Television

I spent a night with friends a few weeks ago. It was an education not only in child care (never lift over your head a child who has just eaten), but also in the state of television today. In the movies these days everyone has a 32-inch flat screen television hanging in the living room, and the feng

Sometimes when I see a movie with a friend in which a mean-spirited character finally gets his (or her) comeuppance, I’ll say jokingly, "It’s like Jesus says in the Gospels, 'What goes around, comes around.’" Usually the friend will smile. But on occasion, the person

In the sugarplum candyland of Neptune, Calif., the high school student Veronica Mars had it all–smarts, a cute boyfriend, a stable nuclear family and social status. It is true that, unlike most of her peers, she was not wealthy; as sheriff, her dad was actually closer to “the help.” But

A commercial plane traveling from Sydney to Los Angeles has communication problems six hours into the flight. The pilots detour toward Fiji. A thousand miles off their original course, things go bad. Turbulence tears off the tail section, then the nose. The middle section crash lands on the beach of

On Jan. 6, 2002, The Boston Globe published a front-page story about child abuse in the Archdiocese of Boston. The article had the chilling opening line, “Since the mid-1990’s, more than 130 people have come forward with horrific childhood tales about how former priest John J. Geoghan al

Here’s a surefire recipe for a hit television miniseries: Combine the most exciting aspects of The DaVinci Code with the apocalypticism of the wildly popular Left Behind novels, and toss in a bit of The X-Files for good measure. That was probably the logic, or illogic, behind NBC’s new s

When it aired in September 1993, NYPD Blue became immediately known for three things.

Sarah Jessica Parker has spent a lot of time at America House. Well, not really. But over the past several years, the cast and crew of the popular, and soon to be departed, HBO series Sex and the City (Sundays, 9 p.m. ET) have frequently been spotted filming on our block in midtown Manhattan, have d

This year the question of which new fall shows to review proves unusually easy. For two new series feature a character familiar to readers of this magazine: God. In CBS’s wonderfully inventive new drama Joan of Arcadia (Friday, 8-9 p.m. ET), the teenage Joan, daughter of the local police chief

Certainly the biggest story in and on television this year was the war in Iraq. The calculated decision by the Pentagon to embed in the theater of war all manner of journalists (including reporters from MTV and Men’s Health magazine) greatly increased the quantity of news stories filed during