Two new fall TV shows, Once Upon a Time and Grimm, blend the real world with the world of fairy tales–but there the similarities stop. The two are radically different, especially in their representations of women. When Grimm remembers that women exist, they are hapless victims (think CSI: Deep Dark Woods), while Once Upon a [...]
The remarkable five-part PBS series Women, War and Peace concludes on Tuesday, November 8 with War Redefined, the capstone piece that brings together the issues brought up in the previous films about conflicts in Afghanistan, Colombia, Liberia and Bosnia. Narrated by Geena Davis, the film touches on, among other things, how the proliferation of small [...]
What’s sexier than a brilliant, Internet-savvy, queer, liberal prime-time news host with an Oxford University degree? Yeah, I can’t think of anything either. Since her show on MSNBC began in 2008 (and even before that, on Air America), Rachel Maddow has been turning heads and getting people thinking. She has been able to set herself [...]
On the heels of the U.S. success of the Danish series Forbrydelsen (remade by AMC as The Killing), Danish television hit Borgen will premiere in the U.S. this weekend. Borgen is billed as a Danish cousin to The West Wing; “borgen” is both the Danish word for “government” and a nickname for the parliament building. As [...]
On October 11, PBS will kick off its new five-part series Women, War, and Peace, executive-produced by Abigail Disney, Gini Reticker and Pamela Hogan. I interviewed Peggy Kuo, a war-crimes prosecutor featured in I Came To Testify, the first segment to air, which focuses on the first-ever international criminal tribunal that addressed rape as a [...]
NBC has officially pulled the plug on the highly promoted new series The Playboy Club after airing only three episodes. The reason given? Poor ratings, which caused seven major advertisers to withdraw after only two episodes. As an ex-bunny, I won’t be shedding any tears. I recently wrote for the Good Men Project about the [...]
Though I agree with Nancy Franklin of the New Yorker that you can’t judge a show by its pilot, I would counter that, in the case of Pan Am, there is quite a bit we can glean from the season opener. Indeed, just as one can gather quite a bit from a book’s cover–is the [...]
News broke last week that Portia de Rossi will star in a sitcom produced by her wife, Ellen DeGeneres. NBC has signed on for a “put pilot”, which means they’ve committed to screening the first episode (and thus, hopefully the whole first season). So far, all we know is that the show is about two [...]
In the original TV version of Charlie’s Angels, the three “Angels” were graduates of the police academy who were working in police jobs that failed to make the most of their superior skills. When Drew Barrymore revived the concept with a pair of movies, she emphasized the superior skills part, making two of the Angels [...]
I’m not familiar with Whitney Cummings’ stand-up, so I watched the pilot of her eponymous sitcom with an open mind. In fact, after reading a New York Times interview in which she was asked if she’d slept her way to the top, I was willing it to be fantastic. Turns out, my willing skills are [...]
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