Robert Abele

Before we all get carried away turning Jeremy Piven into the breakout asshole of Entourage and suddenly “Hug it out, bitch” is a disturbing new catch phrase on playgrounds, let us take a moment and praise Kevin Dillon, to my mind the real gem in a show that’s come into......

After reading about the lawsuit filed against ABC and the folks who produce Extreme Makeover: Home Edition — five parentless siblings claim that a couple took them in, used them to get on the show and a new nine-bedroom house, then treated the brood horribly in an effort to kick......

Photo by Kevin ScanlonFor a guy whose debut as a comedy leading man is as a mild-mannered electronics store worker with zero experience in the sack, Steve Carell managed to get Hollywood into bed with him pretty easily. “I was thinking of fish-out-of-water scenarios, and the pitch was a group......

No one’s sure what Nightline will look like once Ted Koppel’s gone and ABC has to decide whether it wants news or something younger and edgier in that time slot. But in a recent younger and edgier shift on the nights Koppel is away (often featuring a younger and edgier......

Photo by Peter IovinoFor a show with pot dealing as its engine, the new Showtime half-hour comedy Weeds doesn’t draw its laughs from glazed, giggly tokers and sanded-off conversational excursions. Those flamboyantly lovable puffers Cheech and Chong would appear completely out of place in a walk-on, because the setting for......

There are times when you go to a new restaurant and eat a meal and recognize what the cooks were inspired by; you realize you share the same tastes. Watching Lifetime’s sweetly low-key limited series Beach Girls, about pent-up emotions and buried secrets among adults and teens in a Cape......

After returning from vacation, I held my own TiVo marathon to catch up with ABC’s hit summer reality show, Brat Camp, and am suitably hooked. It throws nine disturbed, hostile or otherwise problem-causing teens into a harsh wilderness therapy program — the Oregon-based SageWalk — where the rigors of outdoor......

Photos by Virginia Sherwood As an aficionado of and occasional participant in reality TV, comedian Kathy Griffin has energetically dissected the genre’s giddy highs and guilty-pleasure lows in her take-no-prisoners act. But with Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List, she’s taken the shadowing-camera trail forged by the Osbournes, Anna......

Four bombs went off just a few hours before my plane landed at Heathrow on Thursday, so naturally the TV was switched on almost constantly at my sister’s London home during my day-and-a-half stopover as we tried to get news of what had just happened. True to form, England’s saturation......