Review: 'The Linguists' on KCET

In the shaggy and bittersweet documentary "The Linguists," airing at 10 tonight on KCET (a few months after its general PBS feed), a pair of youngish scholarly word-nerds travel the globe to chart and record languages about to wink into everlasting silence. There are still more than 7,000 languages on Earth (all but one of which most Americans do not speak), each representing, says David Harrison, one of "the possible ways that the human mind can make sense of the world around it." But they are becoming extinct at the rate of one every two weeks, shut down by official suppression or discouragement -- what results, says Greg Anderson with audible distaste, when one people imposes "their will, and their government, and their language" on another -- or simply by falling out of use.

It's a bit of an exaggeration to say that Harrison and Anderson are like something out of a Kevin Smith movie, but the film (by Seth Kramer, Daniel A. Miller and Jeremy Newberger), though it is full of fascinating glimpses of the remote world, does depend heavily on their goofy, geeky charm. "Around the age of 8 or 9 I discovered I had a somewhat irrational interest in the world's languages," says Anderson, but however many tongues the two speak (lots of them), when it comes to this particular subject it's clear they speak the same language.

"Doctor Who" returns to American television tonight with the first of the four "specials" that form the last year to feature beloved "tenth Doctor" David Tennant. (For the uninitiated: The title character "regenerates" every so often, as convenient or desirable for the producers or performer, into a different actor.) It makes its American bow six months after its original UK broadcast, on Christmas 2008; appropriate to the day, it has a Victorian setting, and there are decorations and snow and the odd nod to Dickens, along with giant Victorian sci-fi contraptions (in the surprisingly bounteous screen tradition of Victorian sci-fi contraptions).

Having bid goodbye at last season's end to time-and-space-traveling companion Donna Noble (Catherine Tate), and once again to next-to-next-to-last companion Rose Tyler (Billie Piper), the Doctor arrives solo in 19th century London. Here he encounters another man calling himself the Doctor (weighty David Morrissey, from "State of Play" and "Viva Blackpool!") with a companion of his own (Velile Tshabalala) and holes in his memory. There are some nice twists on the way to filling them.

When a famous person dies, their life flashes before our eyes.

As with any world figure, the death of Michael Jackson was a television event. Though they were slow to pick up and then to confirm the news of his passing, once the newshounds had arrived, they stayed put.

"We’re going to stay on top of this story," Wolf Blitzer said Friday on CNN, which, like its fellow cable news declared it Michael Jackson Day. "We’re not going to go very far away." And yet there was no way around the fact that it was a day absent of news, in which camera crews were sometimes reduced to shooting pictures of each other, as they waited for something to happen. Friday’s big event, the coroner’s report, was as inconclusive as everyone expected it would be.

And so reporters looked to uncover Jackson’s particular Rosebud in the testimony of people who knew or claimed to know him. This formed no consistent picture: He was surprisingly normal or a psychological mess; he looked great lately or he looked terrible. His upcoming London shows would either put him back on top or kill him, if he weren’t dead already. A single statement could contain contradictions: "Other than the dangling of the baby over the balcony I thought he was an excellent father," Jackson friend Bryan Michael Stoller told "The Today Show’s” Meredith Vieira, who had set up camp in the forecourt of Grauman's Chinese Theatre.

The 'failed" TV pilot airing Friday on Fox is a space ride worth taking.

Notwithstanding the title attached to my byline, I am the last person to ask why things do or do not happen in the TV business. But I can say with some assurance that decisions are not always based on quality of work. If they were, "Virtuality", a "failed" pilot from Ronald D. Moore and Michael Taylor of "Battlestar Galactica," would be the first episode of a series and not merely the stand-alone "movie" Fox will present it as tonight.
 
It is not a movie -- it ends unfinished, just as it's really beginning -- but that does not mean you should pass it by, any more than you should forgo "The Last Tycoon" because Fitzgerald died before he got to the end. As directed by <runtime:topic id="PECLB000466">Peter Berg</runtime:topic> ("Friday Night Lights"), this is smart, handsome TV, a witty, measured mix of sci-fi, soap and satire that offers new twists on old tropes. (It sometimes plays -- and looks -- like a homage to "2001: A Space Odyssey.")

Read the entire "Virtuality" review.

-- Robert Lloyd

NBC's "America's Got Talent" returned for its fourth season Tuesday night, the first since Susan Boyle made its cousin "Britain's Got Talent" an international Internet sensation. Coincidentally, Ed McMahon died that morning — from 1983 to 1995, he was the host of "Star Search," which preceded "AGT" in the great chain of talent shows, and itself followed "The Amateur Hour," manned under slightly varying titles by Major Edward Bowes or Ted Mack on radio and television from 1934 through 1970 (with a slight return, hosted by Willard Scott, in 1991). Rapper-comic Nick Cannon, the new "AGT" host, following Regis Philbin and Jerry Springer, nudges things along with mutterings and raised eyebrows; he is not particularly funny, but he is mostly rather sweet.

Unlike "American Idol," whose Simon Cowell is the "creator" of this patented and internationally franchised inflation of something that has been going on in community centers, high school auditoriums and church basements for ages, "AGT" defines talent as broadly as possible and welcomes, if often only to smack them down, performers of all shapes and ages: It likes the very young (children are always asked their ages, usually by judge Sharon Osbourne), the up-from-the-streets, the family band, the dream that won't die — contestants are a mix of karaoke singers, hobbyists looking to take it to the next level, frustrated professionals seeking a larger venue and people who just need you to see that thing they do. It is a kind of human "Antiques Roadshow," in which talents and desires are brought out from the attic for expert appraisal and possible reward. Not everyone likes what they hear.

On Tuesday's show, which covered auditions in New York City, Seattle and Chicago, we saw a man put sharp things up his nose, a man rotate his feet 180 degrees (even more unsettling than the man with the things up his nose), a couple twirl erotically on a hoop and a man sing satirically about being in love with judge David Hasselhoff — songwriting was his avowed talent, not singing — alongside the more usual singers, comics, choirs and dance crews. Many are allowed on stage specifically to fail.

“The Philanthropist,” premiering tonight on NBC, is a gorgeous-looking bit of earnest junk whose pilot bears the estimable names of Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson ("Oz," "Homicide: Life on the Street") as executive producers. Fontana also wrote the script -- from a "concept developed by" Charlie Corwin and Jim Juvonen -- and reportedly worked on a few more before he and Levinson departed the show over a question of tone. (The network wanted it to be more fun; you can see their warring approaches on screen.) The series is being described as an "eight-part drama," which is a nice way of saying it won't be back to prey on your conscience in the fall, or ever.

The gist is this: Pained playboy billionaire Teddy Rist, played by James Purefoy ("Rome"), saves a young boy from drowning when a hurricane hits Nigeria, where Teddy has gone on business. (There is some resonance here with the Child He Couldn't Save, a dead son.) Back home, among business partners Jesse L. Martin and Neve Campbell, he has a kind of delayed epiphany, and returns to Africa, where he is both bewitched and appalled by the lives of the ordinary poor, to offer his help (and find that kid). When he finds his path blocked, he goes off-road -- carrying cholera vaccine by helicopter, motorcycle and finally by snake-bitten foot -- to become what NBC press releases call a "vigilante philanthropist," in bold defiance of the overwhelmingly negative connotations of the word "vigilante."

Read the full story.

Although he did other things in his 86 years, Ed McMahon, who died Tuesday in Los Angeles, will be remembered mostly as the man who sat next to Johnny Carson, except when more important celebrities came between them.

Notwithstanding the dozen years of hosting "Star Search," a role in the 1997 Tom Arnold sitcom "The Tom Show," a high-profile Cash4Gold ad during the last Super Bowl and all that knocking on people's doors in the name of American Family Publishers, McMahon was a professional sidekick, a less-than-equal partner in an enterprise of which he was nevertheless a vital part: Thinking of Johnny, one proceeds quickly and naturally to Ed, who, by dint of association, was almost as famous as his boss -- I say "almost" to include that fraction of the world that may have seen or heard of Carson but never watched his show.

