20th anniversary with three brand-new specials this year, the first of which airs on both BBC America and Logo on Jan. 8 at 10 p.m. ABC will offer the globe-spanning espionage/revenge drama Missing, starring Ashley Judd as a former CIA agent in search of her son, who vanished in Europe, and Game of Thrones’s Sean Bean, beginning March 15. In the not-soon-enough category, Mad Men’s long-delayed fifth season is expected to turn up on AMC sometime this spring, possibly as early as March.

Elsewhere, the usual slew of reality shows—Fox’s American Idol (Jan. 18), NBC’s The Voice (in the coveted post–Super Bowl slot on Feb. 5), and CBS’ The Amazing Race (Feb. 19)—returns with new cycles, while AMC gets into the unscripted business with the Kevin Smith–produced Comic Men, launching Feb. 12. And ABC may have a contender for the worst television show of all time with Work It, a cross-dressing “comedy” starring Ben Koldyke and Amaury Nolasco that already has GLAAD up in arms. (It uses male anxieties, unemployment, and a relentless misogyny to wring jokes out of a stale, Bosom Buddies–like premise.)

Continue reading at The Daily Beast...

The Daily Beast: "Most Memorable TV Deaths of 2011"

Looking back, 2011 proved to be a particularly deadly one for television characters, whose bodies were stacking up even before the return of AMC’s The Walking Dead, which rather notoriously raises the body count each season.

From Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones to Downton Abbey and Boardwalk Empire, TV-show creators this year proved that they were only too willing to kill off beloved characters or shock their respective audiences with deaths involving characters long believed to be “safe,” whether those were little girls, Halloween trick-or-treaters, or heroes.

Safety, it seems, is an outmoded idea. Head over to The Daily Beast to read my and Maria Elena Fernandez's latest feature, "Most Memorable TV Deaths of 2011," in which we examine our choices for the most memorable TV demises this year, rounding up an unlucky 13 who left their fictional lives too soon. But beware: if you’re not up to date on the 12 shows discussed below, you’ll want to avoid reading any further, as there are SPOILERS.

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The Daily Beast: "Homeland, Justified, Downton Abbey and More: The Best and Worst TV Shows of 2011"

At The Daily Beast, it's finally time for my Best and Worst TV Shows of 2011 list: with 10 shows up for recognition as the best (including Justified, Homeland, Downton Abbey, Community, Parks and Recreation, Game of Thrones, The Good Wife, and more) and five for worst of 2011. (Plus, you can also compare my Best/Worst picks to my colleague Maria Elena Fernandez's.)

Head over to The Daily Beast to read my latest feature, "Homeland, Justified, Downton Abbey and More: The Best and Worst TV Shows of 2011," which--as the title indicates--rounds up the best and worst television that 2011 had to offer. Warning: the story may contain spoilers if you are not entirely caught up on the shows discussed here.

What is your take on our lists? Did your favorite/least favorite shows make the cut? Head to the comments section to discuss and debate.

Our Own Worst Enemy is Ourselves: Quick Thoughts on the Homeland Season Finale

I'm puzzled by how polarizing the season finale ("Marine One") of Showtime's Homeland ended up being, with viewers on one side or the other about just how effective--and believable--the climax of the espionage drama was last night.

Personally, I thought it was powerful, heartbreaking, and superlative, filled with emotional resonance and an aura of tragedy hovering uneasily over everyone, particularly the now-tragic figure of Cassandra-like Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), whose portents of doom fell onto deaf ears. It's Carrie who saves the lives of the Vice President and his cabinet as well as that of Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), but her instability is used as a weapon against her. In essence, she saves the world, but is denied the knowledge that she's done so.

Her breakdown in the final third of the episode isn't just a mental one, but that of communication as well as self-worth. Carrie's entire persona is based on a laser-like precision of the facts, collating information, and projecting possible scenarios. Her guilt over missing some valuable clue that led to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11 have shaped the person she is today, one who is determined to dig at the truth regardless of the personal cost to herself. Which is why Carrie's decision at the end of the episode is all the more tragic.

In voluntarily opting to undergo electroshock therapy, Carrie is choosing to forget, to wipe clean the slate of her memory, and start fresh. Her tabula rasa is the result of weeks of being correct but not knowing so, of falling under the thrall of Brody and falling in love with him, of not being trusted by those in charge, and by being exposed in the eleventh hour by someone she trusted. Carrie began the season a disgraced CIA officer; she ends it a disgraced woman, full stop.

