Robert Abele

War-Zone Teens: HBO's Baghdad High

Robert Abele
Somewhere in the reality space between the latest news of horrific suicide bombings in Baghdad and the theatrical release last week of the slick, nonfiction high school movie American Teen lies the HBO documentary Baghdad High, airing Monday. In 2006, four Iraqi teens were given cameras so they could record......

Jeff Lewis: The (Nanny) Camera Hates Him

Robert Abele
After three very different people — a magazine editor who despises reality TV, a professional comedian and a high-powered fine artist — all independently of each other expressed to me a love of Bravo’s Flipping Out and its subject, Los Feliz–based real estate investor Jeff Lewis, I decided I would......
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Spaced: The Next Frontier, on DVD

Robert Abele
Director Edgar Wright, in the U.S. a few years ago to promote the British zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead, heard the same question everywhere he went: “Is Spaced ever going to come out on DVD here?” (Click to enlarge) “I know of quite a few people who ruined their......

TNT's The Closer: Stranger Than Real Life … So Far

Robert Abele
It’s hard not to like TNT’s hit procedural The Closer — you can usually count on the jittery charm Kyra Sedgwick gives Deputy Chief Brenda Johnson’s confession-room shakedowns, and the series’ portrait of an investigative team forever up against departmental bureaucracy and personality conflicts is almost always compelling. But you......
Rumsfeld’s moving targets: The TV version of the Marines’ 1st Recon unit; Credit: Paul Schiraldi

Generation Kill: Wired for War

Robert Abele
There’s a tendency to think of our misadventure in Iraq, now in its sixth year, as one of those long-running, poorly made television shows whose survival somehow feels miraculous and dispiriting, the triumph of an inability to move on to something else. The shame is that for the men and......

G4's Hurl! Thar He Blows!

Robert Abele
With eating competitions, stuffing it all in is what matters. On G4’s new food-shoveling game show, Hurl!, the object is keeping it down. Needless to say, the ancient governments of Rome would have approved. Debuting next Tuesday, Hurl! introduces five contestants — usually young, pudgy frat-boy types of dubious wage-earning......

Blue-Collar ID: The Factory

Robert Abele
There really hasn’t been enough distance since the spate of execrable blue-collar-guy-with-hot-wife sitcoms dominated network television — did the cosmos really need to bestow the gift of residual checks on Jim Belushi? — but I’m hooked on the arrhythmic, improvisational charms of Spike TV’s new show The Factory, which debuted......

Package Check: The Jonas Brothers' Rock Camp

Robert Abele
Disney’s made-for-TV movie Rock Camp — starring pre-adolescent megastars the Jonas Brothers — stormed across the screenscape last weekend like a tween twister, touching down on Disney Channel first on Friday night, then ABC on Saturday night, then ABC Family on Sunday, and on Monday landed at Disney.com. The peppy......