It's easy to underestimate his accomplishment -- or even to wonder whether it should be called an accomplishment at all. We live in a nation of aspiring quarterbacks, pitchers, lead singers and presidents, where we are told to dream big and have it all. (The vice presidency of the United States is regarded as a rarefied form of failure.) But in a world where everyone is innately a star, what does it mean to settle for life as a mere moon?

Read the rest of Robert Lloyd's appreciation of Ed McMahon here.

Read the full obituary here.

Should you desire to write detective fiction, you will want to give your detective some distinguishing decorative characteristic. Since all the plots have been written three times over already, it's how you dress them up that counts.

Will your hero/heroine be a clown detective, a gardener detective, a detective made of cheese? They say it's best to write what you know, which is why my detective would be a TV critic detective (possible titles: "Saturday Night Dead," "Mary Tyler Murder," "Beverly Hills 9021Ohmygod"), just as forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs made hers a forensic anthropologist -- her novels inspired the television series "Bones" -- and Ellen Byerrum, who has worked as a reporter in Washington, D.C., made hers a reporter in Washington, D.C.

Two novels from Byerrum's Crimes of Fashion series have been adapted by Lifetime for the small screen, which is the right-sized screen for them. The first, “Killer Hair,” premieres Sunday, and although it is less than perfect -- the mystery not especially gripping, the resolution almost arbitrary, the characters low on substance and sometimes sense -- it is nevertheless pretty consistently enjoyable. And it has the advantage over many Lifetime movies in that no one is terminally ill, unless you want to consider murder a kind of fatal condition.

Read the full review.

(Photo courtesy David Dolsen/Lifetime Movie)

Cartoon Network's new reality shows, kid style, are variations on grown-up shows.

Cartoon Network premieres four new shows this week, none of them cartoons. These aren't the first CN shows to feature real people: There have been live-action "Ben 10" movies, based on the animated series, and the "Roger Rabbit"-style "Out of Jimmy's Head" in 2006. Indeed, the network's first real original production, "Space Ghost Coast to Coast," was cobbled together around interviews with living, breathing humans. (There is also a live-action "Scooby Doo" prequel slated for the fall.) And Adult Swim, CN's late-night alter ego, has the live-action "Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!" and "Saul of the Mole Men."

The new series are gathered together under the rubric CN Real, which is less a programming bloc than a sub-brand. (Two of the shows premiere tonight and two on Saturday.) As in the past, the current incursion of flesh and blood into the network's formerly fully 2-D Tooniverse has been met with dismay by (mostly adult) animation fans and CN purists -- I was about to write that it is a "hot topic of debate," but really there is no debate at all, just a collection of complementary assessments posted on various Internet message boards as to why this is a bad direction to take.

The point might be made that these shows -- by definition -- have not been created for that particular audience, but to serve younger, less particular CN viewers, and perhaps to steal a few new ones from Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. While any but the most juvenile cartoons are suitable for adults -- there is nothing guilty about the pleasure I get from "The Powerpuff Girls" -- most live-action teen shows are set up to mirror their audience.

Read entire review: Cartoon Network's new reality shows, kid style

-- Robert Lloyd

Photo: The teens in "The Othersiders" visit reportedly haunted places to assess whether unquiet spirits are there.  Credit: Peter "Hopper" Stone / Cartoon Network

HBO's vampire dramedy “ True Blood” returns Sunday night for a second season of gore and guts and breasts and buttocks. The action may take place in the South, but the show itself is truly set in a place called Premium Cable.

Read the full story.

(Photo courtesy HBO)

Review: 'Doctor Who': 'The Next Doctor' on BBC America

"Doctor Who" returns to American television tonight with the first of the four "specials" that form the last year to feature beloved "tenth Doctor" David Tennant. (For the uninitiated: The title character "regenerates" every so often, as convenient or desirable for the producers or performer, into a different actor.) It makes its American bow six months after its original UK broadcast, on Christmas 2008; appropriate to the day, it has a Victorian setting, and there are decorations and snow and the odd nod to Dickens, along with giant Victorian sci-fi contraptions (in the surprisingly bounteous screen tradition of Victorian sci-fi contraptions).

Having bid goodbye at last season's end to time-and-space-traveling companion Donna Noble (Catherine Tate), and once again to next-to-next-to-last companion Rose Tyler (Billie Piper), the Doctor arrives solo in 19th century London. Here he encounters another man calling himself the Doctor (weighty David Morrissey, from "State of Play" and "Viva Blackpool!") with a companion of his own (Velile Tshabalala) and holes in his memory. There are some nice twists on the way to filling them.

When a famous person dies, their life flashes before our eyes.

As with any world figure, the death of Michael Jackson was a television event. Though they were slow to pick up and then to confirm the news of his passing, once the newshounds had arrived, they stayed put.

"We’re going to stay on top of this story," Wolf Blitzer said Friday on CNN, which, like its fellow cable news declared it Michael Jackson Day. "We’re not going to go very far away." And yet there was no way around the fact that it was a day absent of news, in which camera crews were sometimes reduced to shooting pictures of each other, as they waited for something to happen. Friday’s big event, the coroner’s report, was as inconclusive as everyone expected it would be.

And so reporters looked to uncover Jackson’s particular Rosebud in the testimony of people who knew or claimed to know him. This formed no consistent picture: He was surprisingly normal or a psychological mess; he looked great lately or he looked terrible. His upcoming London shows would either put him back on top or kill him, if he weren’t dead already. A single statement could contain contradictions: "Other than the dangling of the baby over the balcony I thought he was an excellent father," Jackson friend Bryan Michael Stoller told "The Today Show’s” Meredith Vieira, who had set up camp in the forecourt of Grauman's Chinese Theatre.

The 'failed" TV pilot airing Friday on Fox is a space ride worth taking.

Notwithstanding the title attached to my byline, I am the last person to ask why things do or do not happen in the TV business. But I can say with some assurance that decisions are not always based on quality of work. If they were, "Virtuality", a "failed" pilot from Ronald D. Moore and Michael Taylor of "Battlestar Galactica," would be the first episode of a series and not merely the stand-alone "movie" Fox will present it as tonight.
 
It is not a movie -- it ends unfinished, just as it's really beginning -- but that does not mean you should pass it by, any more than you should forgo "The Last Tycoon" because Fitzgerald died before he got to the end. As directed by <runtime:topic id="PECLB000466">Peter Berg</runtime:topic> ("Friday Night Lights"), this is smart, handsome TV, a witty, measured mix of sci-fi, soap and satire that offers new twists on old tropes. (It sometimes plays -- and looks -- like a homage to "2001: A Space Odyssey.")

Read the entire "Virtuality" review.

-- Robert Lloyd

NBC's "America's Got Talent" returned for its fourth season Tuesday night, the first since Susan Boyle made its cousin "Britain's Got Talent" an international Internet sensation. Coincidentally, Ed McMahon died that morning — from 1983 to 1995, he was the host of "Star Search," which preceded "AGT" in the great chain of talent shows, and itself followed "The Amateur Hour," manned under slightly varying titles by Major Edward Bowes or Ted Mack on radio and television from 1934 through 1970 (with a slight return, hosted by Willard Scott, in 1991). Rapper-comic Nick Cannon, the new "AGT" host, following Regis Philbin and Jerry Springer, nudges things along with mutterings and raised eyebrows; he is not particularly funny, but he is mostly rather sweet.

