A.V. Club

TV: The Critic: “A Day At The Races And A Night At The Opera”

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 14:00:00 -0600

“A Day At The Races And A Night At The Opera” (season 1, episode 11; originally aired 07/06/1994) It still seems a little surreal that ABC once paired the short-lived but beloved likes of The Critic and The Dana Carvey Showwith the ratings juggernaut that was Home Improvement. The Dana Carvey Show famously alienated much of its potential audience by opening with a Louis C.K-written sketch in which a triumphant Bill Clinton, convinced that nothing, but nothing, could stop his inevitable march to electoral victory in 1996, publicly breast-feeds puppies (and then kittens) from his ...

TV: Saturday Night Live: “Zooey Deschanel/Karmin”

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 12:00:00 -0600

I cannot, in good conscience, give an A grade to a show that allowed those Karmin performances to happen on live national television. But otherwise, that was a relatively strong episode of Saturday Night Live, mostly devoid of the silly material I thought Zooey Deschanel would engender (they pretty much crammed all of that into one sketch). In fact, Zooey was not really a major player and really only made an impression a couple of times, which surprised me, but this episode had a lot of other strengths. The best thing about it was that it moved a little faster ...

TV: Other Shows: Comic Book Men

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 10:00:00 -0600

Comic Book Men debuts tonight on AMC at 10 p.m. Eastern. Comic Book Men is a weird hybrid of a bunch of stuff. It never quite works as its own entity, even though most of the parts making it up are enjoyable in the moment. It exists, by and large, because AMC needs to figure out a way to keep the sizable Walking Dead audience watching AMC, and the network has yet to decide how it wants to follow up the huge success of the zombie show. (To this day, it continues to hedge its bets on which pilots ...

TV: What's On Tonight?: Come fill a virtual seat for the Grammys, won’t you?

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0600

Here’s what’s up in the world of TV for Sunday, Feb. 12. All times are Eastern. TOP PICK The 54th Annual Grammy Awards (CBS, 8 p.m.): Steven Hyden’s already done a great job convincing you to give the Grammys a chance, so it’d be useless for us to list the high-caliber talent (plus Foster The People—zing!) due to take the stage at the Staples Center, about which Steve will have much to say at the end of the night. So here’s a list of musical performers you won’t see at the music ...

Music: Newswire: R.I.P. Whitney Houston

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 22:37:00 -0600

A pop music superstar whose fame was once nearly as big as her once-in-a-generation voice, Whitney Houston died today at the age of 48. Police are investigating the cause of death, though there are no obvious signs of criminal intent. Houston died in a Beverly Hills hotel room, where she was staying while in town to perform at a musical tribute for her mentor, music executive Clive Davis, which still went on as scheduled this evening. Also moving forward is tomorrow’s Grammy telecast, a show Houston once owned and once again will overshadow, only this time for horribly shocking ...

TV: Cowboy Bebop: “Brain Scratch”

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 14:00:00 -0600

In “Brain Scratch,” writer Keiko Nobumoto delivers a thoughtful episode that’s expressly about the mystery of the week’s protagonist. This is refreshing because for once, a disposable character doesn’t just serve as a foil for Spike or one of the other members of the Bebop’s crew. Londes is the leader of Scratch, a cyber-cult that encourages members to leave their bodies behind and find inner peace by becoming pure digital information. Londes is an enigmatic figurehead that indirectly evokes the Aum Shinrikyo cult that came to world prominence in 1995 after the now-infamous Tokyo Sarin Gas ...

TV: The Twilight Zone: “King Nine Will Not Return”/“The Man In The Bottle”

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 12:00:00 -0600

“King Nine Will Not Return” (season 2, episode 1; originally aired 9/30/1960) In which the past can take us to strange places… In 1959, while looking for oil in the Libyan desert, a team of British geologists discovered the wreck of the Lady Be Good, an American bomber that had disappeared in 1943. While the plane had split into two pieces, it was largely intact, except for one glaring absence: there was no crew. The bodies were eventually discovered the following year, but for The Twilight Zone, that didn’t matter. Rod Serling saw the story of the ...