What makes her decision all the more tragic--and the implications all the more severe--is that in that moment of clarity before she slips under the anesthesia, Carrie finally slips together the final missing puzzle piece in her color spectrum of clues, remembering that Brody spoke of Issa in his sleep and that Abu Nazir's son was named Issa. The missing part of the spectrum is finally in full view, the rainbow complete, the puzzle solved, the meaning of Nazir's silence finally clear.

But Carrie has doomed herself to forget, to wipe away the events of the last few weeks, her painful time with Brody, her ouster from the CIA, her injuries in the blast and the subsequent psychological freefall that followed. Carrie won't remember that she made the connection, that she unmasked Brody's involvement, that she Solved It All. Instead, her words are once more misheard, misunderstood, disregarded. Her Cassandra cries are ignored, and cast off as meaningless gibberish, the white noise that arrives before the long sleep.

Brody, meanwhile, has his own life saved in the wake of Carrie's crusading. He--and his family--owe her a debt of gratitude, but it's one that he'll never repay. In reaching out to Dana (smartly, the only member of the Brody family who saw anything about their pater familias' behavior as irrational, bizarre, or troubling), Carrie follows through on Saul's advice vis-a-vis Aileen: she seeks out not what made Brody an extremist (Issa) but what makes him human (his family), hoping that Dana's voice on the line can, in essence, "talk him down" from detonating himself, the Veep, and a slew of government officials in that underground Cheney-esque bunker. It's a masterful payoff to a plant from several episodes ago. In trying to get to Dana, Carrie tries to stab at Brody's Achilles heel: his family.

And it's not until Brody hears Dana's voice on the phone that he begins to rethink this turn of events and weighs what the true collateral damage would be: his own loved ones. It's in that moment that Brody himself decides where his true allegiance lies. Can he rip open a psychic wound in his family through his sins? Can he fail to fulfill a promise to his daughter? On the roof later, it's as though Brody is seeing things clearly for the first time, acknowledging that they do in fact have "views," which he never noticed. Carrie may be forgetting, but for Brody, it's an acknowledgement that he chooses to remember, something that connects to the opening sequence as he videotapes his final confession.

It's a masterful turn of events, once more setting up Carrie and Brody as ideological opposites, defined by their choices and the way in which they process their damage. Which isn't to say that there weren't some missteps along the way here. I agree with the dissenting opinion that Brody's decision to not detonate the VP but instead assume a position of power within the government and do more damage there--while it made sense within the context of Brody's mind--should not have come as a surprising development to Nazir.

After all, surely a turned politico with a grudge against the administration and a fervent Islamist is more of an asset that killing the VP. Brody is right when he says that if he cuts off one head, like a Hydra, another will rise up to take its place. This is all very true, but the way it's handled within the context of the show makes it seem as though this brainstorm of Brody's is news to Nazir, that the leader wouldn't have anticipated this potential turn of events in advance and that it takes Brody failing to follow orders to get him to see a different path for his so-called "Marine One."

But that's a minor quibble in a season finale that brought tension, emotional depth, and gripping suspense to the mix, as well as some unexpected humor (Walker mussing the old woman's hair as he walked out of her apartment, the VP's disgusting use of Elizabeth's death to declare his presidential intentions, Brody's gut-punch of words to Carrie in the police station parking lot, and Carrie's insistence that she go to the hospital). While I suspected that Carrie would figure it out in the end--just in time to forget it all--that moment carried more than its fair share of intellectual and emotional weight (particularly the beautiful scenes between Danes and Mandy Patinkin), rendering Carrie a far more tragic figure than we previously believed her to be.

I'm curious just how far into the future Season Two of Homeland will be set, and just how Carrie will be drawn back into the mix when her security clearance has been revoked permanently. (The sadness with which Saul tells her that there's no way her termination will be reversed was palpable.) Having forgotten what she knew about Brody, Carrie will be forced to start back at square one again, but, considering her dogged determination thus far, I think it's safe to say that Carrie will once again be in pursuit of Brody--and the Truth--before too long.

As for me, I'm anxious to see what that means and how it unfolds. The America of Homeland--and the larger one of the real world--need Carrie Mathison and it needs shows like Homeland that ask uncomfortable questions about the greater good, morality, and governmental malfeasance. I just hope that Season Two lives up to the very large expectations created in the wake of this fantastic and thoughtful finale.