Unlike "American Idol," whose Simon Cowell is the "creator" of this patented and internationally franchised inflation of something that has been going on in community centers, high school auditoriums and church basements for ages, "AGT" defines talent as broadly as possible and welcomes, if often only to smack them down, performers of all shapes and ages: It likes the very young (children are always asked their ages, usually by judge Sharon Osbourne), the up-from-the-streets, the family band, the dream that won't die — contestants are a mix of karaoke singers, hobbyists looking to take it to the next level, frustrated professionals seeking a larger venue and people who just need you to see that thing they do. It is a kind of human "Antiques Roadshow," in which talents and desires are brought out from the attic for expert appraisal and possible reward. Not everyone likes what they hear.

On Tuesday's show, which covered auditions in New York City, Seattle and Chicago, we saw a man put sharp things up his nose, a man rotate his feet 180 degrees (even more unsettling than the man with the things up his nose), a couple twirl erotically on a hoop and a man sing satirically about being in love with judge David Hasselhoff — songwriting was his avowed talent, not singing — alongside the more usual singers, comics, choirs and dance crews. Many are allowed on stage specifically to fail.

“The Philanthropist,” premiering tonight on NBC, is a gorgeous-looking bit of earnest junk whose pilot bears the estimable names of Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson ("Oz," "Homicide: Life on the Street") as executive producers. Fontana also wrote the script -- from a "concept developed by" Charlie Corwin and Jim Juvonen -- and reportedly worked on a few more before he and Levinson departed the show over a question of tone. (The network wanted it to be more fun; you can see their warring approaches on screen.) The series is being described as an "eight-part drama," which is a nice way of saying it won't be back to prey on your conscience in the fall, or ever.

The gist is this: Pained playboy billionaire Teddy Rist, played by James Purefoy ("Rome"), saves a young boy from drowning when a hurricane hits Nigeria, where Teddy has gone on business. (There is some resonance here with the Child He Couldn't Save, a dead son.) Back home, among business partners Jesse L. Martin and Neve Campbell, he has a kind of delayed epiphany, and returns to Africa, where he is both bewitched and appalled by the lives of the ordinary poor, to offer his help (and find that kid). When he finds his path blocked, he goes off-road -- carrying cholera vaccine by helicopter, motorcycle and finally by snake-bitten foot -- to become what NBC press releases call a "vigilante philanthropist," in bold defiance of the overwhelmingly negative connotations of the word "vigilante."

Read the full story.

Although he did other things in his 86 years, Ed McMahon, who died Tuesday in Los Angeles, will be remembered mostly as the man who sat next to Johnny Carson, except when more important celebrities came between them.

Notwithstanding the dozen years of hosting "Star Search," a role in the 1997 Tom Arnold sitcom "The Tom Show," a high-profile Cash4Gold ad during the last Super Bowl and all that knocking on people's doors in the name of American Family Publishers, McMahon was a professional sidekick, a less-than-equal partner in an enterprise of which he was nevertheless a vital part: Thinking of Johnny, one proceeds quickly and naturally to Ed, who, by dint of association, was almost as famous as his boss -- I say "almost" to include that fraction of the world that may have seen or heard of Carson but never watched his show.

It's easy to underestimate his accomplishment -- or even to wonder whether it should be called an accomplishment at all. We live in a nation of aspiring quarterbacks, pitchers, lead singers and presidents, where we are told to dream big and have it all. (The vice presidency of the United States is regarded as a rarefied form of failure.) But in a world where everyone is innately a star, what does it mean to settle for life as a mere moon?

Read the rest of Robert Lloyd's appreciation of Ed McMahon here.

Read the full obituary here.

Should you desire to write detective fiction, you will want to give your detective some distinguishing decorative characteristic. Since all the plots have been written three times over already, it's how you dress them up that counts.

Will your hero/heroine be a clown detective, a gardener detective, a detective made of cheese? They say it's best to write what you know, which is why my detective would be a TV critic detective (possible titles: "Saturday Night Dead," "Mary Tyler Murder," "Beverly Hills 9021Ohmygod"), just as forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs made hers a forensic anthropologist -- her novels inspired the television series "Bones" -- and Ellen Byerrum, who has worked as a reporter in Washington, D.C., made hers a reporter in Washington, D.C.

Two novels from Byerrum's Crimes of Fashion series have been adapted by Lifetime for the small screen, which is the right-sized screen for them. The first, “Killer Hair,” premieres Sunday, and although it is less than perfect -- the mystery not especially gripping, the resolution almost arbitrary, the characters low on substance and sometimes sense -- it is nevertheless pretty consistently enjoyable. And it has the advantage over many Lifetime movies in that no one is terminally ill, unless you want to consider murder a kind of fatal condition.

Read the full review.

(Photo courtesy David Dolsen/Lifetime Movie)

Cartoon Network's new reality shows, kid style, are variations on grown-up shows.

Cartoon Network premieres four new shows this week, none of them cartoons. These aren't the first CN shows to feature real people: There have been live-action "Ben 10" movies, based on the animated series, and the "Roger Rabbit"-style "Out of Jimmy's Head" in 2006. Indeed, the network's first real original production, "Space Ghost Coast to Coast," was cobbled together around interviews with living, breathing humans. (There is also a live-action "Scooby Doo" prequel slated for the fall.) And Adult Swim, CN's late-night alter ego, has the live-action "Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!" and "Saul of the Mole Men."

The new series are gathered together under the rubric CN Real, which is less a programming bloc than a sub-brand. (Two of the shows premiere tonight and two on Saturday.) As in the past, the current incursion of flesh and blood into the network's formerly fully 2-D Tooniverse has been met with dismay by (mostly adult) animation fans and CN purists -- I was about to write that it is a "hot topic of debate," but really there is no debate at all, just a collection of complementary assessments posted on various Internet message boards as to why this is a bad direction to take.

The point might be made that these shows -- by definition -- have not been created for that particular audience, but to serve younger, less particular CN viewers, and perhaps to steal a few new ones from Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. While any but the most juvenile cartoons are suitable for adults -- there is nothing guilty about the pleasure I get from "The Powerpuff Girls" -- most live-action teen shows are set up to mirror their audience.

Read entire review: Cartoon Network's new reality shows, kid style

-- Robert Lloyd

Photo: The teens in "The Othersiders" visit reportedly haunted places to assess whether unquiet spirits are there.  Credit: Peter "Hopper" Stone / Cartoon Network

HBO's vampire dramedy “ True Blood” returns Sunday night for a second season of gore and guts and breasts and buttocks. The action may take place in the South, but the show itself is truly set in a place called Premium Cable.

Read the full story.

(Photo courtesy HBO)

Michael Jackson: TV celebrates, investigates the person, the puzzle

When a famous person dies, their life flashes before our eyes.

As with any world figure, the death of Michael Jackson was a television event. Though they were slow to pick up and then to confirm the news of his passing, once the newshounds had arrived, they stayed put.

"We’re going to stay on top of this story," Wolf Blitzer said Friday on CNN, which, like its fellow cable news declared it Michael Jackson Day. "We’re not going to go very far away." And yet there was no way around the fact that it was a day absent of news, in which camera crews were sometimes reduced to shooting pictures of each other, as they waited for something to happen. Friday’s big event, the coroner’s report, was as inconclusive as everyone expected it would be.

And so reporters looked to uncover Jackson’s particular Rosebud in the testimony of people who knew or claimed to know him. This formed no consistent picture: He was surprisingly normal or a psychological mess; he looked great lately or he looked terrible. His upcoming London shows would either put him back on top or kill him, if he weren’t dead already. A single statement could contain contradictions: "Other than the dangling of the baby over the balcony I thought he was an excellent father," Jackson friend Bryan Michael Stoller told "The Today Show’s” Meredith Vieira, who had set up camp in the forecourt of Grauman's Chinese Theatre.

The 'failed" TV pilot airing Friday on Fox is a space ride worth taking.

