On Sunday night, Jan. 6, HBO will broadcast the first episode of the fifth, and last, season of The Wire. To assure fans: The show continues to offer perhaps the most loving and damning portrait of Baltimore ever put to film, from the cops to the teachers to the drug dealers to the politicians who Read More
Thanks to on-demand viewership, TV programming honchos really need to come up with something good these days. There are a few gems in this spring’s lineup: a cable drama (The Tudors), a generational comedic spin-off (The Winner) and real (!!) reality television (This American Life). Add already popular programs like Ugly Betty, The Office and Read More
Laurence Mark, producer of Dreamgirls, carried his Golden Globe in one hand as he made the congratulatory rounds at the Paramount party following the Golden Globe Awards in Los Angeles on Monday night. He managed to hug well-wishers with one hand while holding the statue in the other. “Someone said to me, ‘It’s the same Read More
At 3 p.m. on Dec. 15, Ricky Gervais stood opposite a picture of his own round face, blown up to three times its size and resting on an easel in the lobby of the HBO building in midtown. “Look what they’ve done to my teeth,” he said, jabbing a finger at his jaw, his voice Read More
Wayne Baker and Meredith Ronayne Met: June 5, 2005 Engaged: Aug. 24, 2006 Projected Wedding Date: Oct. 14, 2006 Meredith Ronayne was a starry-eyed intern at the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York when she watched Wayne Baker deliver a passionate opening statement in a trial against a gang member, pointing Read More
Last night at my friend Dave's I watched the Fox hit Prison Break and was stunned to find out that there were no black guys in the prison. Well a couple maybe. In order to glamorize its grim setting and avoid hairy racial politics, Fox chose to whitefy the prison. Unrealistically, of course. Black Read More
Today The New York Times announced it will take the opportunity to cash out its $100-million investment in the Discovery Times channel. "[I]t has become clear that our investment dollar is better spent developing video for our own nytimes.com," says the memo, reproduced below. In the April 10 issue, the Observer reported, based on Read More
This column is not about the HBO series Big Love. Only flatterers or irritables ascribe culture-changing force to cultural artifacts like TV shows. Fiction, as Stendhal said, is a mirror carried along a road; it shows us what we are, it doesn’t make us what we are. If a new age of poly-relationships is upon Read More
This column is not about the HBO series Big Love. Only flatterers or irritables ascribe culture-changing force to cultural artifacts like TV shows. Fiction, as Stendhal said, is a mirror carried along a road; it shows us what we are, it doesn’t make us what we are. If a new age of poly-relationships is upon Read More
At 9 a.m. on Saturday, March 11, Spike Lee sat behind a desk piled high with the daily papers in a Regency Hotel suite, dressed in a black blazer embossed with a white Yankees emblem, black pants and round thick-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses. He was there to talk about his new thriller, the Clive Owen–Denzel Washington Read More
HBO’s new polygamy drama, Big Love, opens in a sunlit suburban bedroom, with a man and his wife quietly having sex. Then the husband dresses and leaves, dropping a $100 bill on the nightstand. That captures the tone of Big Love—disturbing, but not quite disturbing in the signature HBO way. No one ever swears in Read More
HBO’s new polygamy drama, Big Love, opens in a sunlit suburban bedroom, with a man and his wife quietly having sex. Then the husband dresses and leaves, dropping a $100 bill on the nightstand.
That captures the tone of Big Love—disturbing, but not quite disturbing in the signature HBO way. No one ever swears in Read More
“This whole mess that we’re all in, called being alive, is just a fascinating dilemma,” said Sheila Nevins, the president of HBO’s documentary division. “And how people work that out is, to me, extraordinarily interesting. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a kid with Tourette’s syndrome or a murderer or a hot porn star or a Read More
“This whole mess that we’re all in, called being alive, is just a fascinating dilemma,” said Sheila Nevins, the president of HBO’s documentary division. “And how people work that out is, to me, extraordinarily interesting. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a kid with Tourette’s syndrome or a murderer or a hot porn star or a Read More
If you like these acclaimed HBO programs, you might like these recent articles from The New York Times: The Wire: Police Chief Sees Drug Toll With Father's Eyes, by James Dao and Gary Gately, August 24, 2005. The Sopranos: Gotti Family Blood Brother Is Witness for Government, by Julia Preston, August Read More
