Brendan Bernhard

Photo by Ron Tom/CBS Moral Majority types who claim that television is a bottomless pit of evil aren’t completely wrong. Rather, like a room full of stopped clocks, they’re right several times a day. I was reminded of this recently while watching a promo for some CSI reruns on Spike......

Okay. I will grant you that dwarves, bearded ladies and catatonic psychics are a bit old hat, as are carnivals, the Great Depression, and perhaps even the year 1934, in which Carnivàle, the lavishly enigmatic new series on HBO (Sun., 9 p.m.), takes place. On the other hand, are dwarves......

I had no idea how articulate President Bush could be until I watched DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, the hagiographic docudrama on Showtime that purports to give an inside view of the White House in the days following the most audacious terrorist attack in modern history. “This post–Cold War world......

It’s summertime, and the old attention span isn’t what it used to be. With the beach beckoning, and half the western world slapping on suntan lotion and annoying foreigners, it’s hard to nudge one’s cranium into a working mode. So The O.C., the new teen soap opera on Fox (Tues.,......

The other night I watched a program called Robot Wars in which remote-controlled, demonic-looking machines slug it out like gladiators from another planet. The robots have names like Dead Metal, Mr. Psycho, Sir Killalot and Sergeant Bash, and they slowly hack, gouge, ram and slice each other to bits while......

Photo by J. Viles/FOX Panned by the critics, ignored by the public, the contestants on Paradise Hotel (Fox, Mondays and Wednesdays, 9 p.m.) soldier bravely on. The program, if you’re one of the millions of people who haven’t been watching it, is a reality show about 11 “sexy singles” who’ve......

Of late, bollocks have been big on TV. So have balls. “You’ve got to have a giant pair of bollocks to succeed in this profession,” growled fearsome head chef Gordon Ramsey on a recent episode of BBC America’s Faking It (Sunday, 8 p.m.). And on Project Greenlight (HBO, Sunday, 10:30......