Notwithstanding the title attached to my byline, I am the last person to ask why things do or do not happen in the TV business. But I can say with some assurance that decisions are not always based on quality of work. If they were, "Virtuality", a "failed" pilot from Ronald D. Moore and Michael Taylor of "Battlestar Galactica," would be the first episode of a series and not merely the stand-alone "movie" Fox will present it as tonight.
 
It is not a movie -- it ends unfinished, just as it's really beginning -- but that does not mean you should pass it by, any more than you should forgo "The Last Tycoon" because Fitzgerald died before he got to the end. As directed by <runtime:topic id="PECLB000466">Peter Berg</runtime:topic> ("Friday Night Lights"), this is smart, handsome TV, a witty, measured mix of sci-fi, soap and satire that offers new twists on old tropes. (It sometimes plays -- and looks -- like a homage to "2001: A Space Odyssey.")

Read the entire "Virtuality" review.

-- Robert Lloyd

NBC's "America's Got Talent" returned for its fourth season Tuesday night, the first since Susan Boyle made its cousin "Britain's Got Talent" an international Internet sensation. Coincidentally, Ed McMahon died that morning — from 1983 to 1995, he was the host of "Star Search," which preceded "AGT" in the great chain of talent shows, and itself followed "The Amateur Hour," manned under slightly varying titles by Major Edward Bowes or Ted Mack on radio and television from 1934 through 1970 (with a slight return, hosted by Willard Scott, in 1991). Rapper-comic Nick Cannon, the new "AGT" host, following Regis Philbin and Jerry Springer, nudges things along with mutterings and raised eyebrows; he is not particularly funny, but he is mostly rather sweet.

Unlike "American Idol," whose Simon Cowell is the "creator" of this patented and internationally franchised inflation of something that has been going on in community centers, high school auditoriums and church basements for ages, "AGT" defines talent as broadly as possible and welcomes, if often only to smack them down, performers of all shapes and ages: It likes the very young (children are always asked their ages, usually by judge Sharon Osbourne), the up-from-the-streets, the family band, the dream that won't die — contestants are a mix of karaoke singers, hobbyists looking to take it to the next level, frustrated professionals seeking a larger venue and people who just need you to see that thing they do. It is a kind of human "Antiques Roadshow," in which talents and desires are brought out from the attic for expert appraisal and possible reward. Not everyone likes what they hear.

On Tuesday's show, which covered auditions in New York City, Seattle and Chicago, we saw a man put sharp things up his nose, a man rotate his feet 180 degrees (even more unsettling than the man with the things up his nose), a couple twirl erotically on a hoop and a man sing satirically about being in love with judge David Hasselhoff — songwriting was his avowed talent, not singing — alongside the more usual singers, comics, choirs and dance crews. Many are allowed on stage specifically to fail.

“The Philanthropist,” premiering tonight on NBC, is a gorgeous-looking bit of earnest junk whose pilot bears the estimable names of Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson ("Oz," "Homicide: Life on the Street") as executive producers. Fontana also wrote the script -- from a "concept developed by" Charlie Corwin and Jim Juvonen -- and reportedly worked on a few more before he and Levinson departed the show over a question of tone. (The network wanted it to be more fun; you can see their warring approaches on screen.) The series is being described as an "eight-part drama," which is a nice way of saying it won't be back to prey on your conscience in the fall, or ever.

The gist is this: Pained playboy billionaire Teddy Rist, played by James Purefoy ("Rome"), saves a young boy from drowning when a hurricane hits Nigeria, where Teddy has gone on business. (There is some resonance here with the Child He Couldn't Save, a dead son.) Back home, among business partners Jesse L. Martin and Neve Campbell, he has a kind of delayed epiphany, and returns to Africa, where he is both bewitched and appalled by the lives of the ordinary poor, to offer his help (and find that kid). When he finds his path blocked, he goes off-road -- carrying cholera vaccine by helicopter, motorcycle and finally by snake-bitten foot -- to become what NBC press releases call a "vigilante philanthropist," in bold defiance of the overwhelmingly negative connotations of the word "vigilante."

Read the full story.

Although he did other things in his 86 years, Ed McMahon, who died Tuesday in Los Angeles, will be remembered mostly as the man who sat next to Johnny Carson, except when more important celebrities came between them.

Notwithstanding the dozen years of hosting "Star Search," a role in the 1997 Tom Arnold sitcom "The Tom Show," a high-profile Cash4Gold ad during the last Super Bowl and all that knocking on people's doors in the name of American Family Publishers, McMahon was a professional sidekick, a less-than-equal partner in an enterprise of which he was nevertheless a vital part: Thinking of Johnny, one proceeds quickly and naturally to Ed, who, by dint of association, was almost as famous as his boss -- I say "almost" to include that fraction of the world that may have seen or heard of Carson but never watched his show.

It's easy to underestimate his accomplishment -- or even to wonder whether it should be called an accomplishment at all. We live in a nation of aspiring quarterbacks, pitchers, lead singers and presidents, where we are told to dream big and have it all. (The vice presidency of the United States is regarded as a rarefied form of failure.) But in a world where everyone is innately a star, what does it mean to settle for life as a mere moon?

Read the rest of Robert Lloyd's appreciation of Ed McMahon here.

Read the full obituary here.

Should you desire to write detective fiction, you will want to give your detective some distinguishing decorative characteristic. Since all the plots have been written three times over already, it's how you dress them up that counts.

Will your hero/heroine be a clown detective, a gardener detective, a detective made of cheese? They say it's best to write what you know, which is why my detective would be a TV critic detective (possible titles: "Saturday Night Dead," "Mary Tyler Murder," "Beverly Hills 9021Ohmygod"), just as forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs made hers a forensic anthropologist -- her novels inspired the television series "Bones" -- and Ellen Byerrum, who has worked as a reporter in Washington, D.C., made hers a reporter in Washington, D.C.

Two novels from Byerrum's Crimes of Fashion series have been adapted by Lifetime for the small screen, which is the right-sized screen for them. The first, “Killer Hair,” premieres Sunday, and although it is less than perfect -- the mystery not especially gripping, the resolution almost arbitrary, the characters low on substance and sometimes sense -- it is nevertheless pretty consistently enjoyable. And it has the advantage over many Lifetime movies in that no one is terminally ill, unless you want to consider murder a kind of fatal condition.

Read the full review.

(Photo courtesy David Dolsen/Lifetime Movie)

Cartoon Network's new reality shows, kid style, are variations on grown-up shows.

Cartoon Network premieres four new shows this week, none of them cartoons. These aren't the first CN shows to feature real people: There have been live-action "Ben 10" movies, based on the animated series, and the "Roger Rabbit"-style "Out of Jimmy's Head" in 2006. Indeed, the network's first real original production, "Space Ghost Coast to Coast," was cobbled together around interviews with living, breathing humans. (There is also a live-action "Scooby Doo" prequel slated for the fall.) And Adult Swim, CN's late-night alter ego, has the live-action "Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!" and "Saul of the Mole Men."

The new series are gathered together under the rubric CN Real, which is less a programming bloc than a sub-brand. (Two of the shows premiere tonight and two on Saturday.) As in the past, the current incursion of flesh and blood into the network's formerly fully 2-D Tooniverse has been met with dismay by (mostly adult) animation fans and CN purists -- I was about to write that it is a "hot topic of debate," but really there is no debate at all, just a collection of complementary assessments posted on various Internet message boards as to why this is a bad direction to take.

The point might be made that these shows -- by definition -- have not been created for that particular audience, but to serve younger, less particular CN viewers, and perhaps to steal a few new ones from Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. While any but the most juvenile cartoons are suitable for adults -- there is nothing guilty about the pleasure I get from "The Powerpuff Girls" -- most live-action teen shows are set up to mirror their audience.

