Television Articles: February 2008

Even as Christo submits that the art exists as such, to be observed and absorbed, the film makes a case that politics is inherent in and constitutive of art.

A show where friends sleep around on each other, only to have truths revealed about their lives through a blog? It's basically Gossip Girl, only without the awareness that it's a total fantasy.

Hard Road Home doesn’t overstate any angle on the prison problem, neither the idealism nor the cynicism. Instead, it tells stories, observing and respecting those who know.

Buffalo Bill is most compelling when it considers the ways Cody's story shaped both the national past and the future of celebrity.

While the film reports events of Joe Louis' life, it doesn't shape them or trace specific themes. What does emerge in this bleak outline, however, is the sense that Louis was "betrayed" by a "nation."

The question of cause and effect is crucial, not only to Banished, but also to the black and white communities who live today with the legacy of banishing.

A multiracial grab bag of reality show clichés, the girls offer few new twists.

Predictably, the network cut is much more concerned with removing all premium cable language than with obfuscating the utter corruption Dexter embodies and acts out each episode.

While it's not exactly subtle to posit a post-apocalyptic U.S. as the equivalent of Iraq, it does lay out a new grid for Jericho.

As much as Bernard and Doris is a love story, it is also a study of the difficulties of class and sex, the ways that both complicate intimacy.

Sometime between Hurley's car chase and Naomi's resurrection, it occurred to me that I'm never going to get satisfactory answers to Lost's fast-accumulating questions.

Thank goodness for Lorraine Bracco. Bracco is, as ever, delightful, at once nutty, perverse, and too smart for every show she's in.

Eli Stone deals with weighty issues -- the purpose of life, the inevitability of death, and corporate liability -- but all of it is infused with levity.

Prince Among Slaves establishes its focus -- on the contrast between slavery, as barbaric idea and industry, and one individual's integrity and strength of will.