TV: Grimm: “Tarantella”

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 23:55:00 -0600

Well, so much for consistency. I knew Grimm would take a bit of a dive after a series-best episode last week, and I knew better than to expect some forward development on the plot, but shows like this tend to operate on the assumption that after a handful of standalone plots, somewhere in the episode order is a very serialized one that moves the story along. Right now Grimm doesn’t do that, and even a pretty cool case-of-the-week didn’t abate my questions this week. Angel’s Amy Acker gets a guest turn in Portland as a Spinnetod, a ...

TV: Supernatural: "Professor Pennywhistle's Magical Menagerie"

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:45:00 -0600

It is my sad duty to announce to regular visitors to this corner of The A.V. Club that Zack Handlen will no longer be reviewing Supernatural. Zack was expected to be back here this week, but after several reports of strange noises coming from the empty room behind the waste disposal area. he went to investigate and... vanished... mysteriously. (Cut to office janitor, played by Mark Pellegrino, turning to the camera and smiling ominously.) There are some who believe that Zack fed himself into one of the shredders after he saw the title of this week's episode, which ...

TV: Spartacus: “The Greater Good”

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:00:00 -0600

Trying to convince people that Spartacus is more than just sex and violence is like trying to convince people that Cougar Town isn’t a show about Courteney Cox boinking twenty-something himbos. Making the argument that neither is the case is noble, but usually futile. Oh well. Their loss. “The Greater Good” is a great, succinct summation of what makes Spartacus so addictive. There’s a clarity of purpose at work in this episode, one slightly lacking in the first two installments of the season. Those two haven’t been bad episodes by any stretch, but they were essentially laying ...

TV: The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret: “Conclusion”

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:00:00 -0600

In a few months, when this second season of The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret inevitably joins the first on Netflix Watch Instantly, sitting there with many other short-lived series in the expanding digital vault, I can’t imagine a lot of people are going to take notice. David Cross’ standup work isn’t just hilarious, it’s important, and I’d consider his first two albums landmarks (Shut Up, You Fucking Baby! and It’s Not Funny). His role as Tobias Fünke on Arrested Development is similarly iconic for being a bizarre and ridiculous performance, and Mr ...

TV: Portlandia: “Cat Nap”

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 21:30:00 -0600

I'm a little self-conscious reviewing this, my least favorite episode so far of season two, because I feel if I had personal experience with some of the things being spoofed here (read: if I was both cooler and had fewer Y chromosomes than I do) I would have a better impression of "Cat Nap" as a whole. So, if you usually take that letter grade up there with a few pinches of salt, feel free to dump out a whole cellar. Because as good as Miranda July is in the cold open about the shop with nothing to sell ...

TV: Fringe: “Welcome To Westfield”

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 21:00:00 -0600

For the second time in this recent run of episodes, Fringe opens with a dream sequence in which Peter and Olivia are enjoying an easy, sensual romantic connection—only this time it’s Olivia’s dream, not Peter’s. And that’s not the last time in “Welcome To Westfield” that Amberlivia will have the memories and emotions of Ourlivia overcome her. Later, she’ll remember a case that she never actually worked on with Peter, and at the end of the episode Peter will come over to her apartment, where she’ll have ordered from Damiano’s—the usual ...

TV: Late-night round-up: Late Night With Jimmy Fallon - Week of Feb. 6

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:00:00 -0600

When Conan O’Brien was preparing his eponymous TBS talk show, he spoke to the press about how excited he was to have the freedom to do whatever he wanted. Coming off his live tour and his unceremonious firing from NBC, this was going to be his chance for a big reinvention. It turned out, though, that all he really wanted to do was exactly what he used to do on Late Night, just a little earlier. Conan was still a talk show—monologue, sketch, interviews, musical guest, stay tuned for Lopez Tonight. The talk-show format claimed another victory in ...