Read entire review: Cartoon Network's new reality shows, kid style

-- Robert Lloyd

Photo: The teens in "The Othersiders" visit reportedly haunted places to assess whether unquiet spirits are there.  Credit: Peter "Hopper" Stone / Cartoon Network

HBO's vampire dramedy “ True Blood” returns Sunday night for a second season of gore and guts and breasts and buttocks. The action may take place in the South, but the show itself is truly set in a place called Premium Cable.

Read the full story.

(Photo courtesy HBO)

Review: 'Virtuality'

The 'failed" TV pilot airing Friday on Fox is a space ride worth taking.

Notwithstanding the title attached to my byline, I am the last person to ask why things do or do not happen in the TV business. But I can say with some assurance that decisions are not always based on quality of work. If they were, "Virtuality", a "failed" pilot from Ronald D. Moore and Michael Taylor of "Battlestar Galactica," would be the first episode of a series and not merely the stand-alone "movie" Fox will present it as tonight.
 
It is not a movie -- it ends unfinished, just as it's really beginning -- but that does not mean you should pass it by, any more than you should forgo "The Last Tycoon" because Fitzgerald died before he got to the end. As directed by <runtime:topic id="PECLB000466">Peter Berg</runtime:topic> ("Friday Night Lights"), this is smart, handsome TV, a witty, measured mix of sci-fi, soap and satire that offers new twists on old tropes. (It sometimes plays -- and looks -- like a homage to "2001: A Space Odyssey.")

Read the entire "Virtuality" review.

-- Robert Lloyd

NBC's "America's Got Talent" returned for its fourth season Tuesday night, the first since Susan Boyle made its cousin "Britain's Got Talent" an international Internet sensation. Coincidentally, Ed McMahon died that morning — from 1983 to 1995, he was the host of "Star Search," which preceded "AGT" in the great chain of talent shows, and itself followed "The Amateur Hour," manned under slightly varying titles by Major Edward Bowes or Ted Mack on radio and television from 1934 through 1970 (with a slight return, hosted by Willard Scott, in 1991). Rapper-comic Nick Cannon, the new "AGT" host, following Regis Philbin and Jerry Springer, nudges things along with mutterings and raised eyebrows; he is not particularly funny, but he is mostly rather sweet.

Unlike "American Idol," whose Simon Cowell is the "creator" of this patented and internationally franchised inflation of something that has been going on in community centers, high school auditoriums and church basements for ages, "AGT" defines talent as broadly as possible and welcomes, if often only to smack them down, performers of all shapes and ages: It likes the very young (children are always asked their ages, usually by judge Sharon Osbourne), the up-from-the-streets, the family band, the dream that won't die — contestants are a mix of karaoke singers, hobbyists looking to take it to the next level, frustrated professionals seeking a larger venue and people who just need you to see that thing they do. It is a kind of human "Antiques Roadshow," in which talents and desires are brought out from the attic for expert appraisal and possible reward. Not everyone likes what they hear.

On Tuesday's show, which covered auditions in New York City, Seattle and Chicago, we saw a man put sharp things up his nose, a man rotate his feet 180 degrees (even more unsettling than the man with the things up his nose), a couple twirl erotically on a hoop and a man sing satirically about being in love with judge David Hasselhoff — songwriting was his avowed talent, not singing — alongside the more usual singers, comics, choirs and dance crews. Many are allowed on stage specifically to fail.

“The Philanthropist,” premiering tonight on NBC, is a gorgeous-looking bit of earnest junk whose pilot bears the estimable names of Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson ("Oz," "Homicide: Life on the Street") as executive producers. Fontana also wrote the script -- from a "concept developed by" Charlie Corwin and Jim Juvonen -- and reportedly worked on a few more before he and Levinson departed the show over a question of tone. (The network wanted it to be more fun; you can see their warring approaches on screen.) The series is being described as an "eight-part drama," which is a nice way of saying it won't be back to prey on your conscience in the fall, or ever.

The gist is this: Pained playboy billionaire Teddy Rist, played by James Purefoy ("Rome"), saves a young boy from drowning when a hurricane hits Nigeria, where Teddy has gone on business. (There is some resonance here with the Child He Couldn't Save, a dead son.) Back home, among business partners Jesse L. Martin and Neve Campbell, he has a kind of delayed epiphany, and returns to Africa, where he is both bewitched and appalled by the lives of the ordinary poor, to offer his help (and find that kid). When he finds his path blocked, he goes off-road -- carrying cholera vaccine by helicopter, motorcycle and finally by snake-bitten foot -- to become what NBC press releases call a "vigilante philanthropist," in bold defiance of the overwhelmingly negative connotations of the word "vigilante."

Read the full story.

Although he did other things in his 86 years, Ed McMahon, who died Tuesday in Los Angeles, will be remembered mostly as the man who sat next to Johnny Carson, except when more important celebrities came between them.

Notwithstanding the dozen years of hosting "Star Search," a role in the 1997 Tom Arnold sitcom "The Tom Show," a high-profile Cash4Gold ad during the last Super Bowl and all that knocking on people's doors in the name of American Family Publishers, McMahon was a professional sidekick, a less-than-equal partner in an enterprise of which he was nevertheless a vital part: Thinking of Johnny, one proceeds quickly and naturally to Ed, who, by dint of association, was almost as famous as his boss -- I say "almost" to include that fraction of the world that may have seen or heard of Carson but never watched his show.

It's easy to underestimate his accomplishment -- or even to wonder whether it should be called an accomplishment at all. We live in a nation of aspiring quarterbacks, pitchers, lead singers and presidents, where we are told to dream big and have it all. (The vice presidency of the United States is regarded as a rarefied form of failure.) But in a world where everyone is innately a star, what does it mean to settle for life as a mere moon?

Read the rest of Robert Lloyd's appreciation of Ed McMahon here.

Read the full obituary here.

Should you desire to write detective fiction, you will want to give your detective some distinguishing decorative characteristic. Since all the plots have been written three times over already, it's how you dress them up that counts.

Will your hero/heroine be a clown detective, a gardener detective, a detective made of cheese? They say it's best to write what you know, which is why my detective would be a TV critic detective (possible titles: "Saturday Night Dead," "Mary Tyler Murder," "Beverly Hills 9021Ohmygod"), just as forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs made hers a forensic anthropologist -- her novels inspired the television series "Bones" -- and Ellen Byerrum, who has worked as a reporter in Washington, D.C., made hers a reporter in Washington, D.C.

Two novels from Byerrum's Crimes of Fashion series have been adapted by Lifetime for the small screen, which is the right-sized screen for them. The first, “Killer Hair,” premieres Sunday, and although it is less than perfect -- the mystery not especially gripping, the resolution almost arbitrary, the characters low on substance and sometimes sense -- it is nevertheless pretty consistently enjoyable. And it has the advantage over many Lifetime movies in that no one is terminally ill, unless you want to consider murder a kind of fatal condition.

Read the full review.

(Photo courtesy David Dolsen/Lifetime Movie)

Cartoon Network's new reality shows, kid style, are variations on grown-up shows.

Cartoon Network premieres four new shows this week, none of them cartoons. These aren't the first CN shows to feature real people: There have been live-action "Ben 10" movies, based on the animated series, and the "Roger Rabbit"-style "Out of Jimmy's Head" in 2006. Indeed, the network's first real original production, "Space Ghost Coast to Coast," was cobbled together around interviews with living, breathing humans. (There is also a live-action "Scooby Doo" prequel slated for the fall.) And Adult Swim, CN's late-night alter ego, has the live-action "Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!" and "Saul of the Mole Men."

The new series are gathered together under the rubric CN Real, which is less a programming bloc than a sub-brand. (Two of the shows premiere tonight and two on Saturday.) As in the past, the current incursion of flesh and blood into the network's formerly fully 2-D Tooniverse has been met with dismay by (mostly adult) animation fans and CN purists -- I was about to write that it is a "hot topic of debate," but really there is no debate at all, just a collection of complementary assessments posted on various Internet message boards as to why this is a bad direction to take.

