Robert Abele

End of the Wire

Robert Abele
The ending of The Sopranos last year left its rabid viewers feeling as if they’d been instantly and unceremoniously whacked. But on Sunday night The Wire ended its five-season run on HBO with an honorable attempt to wean us off of its especially potent storytelling narcotic. It had been a......
Terminal City's housewife Katie: The doctors may say cancer;

Terminal City, Canterbury's Law

Robert Abele
The setup for Sundance Channel's 10-part Canadian import Terminal City is meant to be an irreverent juxtaposition of bad news and badly delivered news. The ringing telephone going deliberately unanswered at the upper-middle-class Sampson household bears what housewife Katie (Maria del Mar) instinctively knows — word that her mammogram shows......

Big Gives

Robert Abele
Oprah Winfrey, the grande dame of grand gestures, unveiled her new ABC reality show, Oprah's Big Give, on Sunday. It's a philanthropy race: the better a contestant's ability to shake down donations, the better his or her chances of not getting sent home. Novel idea, even if Donald Trump kinda......
Three-dimensional friends in a digital world: the quarterlifers; Credit: NBC/Elisabeth Caren

Unhitched and quarterlife: TV's Cool Hunters

Robert Abele
It seems you can go home again. This week, NBC started airing quarterlife, the social-network-inspired Web drama that represents the first venture into online production for quality-TV mavens Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, who've never met a catchy generational tag they didn't like (lowercase preferable). The jury's still out on......

Oscar Interruptus

Robert Abele
Every Oscars telecast wages a time battle between clip reels and acceptance speeches, and lately the awardees — often nervous people, most of them not performers, caught in a life-changing moment in which they have to cobble together words of gratitude and fight off the fear they'll forget someone —......

The Equalizer Returns

Robert Abele
Until the mid-1980s debut of The Equalizer's hero, Robert McCall — a Cold War vet disillusioned by the soul-killing nature of spy work who finds redemption in taking up the cause of average-folk clients who might need a bodyguard, avenger or dedicated sleuth — television was not a welcome ground......

Lewis Black's History of the Joke

Robert Abele
For aficionados of comedy, watching the documentary History of the Joke with Lewis Black - airing Monday night on the History Channel - is like traversing a minefield you're happy to cross. The suspense is in which one-liner, observation, off-the-cuff remark or nostalgic knee-slapper from childhood is going to be......
Rude and crude: The Whitest Kids U'Know.

The Whitest Kids U'Know, Fighting to Offend

Robert Abele
The Whitest Kids U'Know is a New York-based comedy group of five guys — guess what color — who are yet another 21st-century DIY success story, having taken their act from campus to the back of a downtown bar to the home-video bulletin board called the Internet to Aspen Comedy......
Cashmere cocktail klatch: Lucy Liu and company; Credit: ABC/Patrick Harbron

Lipstick Jungle vs. Cashmere Mafia

Robert Abele
There's a strange kind of fashionista truth-trumps-fiction irony to the notion that female-empowerment pop-fableist Candace Bushnell's novel Lipstick Jungle — about the personal/professional struggles of three dazzling, sexy and tops-in-their-field Manhattan women — was beaten to the prime-time-series catwalk by a look-alike knockoff called Cashmere Mafia, created by, of all......

The Moment of Truth; Bernard and Doris

Robert Abele
Queasy Money My guess is there's at least one moment for every male contestant in the hot seat on Fox's lie-detector game show, The Moment of Truth, when they think inside, "Why aren't I shouting 'No deal' to Howie Mandel right now in front of a hundred suitcase-holding babes instead?"......