Robert Abele

Toast of the town: Billie Piper as Belle the secret call girl

Faking It: Secret Diary of a Call Girl

Robert Abele
Showtime’s perma-gloss new comedy Secret Diary of a Call Girl comes to us from the United Kingdom, whose Millennium Bridge features in the opening shot of the premiere episode as the petite, designer-suited Belle (Billie Piper) strolls toward us in slo-mo with all the icy confidence of a high-powered 21st-century......

Bubblin' Crude: Black Gold, from the Deadliest Catch guys

Robert Abele
The Texas oil-derrick show Black Gold, debuting this week on truTV, is the latest example of too-tough-for-you reality programming — following executive producer Thom Beers’ hit shows Deadliest Catch on Discovery and Ice Road Truckers on the History Channel — in which a job (crab fishing in the Bering Sea;......

Denise Richards: It's Really Not That Complicated

Robert Abele
The sport of spotting contradictions and dopey little ironies when stars try to rejigger their public image is really the only reason to watch celeb-reality shows like Denise Richards: It’s Complicated. (Hey, I still mourn the train wreck of tears and self-delusion that was, briefly, Hey Paula.) The big idea......

On the Road in America: Hearts and Minds and Reality TV

Robert Abele
Right at the start of the 12-part documentary series On the Road in America, which begins airing Wednesday on the Sundance Channel, we are shown how different the lives of the film’s four main characters — three 20-something men from Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and a Palestinian woman, also......
Ready for her close-up: Laura Dern as Republican hatchet woman Katherine Harris

Down for the Recount

Robert Abele
Hey, political junkies, now that you’ve watched one presidential-nominating race drag on long past the exhaustion point, let’s relive the last big commander-in-chief contest! Return with me, won’t you, to the thrilling days of prolonged-battle yesteryear, when the 2000 presidential election was prematurely called by a wafer-thin margin for one......

The Return of Square Pegs

Robert Abele
Time hasn’t been kind to the series Square Pegs. Twenty-five years after its version of high school geek angst hit the airwaves, the show now comes off like the once-cool classmate whose faded reunion appearance only provokes forced smiles and secret thoughts of, “Why was I so in awe?” In......

New on DVD: Hiya, Kids!! A '50s Saturday Morning

Robert Abele
Media-crazed kids — weaned on Popsicle-colored, flash-explosion-edited TV that leaves little room for wandering eyes and ears — would probably look at the shows collected on Shout! Factory’s new four-disc box set Hiya, Kids!! A ’50s Saturday Morning and think they’d been sent to attention-span hell: static camera shots, old......
Spinster sister: Dame Judi Dench as Miss Matty Jenkyns; Credit: Nick Briggs/BBC

PBS's Cranford: It Takes an Eccentric Village

Robert Abele
Elizabeth Gaskell may not have the marquee power of Jane Austen or Charles Dickens, but if the three-part BBC- and WGBH-partnered Cranford is any indication, there may well be an olde-but-new game in town. Nick Briggs/BBC (Click to enlarge) Spinster sister: Dame Judi Dench as Miss Matty Jenkyns Gaskell, a......