The point might be made that these shows -- by definition -- have not been created for that particular audience, but to serve younger, less particular CN viewers, and perhaps to steal a few new ones from Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. While any but the most juvenile cartoons are suitable for adults -- there is nothing guilty about the pleasure I get from "The Powerpuff Girls" -- most live-action teen shows are set up to mirror their audience.

Read entire review: Cartoon Network's new reality shows, kid style

-- Robert Lloyd

Photo: The teens in "The Othersiders" visit reportedly haunted places to assess whether unquiet spirits are there.  Credit: Peter "Hopper" Stone / Cartoon Network

HBO's vampire dramedy “ True Blood” returns Sunday night for a second season of gore and guts and breasts and buttocks. The action may take place in the South, but the show itself is truly set in a place called Premium Cable.

Read the full story.

(Photo courtesy HBO)

Review: 'America's Got Talent' doesn't have Boyle, but it does have that something compelling

NBC's "America's Got Talent" returned for its fourth season Tuesday night, the first since Susan Boyle made its cousin "Britain's Got Talent" an international Internet sensation. Coincidentally, Ed McMahon died that morning — from 1983 to 1995, he was the host of "Star Search," which preceded "AGT" in the great chain of talent shows, and itself followed "The Amateur Hour," manned under slightly varying titles by Major Edward Bowes or Ted Mack on radio and television from 1934 through 1970 (with a slight return, hosted by Willard Scott, in 1991). Rapper-comic Nick Cannon, the new "AGT" host, following Regis Philbin and Jerry Springer, nudges things along with mutterings and raised eyebrows; he is not particularly funny, but he is mostly rather sweet.

Unlike "American Idol," whose Simon Cowell is the "creator" of this patented and internationally franchised inflation of something that has been going on in community centers, high school auditoriums and church basements for ages, "AGT" defines talent as broadly as possible and welcomes, if often only to smack them down, performers of all shapes and ages: It likes the very young (children are always asked their ages, usually by judge Sharon Osbourne), the up-from-the-streets, the family band, the dream that won't die — contestants are a mix of karaoke singers, hobbyists looking to take it to the next level, frustrated professionals seeking a larger venue and people who just need you to see that thing they do. It is a kind of human "Antiques Roadshow," in which talents and desires are brought out from the attic for expert appraisal and possible reward. Not everyone likes what they hear.

On Tuesday's show, which covered auditions in New York City, Seattle and Chicago, we saw a man put sharp things up his nose, a man rotate his feet 180 degrees (even more unsettling than the man with the things up his nose), a couple twirl erotically on a hoop and a man sing satirically about being in love with judge David Hasselhoff — songwriting was his avowed talent, not singing — alongside the more usual singers, comics, choirs and dance crews. Many are allowed on stage specifically to fail.

“The Philanthropist,” premiering tonight on NBC, is a gorgeous-looking bit of earnest junk whose pilot bears the estimable names of Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson ("Oz," "Homicide: Life on the Street") as executive producers. Fontana also wrote the script -- from a "concept developed by" Charlie Corwin and Jim Juvonen -- and reportedly worked on a few more before he and Levinson departed the show over a question of tone. (The network wanted it to be more fun; you can see their warring approaches on screen.) The series is being described as an "eight-part drama," which is a nice way of saying it won't be back to prey on your conscience in the fall, or ever.

The gist is this: Pained playboy billionaire Teddy Rist, played by James Purefoy ("Rome"), saves a young boy from drowning when a hurricane hits Nigeria, where Teddy has gone on business. (There is some resonance here with the Child He Couldn't Save, a dead son.) Back home, among business partners Jesse L. Martin and Neve Campbell, he has a kind of delayed epiphany, and returns to Africa, where he is both bewitched and appalled by the lives of the ordinary poor, to offer his help (and find that kid). When he finds his path blocked, he goes off-road -- carrying cholera vaccine by helicopter, motorcycle and finally by snake-bitten foot -- to become what NBC press releases call a "vigilante philanthropist," in bold defiance of the overwhelmingly negative connotations of the word "vigilante."

Read the full story.

Although he did other things in his 86 years, Ed McMahon, who died Tuesday in Los Angeles, will be remembered mostly as the man who sat next to Johnny Carson, except when more important celebrities came between them.

Notwithstanding the dozen years of hosting "Star Search," a role in the 1997 Tom Arnold sitcom "The Tom Show," a high-profile Cash4Gold ad during the last Super Bowl and all that knocking on people's doors in the name of American Family Publishers, McMahon was a professional sidekick, a less-than-equal partner in an enterprise of which he was nevertheless a vital part: Thinking of Johnny, one proceeds quickly and naturally to Ed, who, by dint of association, was almost as famous as his boss -- I say "almost" to include that fraction of the world that may have seen or heard of Carson but never watched his show.

It's easy to underestimate his accomplishment -- or even to wonder whether it should be called an accomplishment at all. We live in a nation of aspiring quarterbacks, pitchers, lead singers and presidents, where we are told to dream big and have it all. (The vice presidency of the United States is regarded as a rarefied form of failure.) But in a world where everyone is innately a star, what does it mean to settle for life as a mere moon?

Read the rest of Robert Lloyd's appreciation of Ed McMahon here.

Read the full obituary here.

Should you desire to write detective fiction, you will want to give your detective some distinguishing decorative characteristic. Since all the plots have been written three times over already, it's how you dress them up that counts.

Will your hero/heroine be a clown detective, a gardener detective, a detective made of cheese? They say it's best to write what you know, which is why my detective would be a TV critic detective (possible titles: "Saturday Night Dead," "Mary Tyler Murder," "Beverly Hills 9021Ohmygod"), just as forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs made hers a forensic anthropologist -- her novels inspired the television series "Bones" -- and Ellen Byerrum, who has worked as a reporter in Washington, D.C., made hers a reporter in Washington, D.C.

Two novels from Byerrum's Crimes of Fashion series have been adapted by Lifetime for the small screen, which is the right-sized screen for them. The first, “Killer Hair,” premieres Sunday, and although it is less than perfect -- the mystery not especially gripping, the resolution almost arbitrary, the characters low on substance and sometimes sense -- it is nevertheless pretty consistently enjoyable. And it has the advantage over many Lifetime movies in that no one is terminally ill, unless you want to consider murder a kind of fatal condition.

Read the full review.

(Photo courtesy David Dolsen/Lifetime Movie)

Cartoon Network's new reality shows, kid style, are variations on grown-up shows.

Cartoon Network premieres four new shows this week, none of them cartoons. These aren't the first CN shows to feature real people: There have been live-action "Ben 10" movies, based on the animated series, and the "Roger Rabbit"-style "Out of Jimmy's Head" in 2006. Indeed, the network's first real original production, "Space Ghost Coast to Coast," was cobbled together around interviews with living, breathing humans. (There is also a live-action "Scooby Doo" prequel slated for the fall.) And Adult Swim, CN's late-night alter ego, has the live-action "Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!" and "Saul of the Mole Men."

The new series are gathered together under the rubric CN Real, which is less a programming bloc than a sub-brand. (Two of the shows premiere tonight and two on Saturday.) As in the past, the current incursion of flesh and blood into the network's formerly fully 2-D Tooniverse has been met with dismay by (mostly adult) animation fans and CN purists -- I was about to write that it is a "hot topic of debate," but really there is no debate at all, just a collection of complementary assessments posted on various Internet message boards as to why this is a bad direction to take.

The point might be made that these shows -- by definition -- have not been created for that particular audience, but to serve younger, less particular CN viewers, and perhaps to steal a few new ones from Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. While any but the most juvenile cartoons are suitable for adults -- there is nothing guilty about the pleasure I get from "The Powerpuff Girls" -- most live-action teen shows are set up to mirror their audience.

