Happy birthday, Mr. Dickens.

Over at The Daily Beast, we're celebrating Charles Dickens’s 200th birthday. You can read my latest feature, entitled "Happy Birthday, Charles Dickens! Lost, NCIS, Big Love, Veep Writers on His Legacy," in which I talk to TV auteurs including Lost's Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, The Thick of It and Veep creator Armando Iannucci, NCIS's Gary Glasberg, and others as they reflect on how Dickens’s work has influenced storytelling on television.

Today marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens (1812–1870), but the popularity of the writer of such novels as Great Expectations, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, and David Copperfield—to name but a few of his immortal works—hasn’t diminished in the time since his death.

In the pantheon of great English-language novelists, Dickens reigns supreme for a number of reasons. He was a master storyteller who created unforgettable characters—a menagerie that included the grotesque, the disenfranchised, the saintly, and the avaricious robber barons of his day—who leapt off the page and continue to live on in the imaginations of those who read his words. And his whiplash-inducing plots, with their constant twists, fused populist entertainment and deft societal commentary.

Despite his fame and fortune, Dickens was a champion for social reform, turning his attention to education, the Victorian workhouse, social inequity, and financial speculation, and offering blistering commentary on the failures of legal and governmental institutions to protect those they were designed to defend, themes that continue to resonate sharply today. Looking for his take on Bernie Madoff? Read Little Dorrit. Feel that the educational system is collapsing? Take a look at Nicholas Nickleby. The war on crime? Oliver Twist. Serpentine legal battles? Bleak House.

Additionally, and unbeknownst to him, Dickens also paved the way for the serialized narrative that television viewers have come to enjoy. The majority of his novels were first serialized in monthly or weekly publications, written just a few weeks ahead of time and typically ending with a shocking revelation or cliffhanger that kept readers eagerly awaiting more. This structure is the one clearly embraced by the creators and writers of serialized dramas, parceling out plot and character development in an episodic fashion while having the ability to react to those engaging with the material.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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