Robert Abele

Three is enough? Bill Paxton and his wives

Who's Your Daddy, America?

Robert Abele
HBO’s new Sunday-night lineup turns one of television’s cherished family mantras into a question: Father knows best? For seven years now, viewers have been deep in the messy personal neuroses of Daddy Soprano, who returned to our consciousness last week in gloriously tough, sweetly mundane and — in quite the......

Sympathy for the Hot Chick

Robert Abele
When MTV’s out-of-the-shutter-gate-hot docu-reality series 8th & Ocean introduced identical-twin blondes Kelly and Sabrina into the mix of 10 models — six female, four male — trying to make it in Miami (hoping for both career- and hormone-oriented gains, we have to assume), I thought the producers might be making......

Oscar M. Night

Robert Abele
The self-congratulatory show-biz bonanza on Sunday night didn’t seem to end when the Oscars went to commercial. There was M. Night Shyamalan’s preciously weird American Express ad to contend with, part of the “My Life, My Card” campaign, in which various celebrities — Robert De Niro, Kate Winslet, Tiger Woods......
From commander in chief to commando in chief

Let's Not Get Everyone Killed

Robert Abele
While saddled with an unfortunate name that will inspire sophomoric titters in Beavises and Butt-heads everywhere, CBS’s new military series The Unit is not your typical swinging-dick soldier hour. The men who make up the Army’s clandestine Special Forces group called Delta Force — counterterrorism specialists ready for instant deployment......

Project Bitch Slap

Robert Abele
A wide spectrum of bitchiness — the withering kind, the endearing kind and the kind that is coldly professional — was on display during Bravo’s second-season reunion episode of Project Runway and the one-off special about Runway’s previous winner called Project Jay. On the Runway reunion, the latest crop of......

Meet the Press, Mary

Robert Abele
Years of war, thousands killed — both soldiers and Iraqis — and it took a lawyer getting wounded by the vice president of the United States to finally inspire a cracklingly divisive scene of Sunday-morning theater on Meet the Press. Usually the guests on NBC’s venerable politics show bat away......
Photo by Lorey Sebastian / HBO

Scorn and Her Fury

Robert Abele
There’s a marriage indicated in the title of HBO’s new film Mrs. Harris, even though no marriage is depicted in writer/director Phyllis Nagy’s archly sympathetic rendering of the complex, volatile coupling of divorcée Jean Harris and bachelor Dr. Herman “Hy” Tarnower, author of one of the most successful diet books......

Truth to Oprah Power

Robert Abele
Dave Chappelle once did a sketch on his Comedy Central Chappelle’s Show in which he impregnated Oprah Winfrey and happily let her become his sugar mama; in another skit, he was questioned by a James Lipton type. Now, over the past two weeks, he’s sat for straight interviews with the......

Monkeys, Monsters and Dead Flies

Robert Abele
The joke is getting old that people watch the Super Bowl for the commercials, and it’s not really true, anyway. You want a damn good game, first and foremost (Seahawks, that means catching the football). But the array of ad buyers did a fine job of keeping us amused between......

Oscar Morning Howlers

Robert Abele
Again, I got up at 5:30 a.m. for the announcement of the Academy Award nominations on E! because the network reliably provides at least a half hour of live coverage. And again I was disappointed — not in the nominations, but in who E! chose to offer nerdy analysis. This......