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Minisodes, Mini-Seasons and Mini-Press Tours
Tonight at 10 p.m. ET, the FX series "Rescue Me" presents the latest self-described minisode, featuring star Denis Leary and company in a short stand-alone segment. How short? The closing credits run at 10:05... (more)
Tuesday, July 08, 2008|
AN UNMARRIED WOMAN Fox Movie Channel, 8 p.m. ET Sarah Jessica Parker once said this 1978 movie was like a very early Sex and the City. Maybe, if Carrie had been suddenly and cruelly dumped by Mr. Big, and left alone to fend for herself in big bad New York City. But when this film was released, it served as a feminist manifesto (or womanifesto), paired in spirit with TV’s One Day at a Time, which had premiered three years earlier. |
I SURVIVED A JAPANESE GAME SHOW ABC, 9 p.m. ET It’s been a few years since I had a true guilty pleasure on TV, but I’m afraid this meets all the qualifications. It’s almost indefensible in concept – and yet I find it oddly entertaining, unlike most reality competition shows. The reason, or at least my excuse? The games themselves are weirdly genial – like this week’s challenge, to wear a Velcro suit (remember David Letterman doing that years ago?) and jump onto a big board, trying to contort your body into the appropriate outlines. |
HELL'S KITCHEN Fox, 9 p.m. ET And here’s a reality competition show I love, but with no guilt whatsoever. Tonight’s the season finale, so we’ll learn whether Petrozza or Christina will win the right to be executive chef at Gordon Ramsay’s Los Angeles restaurant named London. (The runner-up, I think, gets to work at a London fast-food joint named Los Angeles.) |
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AFI LIFE ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: A TRIBUTE TO WARREN BEATTY USA, 9 p.m. ET Postponed from an earlier date, this celebration of Warren Beatty’s career included salutes by Dustin Hoffman, Bill Clinton and, somewhat tardily, Jack Nicholson. |
P.O.V.: THE BALLAD OF ESEQUIEL HERNANDEZ PBS, 10 p.m. ET (Check local listings) This documentary looks anew at an 11-year-old case, in which a fully camouflaged team of Marines was dispatched to the border town of Redford, Texas to observe patterns of illegal immigration. The Marines ended up shooting and killing an 18-year-old Redford resident, a high-schooler out tending to the family goats. Video of the last moments of Esequiel Hernandez’s life are included in this report, which drags a bit but is undeniably, infuriatingly timely. |
RESCUE ME MINISODE FX,10 p.m. ET This week’s five-minute minisode is about a local bar – and the hot new employee. For more, see today’s BIANCULLI’S BLOG. |
WEIRD & WILD: 'Car Talk' cartoon?
WEIRD & WILD: 'People Who Won't Go Away' Gotta love that episode title, right? And this special installment of "The Soup Presents" (Monday at 10 p.m. ET on E!) picks on all the right celebrity victims -- Danny Bonaduce, David Hasselhoff, Scott Baio, Janice DIckinson . . . (more)
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FOR BETTER OR WERTS
How much do we love NPR's "Car Talk"? We wish that public radio's weekly advice/amusement hour had its own channel, 24/7, so we could listen to Tom and Ray Magliozzi chortle whenever we need a laugh, too. So this week's premiere of the animated half-hour public TV series "Click and Clack's As the Wrench Turns" (Wednesday at 8 p.m. ET on most PBS stations; check local listings) should be occasion for congratulation. But we're not so sure . . . 
Now there's something to watch on Saturday nights through the summer. HBO is re-airing all of "Big Love," starting with the polygamy drama-comedy hour's 2006 pilot (Saturday, July 5 at 8 p.m. ET, HBO2). Bill Paxton stars as the harried businessman forever trying to satisfy (no, not that way) wives Jeanne Tripplehorn, Ginnifer Goodwin and the sublimely resentful Chloe Sevigny, while keeping their lifestyle secret from the mainstream world they're trying to live in. He's also busy fending off the more primitive plotters back at his extended family's polygamy "compound" . . . 
NEW and RECOMMENDED 
Lionsgate's first-season DVD set of Mad Men, AMC's first, fabulous weekly drama series, is out now -- and if there's one thing that will make this long, hot summer of TV doldrums more tolerable, this is it... Mad Men is set at a Madison Avenue advertising agency in 1960 -- when men were chauvinists, women wore bullet bras, and everyone smoked like the chimney tops in Mary Poppins. Three-martini lunches were common. So were office affairs, ambitious jockeying for position, and secrets. Lots of secrets. Matthew Weiner, a talented writer on The Sopranos, created this series, and started out by getting the cast and look exactly right. Jon Hamm stars as Don Draper, a dashing ad exec with a beautiful blonde wife (January Jones as Betty), more than one woman in his peripheral orbit, and some deep, dark secrets in his distant past... CLASSICS TO CONSIDER 
How perverse WERE the 1950s? Get a load of these kiddie shows. Hosts whose attitudes would probably get them run through criminal databases today. Shrieking studio audiences of tots clearly mainlining sugar
before the show. Unbridled, unapologetic product shillery. The
innocent days? They're now, people! These folks were sick. |