What did you think of the season finale? Are you dying to see Season Two of Homeland as soon as possible? Head to the comments section to discuss and debate.

Season Two of Homeland will air in 2012 on Showtime.

The Daily Beast: "TV Breaks the Incest Taboo"

HBO's Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones, Bored to Death and other TV shows have recently featured incest storylines or themes.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "TV Breaks the Incest Taboo," in which I examine this troubling trend in scripted programming.

In 1990, Twin Peaks gave the world a nightmare vision into the seediness beneath the placid veneer of small-town America. But while one of the many puzzles embedded within Twin Peaks’ narrative was the identity of the murderer of teen queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), the true secret lurking at the heart of the mystery was the incest and abuse suffered by Laura at the hands of her father, Leland (Ray Wise) and the psychic damage this secret caused his wife, Sarah (Grace Zabriskie). It’s a reveal so horrific, so destructive, that the creators represented it in terms of the supernatural, having Leland possessed by a demonic entity in order to explain the cruelty and lack of humanity that such a crime would require.

“The act at the black heart of the murder colored the entire narrative,” Twin Peaks’ co-creator Mark Frost told The Daily Beast this week. “Incest is a primal, eternal taboo in civilized culture, and some of the greatest tragedies ever written proceed from it, or lead to it.”

In the 20-plus years since Twin Peaks first premiered, television’s approach to incest had changed little, with few shows daring to break that taboo. But, particularly in the last year, scripted television shows have reversed their disinclination to deal with incest. Premium cable is allowing creators to push boundaries with storylines that weren’t previously permissible. And with incest at the forefront of the national conversation—as classical-music troupe The 5 Browns come clean about the incest they suffered at the hands of their manager father—it is providing grist for the story engines of some of television’s most daring and controversial shows.

Continue reading at The Daily Beast...

The Daily Beast: "Fall TV Report Card: The Winners and Losers"

With the 2011-12 television season in full swing and the cancellation orders stacking up, Jace Lacob rounds up the season’s winners (Revenge! Homeland!), losers (Man Up! Whitney!), and draws.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest story, "Fall TV Report Card: The Winners and Losers," in which I offer up not a critic's list, or a Best of 2011 TV list, but a business story selecting the winners and losers (as well as draws) for the first half of the 2011-12 television season. (Those selections are in the gallery.)

With the 2011-12 television season well underway, it’s become increasingly clear that this isn’t the best fall the broadcasters have ever had. Back in May, when the networks touted their new offerings to advertisers, it appeared they were trying to take some risks with their programming.

But the opposite is true: most of those shows featured what the networks hoped were built-in audiences for retro brand settings (Pan Am! The Playboy Club!) or remakes of vintage television (Charlie’s Angels, it’s back to pop-culture heaven for you), but viewers largely stayed away from these and many of the new fall shows.

Those claiming that viewers’ attention is elsewhere, such as on the Internet, likely don’t have a response for the oversize audience for things like AMC’s The Walking Dead, now the highest-rated cable show on the air, or the first post–Charlie Sheen episode of CBS’s Two and a Half Men. (The latter could be due to sampling, but the show has remained consistently in the range of 14 million to 16 million viewers since then.) It seems as though people are watching television, but they’re increasingly just not that excited about what’s airing on the broadcasters. (Just look at the declining fortunes of once-invulnerable reality franchise The Biggest Loser.) Which is downright worrisome, as the networks have to replace aging series and churn out new and zeitgeist-grabbing programming on a yearly basis. And sorry, Fox, but that wasn’t The X Factor, despite the nonstop hype.

Continue reading at The Daily Beast...

The Daily Beast: "Bravo’s Addictive Work of Art"

The art-world reality competition, Work of Art, with its oddball artists, overly harsh judges, and a terrifically animated mentor has become must-see television.

Let’s be honest: Many of us watch reality television to fulfill a voyeuristic need to peer into other people’s lives, and to perhaps feel better about our own. The staggering success of Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise would seem to prove this, just as, similarly, the cable channel’s reality shows tap this universal human need within the context of competition.

We’ve seen pastry chefs break down about Red Hots, fashion designers make competitors’ mothers cry (Project Runway’s Jeffrey Sebelia, we’re looking at you), but the drama has perhaps never seemed quite so real or the participants quite so tortured as the artists on Bravo’s highly addictive Work of Art, currently airing its second season Wednesday nights at 9 p.m.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest story, "Bravo’s Addictive Work of Art," in which I look at the unexpected pleasures to be found in Bravo's art competition series.

