Near the end of Bill Brioux’s podcast interview with legendary TV writer Ken Levine, Bill asks his guest what TV he’s watching these days. Levine – whose writing credits include M*A*S*H, Frasier, The Simpsons, Everybody Loves Raymond and many others – could only come up with baseball and Jeopardy! I feel your pain, Ken. The
So far this fall TV season, I’ve checked out Matlock (a passable non-remake of the original), High Potential (gimmicky tripe), Rescue: Hi-Surf (standard beautiful-people-doing-heroic-things drama) and Murder in A Small Town (where there is a murder in a small town every week, until I assume the entire population is murdered). All of these programs are,
Few shows in TV history are more associated with geriatric viewing than the 1986-95 lawyer drama Matlock. It starred folksy Andy Griffith as a lawyer whose down-home mannerism hides a brilliant legal mind. Or at least, that’s how I understand it; I’ve never seen an episode. The fact that anyone under 60 knows anything about
It is said that nobody wants to know how the sausage is made. Well, not me. During my journalism career, I found it a privilege to go behind the scenes and find out how the sausage is made, metaphorically anyway. Here are a few of the best documentary series available on the streaming services (and
[With Sunday’s 76th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards signalling the start of another Fall TV season, we’re going to up the review ante here at brioux.tv. Maurice Tougas leads things off with this look at one of the new traditional broadcast network shows about to come our way.] In High Potential, a new ABC series airing
Edmonton TV station Global turned 50 this month. That news may not mean much to anyone outside of Global Edmonton’s reach – and considering the sad state of local TV, it might not mean that much in Edmonton either – but without Global Edmonton the classic sketch comedy series SCTV wouldn’t exist. CITV, later shortened
Cue the Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum (Random House). In the introduction to Cue the Sun!, Pulitzer Prize-winning television critic Emily Nussbaum reveals that in 2003 she told a friend that she wanted to write a book about this new genre called ‘reality TV’. After all, Survivor was a smash hit.
You might say Japan is having a pop culture moment. From the multi-Emmy award-nominated drama Shogun (all episodes available on Disney+) to a steady stream of utterly bizarre Japanese contestants on America’s Got Talent, Japan is everywhere this year. If you’ve got a hankering for a little TV sushi, I have some other suggestions from