Robert Abele

We should all rise from our ergonomic recliners and give a cheer for Christina Applegate, who has returned to the sitcom at last. It’s her home, really. She grew up before a studio audience honing her comedy skills as withering ditz Kelly Bundy on Married With Children, and emerged as......

A few of my favorite shows had their season premieres last week. Two of them, ratings stragglers Friday Night Lights and 30 Rock — both given second-season orders that lesser-quality shows wouldn’t have warranted — didn’t disappoint, even with elements that clearly betrayed efforts to hook more eyeballs. The Jerry......

ABC’s Pushing Daisies is the most deliberately offbeat entry in the network fall sweepstakes. But it’s less Twin Peaks than Edward Scissorhands, and certainly no less ridiculous (and, frankly, already smarter) about its mortality/relationship metaphors than any episode of Grey’s Anatomy. It’s a whimsical, romantically inventive and darkly funny pop-up......

The five-hour British miniseriesFive Days — a co-production of HBO and the BBC that starts its stateside run Tuesday, October 2 — is only nominally a mystery about what happened to a young mother (Christine Tremarco) from the London suburbs who mysteriously disappears on her way to visit her grandfather......

You’ve seen the promos all summer long. Now it’s here. It wants your eyeballs, your love, your dedication. It’s fall TV. So let’s get started with . . . the CW? I’ve had a grudge against the CW ever since its deciders canceled my beloved Veronica Mars. (If I keep chanting “Movie!......

If the Emmys go back to a round stage next year, it should at least revolve, maybe suddenly, jerkily, to give shocked — shocked! — awardees the true feeling that the earth has moved beneath them. And with a revolving platform, each acceptance speech could last the length of one......

For many docuphiles — particularly worshippers at the altar of grainy footage, dulcet-toned narrators and the slick packaging of dead-and-gone ages — a new multipart Ken Burns film is the serious-television equivalent of General MacArthur’s promised triumphal return to an abandoned Philippines. No, he wasn’t dawdling while you bided time......

Fox’s new cop show K-Ville, set in New Orleans post-Katrina (thus the “K”), can feel more like a hospital drama than a police series. That’s because in the eyes of NOPD partners Marlin Boulet (Anthony Anderson) and Trevor Cobb (Cole Hauser), the primary aspect of their job is preventing the......

French documentarians Denis Poncet and Jean-Xavier De Lestrade, who have shown a Wiseman-like knack for burrowing into the daily lives of law enforcement and the justice system in their Oscar-winning film Murder on a Sunday Morning and their Peabody Award–winning eight-part The Staircase, have produced a new nonfiction series that......