Image Credit: David Giesbrecht

So Ben’s engagement present to Leslie was a personal meet-and-greet with her sex-object-idol, Vice President Joe Biden. His teeth bright enough to light the Parks and Recreation set, Biden proved to be a good actor — or rather, a good reactor (hey, that’s how John Wayne defined the job anyway), to Leslie’s nonplussed yet turned-on reactions. READ FULL STORY »

Image Credit: Jordin Althaus/NBC

“Whitney is taped in front of a live studio audience,” said Whitney Cummings at the start of Wednesday night’s second-season premiere of Whitney, apparently in an effort to prove that, yes, there really are human beings that laugh at Whitney. READ FULL STORY »

Image Credit: Edward Herrera/ABC; Peter Stone/ABC

Last Man Standing returned a series transformed on Friday night, while Malibu Country debuted as a new series with regressive tendencies. Clearly wanting to shake things up, get some attention and some ratings, Tim Allen’s character Mike Baxter has become a supporter of Mitt Romney, a mouthpiece for the Republican party, and perhaps something a bit more extreme. The strategy has worked, at least as far as attention: I probably wouldn’t be reviewing this show, were Mike not saying things like, “You voted for a guy from Kenya.” READ FULL STORY »

Image Credit: Greg Gayne/Fox

The women at the centers of New Girl, Ben and Kate, and The Mindy Project are all intelligent, funny people who, in their various distinctive ways, use ditziness and “girly”-ness to their advantage, flummoxing the more dense specimens of manhood they encounter. Where Lena Dunham offers the nimble mumble-realism version of this sort of woman on her HBO show Girls, these network girls (and I include the female creators, show-runners, and writers also involved in that phrase) are working with a big mass audience, one that needs to be won over more broadly, if you don’t mind my saying so. The Halloween episodes of these three shows demonstrated what I’m talking about. READ FULL STORY »

Image Credit: Karen Neal/ABC

There are certain kinds of shows that invite automatic derision, none more so than the high-concept sitcom. From My Favorite Martian to My Mother the Car through Holmes and Yo-Yo and Work It to ABC’s The Neighbors, the intentional silliness of the premise is an automatic turn-off to a lot of people. The key word there, though, is “intentional”: You don’t make My Mother the Car thinking you’re creating a brilliant satire of man’s dependency on the automobile. And Bosom Buddies was a potentially awful idea (which Work It copped), but was redeemed by the budding talents of Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari, among others. Similarly if not as successfully, the knowing creators of The Neighbors clearly want their show to serve as something more than a series of sight-gags and verbal gaffes, this time from a bunch of aliens who’ve moved into a suburban enclave. READ FULL STORY »

The Mindy Project and Ben and Kate, both of which premiered on Tuesday night flanked by a pair of new New Girl episodes, are the most promising of sitcoms in a fall season that’s not big on promising new sitcoms. If that seems like faint praise, it’s more like the sound of me hedging my bets, because while I was charmed by both, I recognize that the quality could rise or fall quickly.  READ FULL STORY »

Image Credit: Chris Haston

The season premiere of The Office has a lot more snap and vigor than most of last season’s episodes. The half-hour felt as though, with the end of the series in sight, it now has a renewed sense of purpose — to go out strongly, and perhaps paying off on a number of long-running subplots. READ FULL STORY »

The new TV season is in full swing on NBC, with sitcoms such as Go On and The New Normal having aired their second episodes, and the season premiere of one of my favorite dramas, Parenthood, aired earlier this week. READ FULL STORY »

Image Credit: Trae Patton/NBC

The New Normal got a nice little showcase preview after the season premiere of The Voice on Monday night, and it is, in the manner to which we have become accustomed with productions mounted by Ryan Murphy, a briskly-paced mishmash of the well-performed, the extravagantly sentimental, the insufferably self-congratulatory, and the witheringly sarcastic. Plus, NeNe Leakes and a cameo by Gwyneth Paltrow. READ FULL STORY »