Work of Art: The Search for the Next Great Artist airs Wednesday nights at 9 p.m. ET/PT.

The Daily Beast: "Showtime's Homeland: The Best New Show of the Season

There is no room for argument: Showtime’s provocative and gut-wrenching psychological thriller Homeland is the best new show of the season.

Revolving around two very unreliable narrators engaged in a series of riveting mind games, Homeland explores an America 10 years after 9/11, surveying the damage done to both the national psyche and the central protagonists. Claire Danes plays Carrie Mathison, a CIA operative with both a mental illness and a troubling sense of personal guilt that she missed crucial intelligence prior to the Sept. 11 attacks; Damian Lewis (Life) plays soldier Nicholas Brody, a prisoner of war who returns home to a family that long thought him dead, and who may or may not have been turned into an enemy of the state during his eight-year captivity in Iraq.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, entitled "Showtime's Homeland: The Best New Show of the Season," in which I talk to the show's co-creators Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon about terrorism, intelligence analysis, and paranoia in the post-9/11 and post-24 era.

Homeland airs Sunday evenings at 10 p.m. ET/PT on Showtime.

The Daily Beast: "Community on Hiatus: Why NBC Is Making a Mistake"

Community fans, this is your St. Crispin’s Day moment. Dumping Community in favor of shifting around the Thursday-night comedies feels a bit like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Community, after all, is not the iceberg that’s sinking NBC.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest story, "Community on Hiatus: Why NBC Is Making a Mistake," in which I look at the case for and against keeping the brilliant and subversive comedy around.

For right now, Community airs Thursday evening at 8 p.m. on NBC.

The Daily Beast: "American Horror Story: The Craziest Show on TV"

The most divisive show on television is FX’s American Horror Story, a haunted-house drama created by Glee’s Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, with viewers and critics loving it, hating it, or loving to hate it.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "American Horror Story: The Craziest Show on TV," in which Maria Elena Fernandez and I, in our latest He Said/She Said discussion, examine the show's merits and failings and attempt to come to something resembling an agreement about the show. (Spoiler: we don't.)

What is your take on American Horror Story? Head to the comments section to discuss, debate, and react.

American Horror Story airs Wednesdays at 10 pm ET/PT on FX.

The Daily Beast: "The Teens of Parenthood"

In NBC’s Parenthood, the show’s teens--including Mae Whitman, Sarah Ramos, and Miles Heizer--often walk away with the most heartbreaking and emotional storylines.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, entitled "TV's Most Talented Teens" (formerly known as "The Teens of Parenthood"), in which I sit down with Whitman, Ramos, and Heizer to discuss their characters, on-set camaraderie, and, yes, the haircut that launched a thousand tweets.

Parenthood returns with new episodes tonight at 10 pm ET/PT on NBC.

The Daily Beast: "Jack Huston: Boardwalk Empire's Scene-Stealer"

HBO’s Boardwalk Empire revolves around mob feuds, illegal bootlegging, and the corruption and venality that accompanied Prohibition. But beneath the surface, the show is about grasping at the American dream. That quest for happiness has never been more vivid—nor more painfully realized—than in Boardwalk Empire’s Richard Harrow, a Great War sniper who now kills for profit, wearing a tin half-mask.

Jack Huston, the grandson of legendary director John Huston (and nephew to Anjelica and Danny Huston), is stealing nearly every scene of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, where he plays disfigured sniper turned hitman Richard Harrow.

At The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Boardwalk Empire's Scene-Stealer," in which I talk to Huston about this week’s episode, wearing the mask, and whether Richard still has a soul.

Rolling the Dice: An Advance Review of Community's "Remedial Chaos Theory"

Warning: You do not want to miss Thursday's episode of Community.

It's a given that some of the most ambitious episodes of NBC's Community are often the ones with the seemingly most straightforward concepts. Look at Season Two's fantastic "Cooperative Calligraphy" for a strong example of this: the gang at Greendale is locked in the study room when Annie's pen goes missing. A bottle episode is turned on its head (no pun intended) here, transforming a slight idea into a larger one as the group is beset by paranoia and fractures in front of our eyes.

The same holds true for Thursday's upcoming episode, "Remedial Chaos Theory," another bottle episode that defies the laws of logic and probability in a way. With Dan Harmon and the writing staff achieving such dizzying heights with "Cooperative Calligraphy," it seemed nearly impossible that they would be able to approach another bottle episode with the same gonzo spirit that made the original so palpably exciting and innovative. And yet that's just what they've managed to do with this week's episode, another bottle episode of ingenuity, emotion, and true insight, which I loved from start to finish.

