Robert Abele

The Decency Chronicles

Robert Abele
Britain’s most famous umbrage-taker in its culture wars was a churchgoing, priggish art teacher/housewife who swung right back at swinging London in the 1960s with a ferocious campaign to rid a modernizing BBC of, well, everything that made television a galvanizing cultural force then: lax attitudes toward sex, realistic portrayals......

Time Warp's Cool Science: What Mentos Wrought

Robert Abele
Discovery Channel’s new Wednesday-night show Time Warp is see-this! science for the Mentos/Diet Coke generation. Time Warp events get the super-slo-mo treatment, so we can see what blender blades do to everything from gumballs to a video camera (think of all those Will It Blend? Web videos); what stone slabs......
Philip Winchester as Robinson Crusoe; Credit: Kelly Walsh/NBC

TV REVIEW: NBC's Crusoe: Thank God, It's Friday

Robert Abele
In the two-hour premiere of Crusoe, the expensive-looking and silly new 13-part television series NBC adapted from literature’s stranded-man classic, our hero (Philip Winchester) keeps having flashbacks to the civilized world he’s left behind. I have to admit, I kept having flashbacks, too — to the 10-year-old me who was......
Slater: The enemy of my enemy ... is me.

TV Reviews: Crash and My Own Worst Enemy: When Worlds Collide

Robert Abele
When the film Crash was released in 2005, TV guy Paul Haggis — who’d written for everything from The Facts of Life and thirtysomething to L.A. Law and created the acclaimed, short-lived crime saga EZ Streets — vaulted into the movie leagues as a prestige writer/director. Crash envisioned a cross-hatched......

Harvey Keitel Sustains Life on Mars

Robert Abele
Well, of course you’re going to feel like it’s 1973 again when you watch ABC’s Life on Mars. Harvey Keitel is in it. He hasn’t stopped oozing 1973 since he was a mean-streets member of the original Scorsese mob, and as Detective Gene Hunt, a barrel-chested bruiser who likes to......

NBC's Kath & Kim: Glamour Girls Gone Kitsch

Robert Abele
NBC’s mother/daughter sitcom Kath & Kim arrives this week as the network’s final piece in its Thursday-night comedy puzzle, with a few of the series’ elements seemingly preconditioned to fit snugly with its schedule mates. Like The Office, it’s an Americanization of a wildly popular sitcom from another country, this......
Bombings in Pakistan are only the beginnings of trouble in The Last Enemy.

The Last Enemy and Little Britain USA: Skullduggery and Wig Jobs

Robert Abele
With the generally unstable nature of the world now, why shouldn’t it be a fertile time for the makers of paranoid thrillers? Of course, here in America, we create a terrorism pulse-quickener like 24 and queasily discover that its torture-never-fails hero has become an actual source of inspiration for detainee......