Read entire review: Cartoon Network's new reality shows, kid style

-- Robert Lloyd

Photo: The teens in "The Othersiders" visit reportedly haunted places to assess whether unquiet spirits are there.  Credit: Peter "Hopper" Stone / Cartoon Network

HBO's vampire dramedy “ True Blood” returns Sunday night for a second season of gore and guts and breasts and buttocks. The action may take place in the South, but the show itself is truly set in a place called Premium Cable.

Read the full story.

(Photo courtesy HBO)

Ready for 'The Philanthropist'?

“The Philanthropist,” premiering tonight on NBC, is a gorgeous-looking bit of earnest junk whose pilot bears the estimable names of Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson ("Oz," "Homicide: Life on the Street") as executive producers. Fontana also wrote the script -- from a "concept developed by" Charlie Corwin and Jim Juvonen -- and reportedly worked on a few more before he and Levinson departed the show over a question of tone. (The network wanted it to be more fun; you can see their warring approaches on screen.) The series is being described as an "eight-part drama," which is a nice way of saying it won't be back to prey on your conscience in the fall, or ever.

The gist is this: Pained playboy billionaire Teddy Rist, played by James Purefoy ("Rome"), saves a young boy from drowning when a hurricane hits Nigeria, where Teddy has gone on business. (There is some resonance here with the Child He Couldn't Save, a dead son.) Back home, among business partners Jesse L. Martin and Neve Campbell, he has a kind of delayed epiphany, and returns to Africa, where he is both bewitched and appalled by the lives of the ordinary poor, to offer his help (and find that kid). When he finds his path blocked, he goes off-road -- carrying cholera vaccine by helicopter, motorcycle and finally by snake-bitten foot -- to become what NBC press releases call a "vigilante philanthropist," in bold defiance of the overwhelmingly negative connotations of the word "vigilante."

Read the full story.

Although he did other things in his 86 years, Ed McMahon, who died Tuesday in Los Angeles, will be remembered mostly as the man who sat next to Johnny Carson, except when more important celebrities came between them.

Notwithstanding the dozen years of hosting "Star Search," a role in the 1997 Tom Arnold sitcom "The Tom Show," a high-profile Cash4Gold ad during the last Super Bowl and all that knocking on people's doors in the name of American Family Publishers, McMahon was a professional sidekick, a less-than-equal partner in an enterprise of which he was nevertheless a vital part: Thinking of Johnny, one proceeds quickly and naturally to Ed, who, by dint of association, was almost as famous as his boss -- I say "almost" to include that fraction of the world that may have seen or heard of Carson but never watched his show.

It's easy to underestimate his accomplishment -- or even to wonder whether it should be called an accomplishment at all. We live in a nation of aspiring quarterbacks, pitchers, lead singers and presidents, where we are told to dream big and have it all. (The vice presidency of the United States is regarded as a rarefied form of failure.) But in a world where everyone is innately a star, what does it mean to settle for life as a mere moon?

Read the rest of Robert Lloyd's appreciation of Ed McMahon here.

Read the full obituary here.

Should you desire to write detective fiction, you will want to give your detective some distinguishing decorative characteristic. Since all the plots have been written three times over already, it's how you dress them up that counts.

Will your hero/heroine be a clown detective, a gardener detective, a detective made of cheese? They say it's best to write what you know, which is why my detective would be a TV critic detective (possible titles: "Saturday Night Dead," "Mary Tyler Murder," "Beverly Hills 9021Ohmygod"), just as forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs made hers a forensic anthropologist -- her novels inspired the television series "Bones" -- and Ellen Byerrum, who has worked as a reporter in Washington, D.C., made hers a reporter in Washington, D.C.

Two novels from Byerrum's Crimes of Fashion series have been adapted by Lifetime for the small screen, which is the right-sized screen for them. The first, “Killer Hair,” premieres Sunday, and although it is less than perfect -- the mystery not especially gripping, the resolution almost arbitrary, the characters low on substance and sometimes sense -- it is nevertheless pretty consistently enjoyable. And it has the advantage over many Lifetime movies in that no one is terminally ill, unless you want to consider murder a kind of fatal condition.

Read the full review.

(Photo courtesy David Dolsen/Lifetime Movie)

Cartoon Network's new reality shows, kid style, are variations on grown-up shows.

Cartoon Network premieres four new shows this week, none of them cartoons. These aren't the first CN shows to feature real people: There have been live-action "Ben 10" movies, based on the animated series, and the "Roger Rabbit"-style "Out of Jimmy's Head" in 2006. Indeed, the network's first real original production, "Space Ghost Coast to Coast," was cobbled together around interviews with living, breathing humans. (There is also a live-action "Scooby Doo" prequel slated for the fall.) And Adult Swim, CN's late-night alter ego, has the live-action "Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!" and "Saul of the Mole Men."

The new series are gathered together under the rubric CN Real, which is less a programming bloc than a sub-brand. (Two of the shows premiere tonight and two on Saturday.) As in the past, the current incursion of flesh and blood into the network's formerly fully 2-D Tooniverse has been met with dismay by (mostly adult) animation fans and CN purists -- I was about to write that it is a "hot topic of debate," but really there is no debate at all, just a collection of complementary assessments posted on various Internet message boards as to why this is a bad direction to take.

The point might be made that these shows -- by definition -- have not been created for that particular audience, but to serve younger, less particular CN viewers, and perhaps to steal a few new ones from Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. While any but the most juvenile cartoons are suitable for adults -- there is nothing guilty about the pleasure I get from "The Powerpuff Girls" -- most live-action teen shows are set up to mirror their audience.

Read entire review: Cartoon Network's new reality shows, kid style

-- Robert Lloyd

Photo: The teens in "The Othersiders" visit reportedly haunted places to assess whether unquiet spirits are there.  Credit: Peter "Hopper" Stone / Cartoon Network

HBO's vampire dramedy “ True Blood” returns Sunday night for a second season of gore and guts and breasts and buttocks. The action may take place in the South, but the show itself is truly set in a place called Premium Cable.

Read the full story.

(Photo courtesy HBO)

An Appreciation: Ed McMahon (1923-2009)

Although he did other things in his 86 years, Ed McMahon, who died Tuesday in Los Angeles, will be remembered mostly as the man who sat next to Johnny Carson, except when more important celebrities came between them.

Notwithstanding the dozen years of hosting "Star Search," a role in the 1997 Tom Arnold sitcom "The Tom Show," a high-profile Cash4Gold ad during the last Super Bowl and all that knocking on people's doors in the name of American Family Publishers, McMahon was a professional sidekick, a less-than-equal partner in an enterprise of which he was nevertheless a vital part: Thinking of Johnny, one proceeds quickly and naturally to Ed, who, by dint of association, was almost as famous as his boss -- I say "almost" to include that fraction of the world that may have seen or heard of Carson but never watched his show.

It's easy to underestimate his accomplishment -- or even to wonder whether it should be called an accomplishment at all. We live in a nation of aspiring quarterbacks, pitchers, lead singers and presidents, where we are told to dream big and have it all. (The vice presidency of the United States is regarded as a rarefied form of failure.) But in a world where everyone is innately a star, what does it mean to settle for life as a mere moon?

Read the rest of Robert Lloyd's appreciation of Ed McMahon here.

Read the full obituary here.

Should you desire to write detective fiction, you will want to give your detective some distinguishing decorative characteristic. Since all the plots have been written three times over already, it's how you dress them up that counts.

Will your hero/heroine be a clown detective, a gardener detective, a detective made of cheese? They say it's best to write what you know, which is why my detective would be a TV critic detective (possible titles: "Saturday Night Dead," "Mary Tyler Murder," "Beverly Hills 9021Ohmygod"), just as forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs made hers a forensic anthropologist -- her novels inspired the television series "Bones" -- and Ellen Byerrum, who has worked as a reporter in Washington, D.C., made hers a reporter in Washington, D.C.