Quick set up: Troy and Abed have a new apartment and they've invited the study group over for a housewarming party with genteel rules and a bowl of olives next to the toilet. (It's that sort of "fancy" do.) When the pizza they ordered arrives, no one wants to go down to get it, leading Jeff to come up with a solution: he'll roll a six-sided die to determine which of them will go downstairs. This is where the chaos theory of the title comes in, as Abed posits that Jeff has unwittingly created a series of alternate timelines, based on the outcome of the roll.

The genius of the installment comes from the fact that we're allowed to witness how each of these timelines plays out, sometimes similarly, sometimes with vast differences, each spinning out of the singular event of Jeff throwing that die in the air. In some, truths are dragged out into the light; in others, feelings are locked away, possibly forever, as moments fizzle, are missed, or are shunned altogether. The beauty of the episode comes from the small universalities created across the timelines, some of which are affected by the chaotic nature of the die-roll: Shirley baking pies, Jeff injuring himself, Britta wanting to sing aloud to "Roxanne," Pierce's insensitivity (and a gross Eartha Kitt story), etc.

Likewise, the episode works because of the individual characters' consistency from timeline to timeline. The dynamics between the characters may shift and buckle due to external pressures--people are in different places due to the chaotic nature of change in the timestream--but the characters themselves remain reassuringly the same: Jeff will always act like Jeff; Shirley will always be giving; Britta always flighty. The simmering attraction between Jeff and Annie is still bubbling away, because these timelines emanate not from the distant past but from the immediacy of now, from a chance roll of the dice.

I don't want to spoil too much of "Remedial Chaos Theory" because it is a breathtakingly ambitious episode comprised of separate narrative strands that twist together into an intoxicating union of character, story, and plot. (And fake goatees.) The concept may be heady, but the emotions within these timelines are painfully real, resonant, and yet not separate from the comedy. Will the gang tell Shirley why they're shunning her baked goods? Will Jeff and Annie give into their mutual attraction? What's going on between Troy and Britta? Will Pierce choose to humiliate Troy or choose to be a decent human being?

What I will say is that the episode gives us one of the series' best moments of group unity and singularity that had my face aching from smiling by the end of it. I'm definitely not going to ruin the moment here, but I'll say that it's both fitting and unexpected, a true instance of shared joy and collectiveness that harkens to the show's title and the group's relationship, not just to one another, but to the audience as well.

All in all, "Remedial Chaos Theory" is an intelligent, hysterical, and ambitious installment that proves just how much the Community writers challenge themselves to break through long-held narrative traditions to produce something innovative and electrifying. It's clear that they too took a chance on a roll of the dice, and this piece of narrative origami has paid off magnificently.

Community's "Remedial Chaos Theory" airs Thursday at 8 pm ET/PT on NBC.

The Daily Beast: "The Cult of Linda Hunt"

At 66 and four-feet-nine, Linda Hunt is an unlikely action heroine.

But as the enigmatic Hetty Lange on NCIS: LA, Oscar winner Hunt (who won for her staggering performance as a male Indonesian-Australian dwarf in Peter Weir's The Year of Living Dangerously) has become a Teen Choice Award recipient and the show’s breakout character.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, entitled "The Cult of Linda Hunt," in which I sit down with the Oscar (and Teen Choice Award!) winner Hunt to discuss NCIS: Los Angeles' Hetty, The Year of Living Dangerously, water from the moon, and what the future holds. (I also talk to creator Shane Brennan and Chris O'Donnell about the remarkable Hunt and her character.)

NCIS: Los Angeles airs Tuesday evenings at 9 pm ET/PT on CBS.

Brand New Day: Thoughts on the Season Premiere of The Good Wife

The wait is over.

After months of waiting breathlessly for the repercussions of Alicia (Julianna Margulies) and Will (Josh Charles) entering that hotel room together (with Alicia taking control of the situation), The Good Wife returned for the start of its third season ("A New Day"), written by Robert and Michelle King, with a new night and timeslot, a new haircut for Alicia, and a new office for our erstwhile good wife, who proved this week just how bad she can be.