TV: Newswire: John Goodman and Roseanne Barr are getting back together

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:21:00 -0600

Roseanne Barr’s Downwardly Mobile is already essentially a rehash of Roseanne—what with its focus on finding the funny in poor people, its setting among the even lower-rent digs of a trailer park, and of course, all that Roseanne—and suddenly that's even more official. Deadline reports that John Goodman is in final negotiations to join the NBC pilot, thus reuniting with his former TV wife, former Roseanne executive producer Eric Gilliland, and former role as that guy whose lovably teddy-bearish persona softens Roseanne’s natural abrasiveness and makes her seem human, even almost likable. Of course, this ...

TV: Newswire: Melissa McCarthy helps get her husband his own CBS sitcom

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:00:00 -0600

Melissa McCarthy and her writer-actor husband, Ben Falcone—recently seen as McCarthy’s make-out partner Air Marshall Jon in Bridesmaids—have co-written a comedy pilot for CBS. The show would be a starring vehicle for Falcone, so if the network picks it up, not only will the other guys in the writing room at The Looney Tunes Show have to stop calling him "Mr. Melissa McCarthy,” the two of them could lunch together every day at the CBS commissary and hold hands while talking about how things are going on their respective sets. That wouldn't be enough to get ...

Books: Newswire: Marvel forces Ghost Rider creator to stop saying he's Ghost Rider creator

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:45:00 -0600

After nearly five years of bitter and depressing legal back-and-forth only slightly ameliorated by the fact that it concerned a biker with a flaming skull, Marvel has won a lawsuit that forces Ghost Rider creator Gary Friedrich to stop identifying himself as “Ghost Rider creator Gary Friedrich,” simply because he is the creator of Ghost Rider. The oddly existentialist decision brings an end to a court battle first launched back in 2007, when Friedrich sued Marvel claiming that rights to the character had reverted back to him in 2001, and were subsequently being exploited by the company’s Ghost Rider ...

TV: Other Shows: Lilyhammer

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:00:00 -0600

The first season of Lilyhammer is now available for streaming on Netflix. Of all the original regular cast members on The Sopranos, nobody's act got thinner, faster, than Steve Van Zandt's. In the show's early days, Van Zandt's bantamweight intensity, antsy mannerisms, and baleful glower made for a strong contrast to James Gandolfini's solid, watchful authority. But by the time The Sopranos pulled into the station for the 86th and final time, I'd begun to shudder a little every time he lurched onscreen, preceded, like a medieval herald, by his lower lip. It didn ...

TV: Newswire: Bradley Whitford to bring the worlds of Parks And Recreation and The West Wing even closer together

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:41:00 -0600

The Huffington Post has a whole bunch of potential spoilers for the rest of the Parks And Recreation season (which you can read here if so inclined), but perhaps the one of greatest interest—especially to that Venn diagram overlap of Parks and West Wing fans that surely exists—is that Bradley Whitford has an upcoming guest spot. The Aaron Sorkin muse will turn up as the departing city councilman whose seat Leslie is running for, inspiring an episode that’s reportedly crammed with West Wing homages—most obviously its title, “Live Ammo,” which intentionally recalls one of Rob Lowe ...

TV: Newswire: John Stamos returning to sitcoms, finally

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:09:00 -0600

It’s been a good week for the Stamos-aholics amongst us. First the word came down from the Grammy gods on high that sometimes-drummer John Stamos would be a part of the upcoming Beach Boys reunion at the Grammys, and today Deadline reports that the erstwhile Uncle Jesse and his dimples could be coming back to sitcoms full-time. Stamos has signed on to star in Little Brother, a Fox comedy pilot about a man who finds out he has an ex-con half-brother played by comedian T.J. Miller—the mad scientist-haired cameraman from Cloverfield (and our fellow “Spa Weekend with ...