Two novels from Byerrum's Crimes of Fashion series have been adapted by Lifetime for the small screen, which is the right-sized screen for them. The first, “Killer Hair,” premieres Sunday, and although it is less than perfect -- the mystery not especially gripping, the resolution almost arbitrary, the characters low on substance and sometimes sense -- it is nevertheless pretty consistently enjoyable. And it has the advantage over many Lifetime movies in that no one is terminally ill, unless you want to consider murder a kind of fatal condition.

Read the full review.

(Photo courtesy David Dolsen/Lifetime Movie)

Cartoon Network's new reality shows, kid style, are variations on grown-up shows.

Cartoon Network premieres four new shows this week, none of them cartoons. These aren't the first CN shows to feature real people: There have been live-action "Ben 10" movies, based on the animated series, and the "Roger Rabbit"-style "Out of Jimmy's Head" in 2006. Indeed, the network's first real original production, "Space Ghost Coast to Coast," was cobbled together around interviews with living, breathing humans. (There is also a live-action "Scooby Doo" prequel slated for the fall.) And Adult Swim, CN's late-night alter ego, has the live-action "Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!" and "Saul of the Mole Men."

The new series are gathered together under the rubric CN Real, which is less a programming bloc than a sub-brand. (Two of the shows premiere tonight and two on Saturday.) As in the past, the current incursion of flesh and blood into the network's formerly fully 2-D Tooniverse has been met with dismay by (mostly adult) animation fans and CN purists -- I was about to write that it is a "hot topic of debate," but really there is no debate at all, just a collection of complementary assessments posted on various Internet message boards as to why this is a bad direction to take.

The point might be made that these shows -- by definition -- have not been created for that particular audience, but to serve younger, less particular CN viewers, and perhaps to steal a few new ones from Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. While any but the most juvenile cartoons are suitable for adults -- there is nothing guilty about the pleasure I get from "The Powerpuff Girls" -- most live-action teen shows are set up to mirror their audience.

Read entire review: Cartoon Network's new reality shows, kid style

-- Robert Lloyd

Photo: The teens in "The Othersiders" visit reportedly haunted places to assess whether unquiet spirits are there.  Credit: Peter "Hopper" Stone / Cartoon Network

HBO's vampire dramedy “ True Blood” returns Sunday night for a second season of gore and guts and breasts and buttocks. The action may take place in the South, but the show itself is truly set in a place called Premium Cable.

Read the full story.

(Photo courtesy HBO)

Want 'Killer Hair'?

Should you desire to write detective fiction, you will want to give your detective some distinguishing decorative characteristic. Since all the plots have been written three times over already, it's how you dress them up that counts.

Will your hero/heroine be a clown detective, a gardener detective, a detective made of cheese? They say it's best to write what you know, which is why my detective would be a TV critic detective (possible titles: "Saturday Night Dead," "Mary Tyler Murder," "Beverly Hills 9021Ohmygod"), just as forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs made hers a forensic anthropologist -- her novels inspired the television series "Bones" -- and Ellen Byerrum, who has worked as a reporter in Washington, D.C., made hers a reporter in Washington, D.C.

Two novels from Byerrum's Crimes of Fashion series have been adapted by Lifetime for the small screen, which is the right-sized screen for them. The first, “Killer Hair,” premieres Sunday, and although it is less than perfect -- the mystery not especially gripping, the resolution almost arbitrary, the characters low on substance and sometimes sense -- it is nevertheless pretty consistently enjoyable. And it has the advantage over many Lifetime movies in that no one is terminally ill, unless you want to consider murder a kind of fatal condition.

Read the full review.

(Photo courtesy David Dolsen/Lifetime Movie)

Cartoon Network's new reality shows, kid style, are variations on grown-up shows.

Cartoon Network premieres four new shows this week, none of them cartoons. These aren't the first CN shows to feature real people: There have been live-action "Ben 10" movies, based on the animated series, and the "Roger Rabbit"-style "Out of Jimmy's Head" in 2006. Indeed, the network's first real original production, "Space Ghost Coast to Coast," was cobbled together around interviews with living, breathing humans. (There is also a live-action "Scooby Doo" prequel slated for the fall.) And Adult Swim, CN's late-night alter ego, has the live-action "Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!" and "Saul of the Mole Men."

The new series are gathered together under the rubric CN Real, which is less a programming bloc than a sub-brand. (Two of the shows premiere tonight and two on Saturday.) As in the past, the current incursion of flesh and blood into the network's formerly fully 2-D Tooniverse has been met with dismay by (mostly adult) animation fans and CN purists -- I was about to write that it is a "hot topic of debate," but really there is no debate at all, just a collection of complementary assessments posted on various Internet message boards as to why this is a bad direction to take.

The point might be made that these shows -- by definition -- have not been created for that particular audience, but to serve younger, less particular CN viewers, and perhaps to steal a few new ones from Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. While any but the most juvenile cartoons are suitable for adults -- there is nothing guilty about the pleasure I get from "The Powerpuff Girls" -- most live-action teen shows are set up to mirror their audience.

Read entire review: Cartoon Network's new reality shows, kid style

-- Robert Lloyd

Photo: The teens in "The Othersiders" visit reportedly haunted places to assess whether unquiet spirits are there.  Credit: Peter "Hopper" Stone / Cartoon Network

HBO's vampire dramedy “ True Blood” returns Sunday night for a second season of gore and guts and breasts and buttocks. The action may take place in the South, but the show itself is truly set in a place called Premium Cable.

Read the full story.

(Photo courtesy HBO)

Reviews: 'The Othersiders,' 'Brain Rush,' 'Destroy Build Destroy' and 'Survive This'

Cartoon Network's new reality shows, kid style, are variations on grown-up shows.

Cartoon Network premieres four new shows this week, none of them cartoons. These aren't the first CN shows to feature real people: There have been live-action "Ben 10" movies, based on the animated series, and the "Roger Rabbit"-style "Out of Jimmy's Head" in 2006. Indeed, the network's first real original production, "Space Ghost Coast to Coast," was cobbled together around interviews with living, breathing humans. (There is also a live-action "Scooby Doo" prequel slated for the fall.) And Adult Swim, CN's late-night alter ego, has the live-action "Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!" and "Saul of the Mole Men."

The new series are gathered together under the rubric CN Real, which is less a programming bloc than a sub-brand. (Two of the shows premiere tonight and two on Saturday.) As in the past, the current incursion of flesh and blood into the network's formerly fully 2-D Tooniverse has been met with dismay by (mostly adult) animation fans and CN purists -- I was about to write that it is a "hot topic of debate," but really there is no debate at all, just a collection of complementary assessments posted on various Internet message boards as to why this is a bad direction to take.

The point might be made that these shows -- by definition -- have not been created for that particular audience, but to serve younger, less particular CN viewers, and perhaps to steal a few new ones from Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. While any but the most juvenile cartoons are suitable for adults -- there is nothing guilty about the pleasure I get from "The Powerpuff Girls" -- most live-action teen shows are set up to mirror their audience.

Read entire review: Cartoon Network's new reality shows, kid style

-- Robert Lloyd

Photo: The teens in "The Othersiders" visit reportedly haunted places to assess whether unquiet spirits are there.  Credit: Peter "Hopper" Stone / Cartoon Network

HBO's vampire dramedy “ True Blood” returns Sunday night for a second season of gore and guts and breasts and buttocks. The action may take place in the South, but the show itself is truly set in a place called Premium Cable.

Read the full story.

(Photo courtesy HBO)

Review: 'True Blood'

HBO's vampire dramedy “ True Blood” returns Sunday night for a second season of gore and guts and breasts and buttocks. The action may take place in the South, but the show itself is truly set in a place called Premium Cable.

Read the full story.

(Photo courtesy HBO)