Slate Articles

Comic Book Men

Troy Patterson — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:45:00 GMT

Comic Book Men (AMC, Sundays at 10 p.m. ET), a reality show about a crew of perfectly nice geeks, boasts competent production values. Thus, it is jarring to see Kevin Smith's name attached. As Sam Adams wrote in a recent Slate piece, Smith "once said he wasn’t particularly interested in how his films looked." The director of Clerks and Chasing Amy is, in purely cinematic terms, an auteur without a vision.

Smash

Troy Patterson — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 21:18:06 GMT

You cannot have avoided hearing about Smash (NBC, Mondays at 10 p.m. ET). NBC has been running ads during NFL games, reminders in its chyron, teasers in taxis, spots in Playbill; at this point, even people who do not own televisions may feel that the network bought airtime in their REM sleep. Just as the series, with its cameos by Broadway machers and its fond peeks inside theater haunts, is pitched at both residents of the entertainment world and the good people of Peoria, these promotions serve two constituencies. One is composed of the civilians who may yet be pummeled into watching this soapy musical about a Broadway musical—soap as dispensed by the bathroom attendant at Sardi’s. The other is “the creative community.” The second group, lingeringly cheesed off by the network’s 2009 move to crowd drama out of primetime in favor of Jay Leno, need convincing that NBC is committed to attempting classy, smart work for adults. Even if the show fails commercially, the peacock will have smoothed some feathers.

Brown Girls, Brownstones, White Guys, Black Pants

Troy Patterson — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 21:19:51 GMT

If you're anything like me—and I hope for your own sake you're not—then you stoked your romance with New York City in front of PBS late at night in the early '90s. Viewers like you responded to a matched set of indie hits the channel then favored—Whit Stillman's Metropolitan and Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It. Audrey Rouget, Nola Darling. Paleface, redskin. Cool, hot. Uptown, Brooklyn—very specifically Fort Greene, depicted as an urban paradise populated by black nerds and the women who have got to have it from them. A revelation! Nelson George, a talented journalist and a producer of that film, has lived in that neighborhood since back in the day and delivers it a love letter in the form of Brooklyn Boheme (Showtime, Thursday at 8:30 p.m. ET).

A Little Bit of Luck

Troy Patterson — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 16:48:00 GMT

HBO premieres Luck, a new horse-racing series starring Dustin Hoffman and Nick Nolte, this Sunday at 9. Back in December, Troy Patterson assessed a special showing of the pilot episode and pronounced it a winner. Producer David Milch tempers the mythmaking with gritty historical detail, Patterson said, and characters spit out their lines in an addictive rat-a-tat that will have you grinning even as you try to set up closed captioning on your TV. The review is reprinted below.

And YOU Get a Talk Show, And YOU Get a Talk Show!

Troy Patterson — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:13:30 GMT

As the world turns, daytime television ceases to spin on the axis of the soap opera. Almost precisely 40 years ago, Renata Adler opened a television column in The New Yorker by gaping at the "extremes of hatred and loneliness" played out on The Doctors, a racy alternative to General Hospital then working through a plot line about "an educated man so bitter that he kills himself solely to frame another man for murder." The noonday demon frolicked, and the show, Adler wrote, was "an epic of despair." That sort of death no longer has a place in the afternoon. The TV Doctors on call in 2012 is a syndicated Dr. Phil spinoff where physicians and psychologists wearing scrubs or lab coats mix smoothies that promise to improve your orgasm.

Lost on The Rock

Troy Patterson — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 21:41:24 GMT

From the 1993 debut of The X-Files through our age of the lunatic Fringe, Fox has nursed a crush, often a productive one, on supernatural procedurals. Hallmarks of the form include paranormal happenings, paradoxical schemes for world domination, and para-governmental agents sharing spooked glares in the green glow of computer monitors. Alcatraz (debuts Monday at 8 p.m. ET) moves through this subgenre’s paces at a decent clip, conveys a measure of suspense—and yet still left this viewer feeling mildly drowsy. No small part of the show’s soporific quality owes to its visual hush—the dimness of its lighting. In common with its predecessors, Alcatraz unfolds amid a cinematographic gloaming meant to suggest a perpetual twilight zone of the soul.

Are You There, Are You There, Chelsea?

Troy Patterson — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 22:04:08 GMT

Are You There, Chelsea? (NBC, Wednesdays at 8:30 p.m. ET) remixes a collection of humorous essays by the multitalented irritant Chelsea Handler into a sitcom starring Laura Prepon as Handler's almost-all-id alter ego. The book is called Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea—a name which, though too polysyllabic and dipsomaniacal to work for network primetime, undeniably makes irreverent sense in its corrupted echo of Judy Blume. The title’s elision for television is perhaps ill-considered; however, given Handler's persona as a dedicated lush, you can parse it as a question posed by a friend or first responder desperate to snap her back from a boozy brownout.

Remember Sunday? Wasn’t Sunday Great?

Troy Patterson — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 19:18:20 GMT

CBS this morning introduced CBS This Morning (weekdays at 7 a.m. ET), its latest attempt not to croak at the cockcrow. For decades, NBC’s Today and ABC’s Good Morning America have eaten this network’s breakfast. Now, CBS is threatening to make itself useful by offering a product lacquered like hard news. Abandoning all hope of communing with the man or the Girl Scout troop on the street—as Today does at Rockefeller Plaza and GMA in Times Square—the new show comes to us from the “CBS Broadcast Center,” way west on 57^th Street, where tourists fear to tread.

Downton Abbey, Reviewed

Troy Patterson — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 20:40:06 GMT

“Who knew it would be so much fun to watch a house full of magnificently dressed aristocrats and their servants living all under one roof?” Here comes Laura Linney—lovely in black lace, a gracious hostess strolling before a backdrop like a crimson curtain—to ask a trick question of viewers like you, this Sunday on PBS.

Troy Patterson’s TV Top 10

Troy Patterson — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 17:55:18 GMT

1. Breaking Bad (AMC) was the best TV show of 2011. But you don't have to take my word for it. No, really, don't; you can't, actually; I have scarcely seen anything of its fourth season. My DVDs sit unspun, waiting to be binged upon when I've got a free weekend to fill, or a preteen slumber party to emotionally scar. Earlier this month, The New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum spoke truth to power under the headline “I Hate Top Ten Lists:” "Part of my problem is the false authority of it," she wrote. "TV critics certainly try to keep up, but damn, there’s a lot of TV." Indeed, I sometimes moderate my viewing habits in the belief that I can sharpen my vision by resting my eyes. The key to being a TV critic without losing one's mind is to not watch too much television, or so I hope. But it’s a strategy that closes the opportunity to make definitive pronouncements. As far as I know, Charlie's Angels is an unjustly ignored masterpiece.