Television

‘Wolf Hall’ and the emergence of Thomas Cromwell

Life and loss in ‘Call the Midwife’

If you are wondering how many seconds pass before The Italian Americans, PBS's two-part series premiering Feb. 17, mentions The Godfather, here's a spoiler: precisely zero. Surprisingly, the documentary opens cold with Marlon Brando rasping the familiar line, “I'll make h

Fifteen years after the premiere of “The West Wing,” there are more television shows about politics than ever before, with “Scandal” among the biggest hits on broadcast television and a half-dozen others in production on various platforms. But the trend is not likely to boost

This month Friends turns 20. When I was that age, 20 years ago, I lay on the hardwood floor of my first apartment on Chicago’s North Side with my own group of friends and cynically watched NBC’s newest collection of beautiful people trying to be funny. As we made sarcastic comments to on

When HBO first announced that it had greenlit a television series about the Rapture, one would have been forgiven for assuming we were in for yet another twist on Hollywood’s seemingly endless obsession with the post-apocalyptic. Given the popularity of recent “scripturally inspired&rdqu

Netflix’s ‘Orange Is the New Black’

I can’t tell whether I was actually sick the week season two of Netflix’s House of Cards dropped, or if I was glued to the couch because I just couldn’t stop watching.

Late on Sunday nights when I was a kid I used to sneak downstairs to our family TV room, where more often than not my father was asleep in his chair, the news or sitcom reruns droning on. I would do my best to slip the remote control from off his chair, turn down the volume and switch the channel. I

Showtime’s ‘Homeland’ asks, when the world turns to tempest, who is crazy and who is sane?