TV REVIEWS: KATIE

Katie Couric seemed to send out a message on her very first afternoon talk show: don’t expect any heavy lifting this time around. Although she once remarked that her tombstone ought to read “Perky No More,” Couric appeared to be as perky as she ever was on the Today show, no longer attempting to affect […]

GCB DEBUTS; TV SURVIVES

GCB, based on Kim Gatlin’s saucy novel Good Christian Bitches, premiered … ahem … modestly on ABC Sunday night, a sort of Southern companion to the network’s Desperate Housewives, which precedes it. The show drew 7.60 million viewers, losing 7 percent of Housewives’ audience. Nevertheless, that was enough to edge out the second hour of […]

DANCING WITH POLITICS

A day before the winner of Dancing with the Stars is due to be announced, the show appears to have entered the realm of extremist politics. Bringing to mind the anthrax scares of 2001, it was reported over the weekend that a letter addressed to finalist Bristol Palin contained white powder. Although it turned out […]

CRITICS SLAM CNN’S LATEST PRIMETIME ENTRY

The success of CNN’s big gamble in mounting a new politically-oriented talk show in primetime featuring the conservative columnist Kathleen Parker and the liberal former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer won’t be known until the ratings start coming in — but the verdict of TV columnists has been uniformly disapproving. New York Times TV critic […]