Among other areas, The Good Wife has excelled in its handling of female sexuality, particularly in terms of how it's handled within the confines of a primetime broadcast network drama. This hasn't been a show featuring much bed-hopping from its main character, who spent the first two seasons coming to terms with her husband's infidelity, her passion towards her boss, and her decision to kick said husband to the curb after learning that he had slept with one of the few friends she had (that would be Archie Panjabi's Kalinda Sharma, naturally). On the night of his election victory.

This week's episode--which found Alicia representing a Muslim college student alternately accused of participating in violence at an interfaith rally and first-degree murder--may have revolved around ethnic tensions and avatar-based video gaming but it was the scene between Alicia and Will--in which they continued the affair they started in the season finale--that got tongues wagging this week. Was it too hot? Too steamy? Did it cross the line?

I'd argue that it was steamy but it was also a very mature handling of female sexuality, one that we don't ordinarily see on television, as Alicia gave into her own desires, once again taking control of the situation from her male partner, to achieve her own pleasure. It's no surprise that Alicia refuses to be objectified here; the title of the series speaks volumes about the way she had been objectified as the scandalized politician's wife. Likewise, the courtroom scenes proved that she refuses to bow to her husband, now newly returned to his seat of power, but instead promises an adversarial relationship with her estranged partner.

These two are all smiles in front of the kids, but the facades wear thin whenever they're alone: Alicia tells him that she'll make excuses for him rather than sit beside him over dinner at Zach's girlfriend's house; she refuses to be shaken when Peter tries to goad her into crumbling after proving her mettle in court. They might not be divorced, but these two are clearly already plotting their own particular revenges.

And that's a Good Thing. In its third season, The Good Wife isn't approaching anything--whether it be the struggling marriage between Peter and Alicia, the sexual tension between Alicia and Will, or the now fractured friendship between Alicia and Kalinda--as anything resembling a sacred cow. Instead, it's playing fast and loose with its dramatic underpinnings, creating a shifting landscape where anything is possible, plots can turn on a dime, and relationships can be undone with relative easy.

I will say that I am going to miss Kelli Giddish, who reprised her role from last season as the mercenary-minded Sophia Russo; her presence here gives us hints of the love triangle that the Kings told me would have gone down between Kalinda, Cary, and Sophia. She's a fantastic foil for Kalinda as well, their sexual tension simmering quite nicely (after a fling last season) while their competitive natures get the better of them. Having Sophia turn up like the metaphorical bad penny every time Kalinda got a lead on the investigation served to further intertwine their lives. It's a shame that we won't get to see this develop further now that Giddish is starring in NBC's Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

Cary, meanwhile, is playing for keeps. It's remarkable just how much Matt Czuchry's character has changed since the early episodes of the series. Once an arrogant little minnow, Cary has become a ruthless shark, perfectly willing to do whatever he has to in order to win, in order to prove his place beside Peter at the state's attorney's office. Even his one seemingly altruistic act in this episode--slipping the traffic camera report to Kalinda--had an ulterior motive, as he then flipped the situation on its head, using the report to finger Alicia's client as the prime suspect in a brutal murder. (Which, to me, always felt deeply personal, rather than political: stabbed 45 times screams crime of passion, not hate crime, per se.) I'm curious to see where Cary is headed and whether his closed-off nature speaks to his association with the similarly compartmentalizing Kalinda.

However, I do want to see Alicia and Kalinda eventually come back to some sort of understanding, though I hope it takes a while for the ice to thaw between these two. As much as I loved Diane's insistence that the two women work out whatever is between them (implicit in that: an understanding that Diane doesn't want to know what it is), I thought the scene between Kalinda and Will at the bar underpinned Kalinda's loneliness this season. She's shut down emotionally again, unwilling to let Sophia in, unwilling to let anyone get too close after she got burned by Alicia. Maybe Kalinda does need a dog. (Plus, how awesome was Will's suggestion that "Kalinda and pooch" could solve crimes together?)

All in all, I thought that "A New Day" represented a fantastic start to the third season, one that immediately made me crave more episodes of The Good Wife immediately... and an installment that made me feel that perhaps winding down my weekend with Alicia and Co. on a Sunday evening is a great thing indeed.

However, I'm curious to know: what did you think of "A New Day"? What was your take on the Alicia/Will scene? Will Kalinda and Alicia ever mend their fences? What's going on with Grace and her new tutor? Head to the comments section to discuss.

Next week on The Good Wife ("The Death Zone"), Alicia must quickly learn English Law when a libel case she won in the United States is retried in a British court.