Robert Abele

Chances are you, like me, were raised not to name-call. But if our moms knew we could make a brilliant career out of it, they might have been less inclined to break up our playground fights. Poison-larynxed comedian Don Rickles is the lucky bastard who made it, that toad-bulldog hybrid......

There’s nothing urgent or shocking or baiting about the Sundance Channel’s eight-part documentary series Nimrod Nation, an affable portrait of a wintry, isolated Upper Peninsula community — Watersmeet, Michigan — where hunting, ice fishing, homemade head cheese and high school basketball (the Nimrods are the team name) rule. This makes......

When I pried open my new DVD box set of My So-Called Life: The Complete Series, one of my all-time favorite shows, I found an awesomely substantive package: not only all 19 episodes on five discs, but art and liner notes from creator Winnie Holzman and famous fans like Joss......

On Our Watch, the devastating hour on Darfur that Frontline airs next week, is a first-rate primer on the ugliest side of transnational inaction, a perfect storm of isolated tragedy and lucrative global alliances that show how all the promises made after Rwanda and Bosnia are meaningless when put to......

Since we’re in the thick of a candidate-mad season, it’s a good time for HBO to be airing the 2003 British film The Deal, about the secret arrangement in the early 1990s between Labour Party stars Gordon Brown and Tony Blair that eventually handed Blair the Prime Ministership. It’s essentially......

It’s not making waves anymore as water-cooler chatter, perhaps, but HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm is still an awfully funny show, with creator/star Larry David’s particular brand of Rube-Goldberg-like nuisance humor — where rudeness begets personal slights beget unwitting gestures beget misinterpretations beget David’s ostracism from society — in as fine......

If only our election seasons were as brisk as the first part of The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard, the latest Masterpiece Theater import from Britain airing Sundays through Nov. 18. At the top of the hour, we’re introduced to cheery supermarket manager Ros Pritchard (Jane Horrocks, still best known here as......

Why was it so weird to see Ellen Degeneres weep over a transplanted puppy, then cancel two of her tapings because the whole thing was too much for her, like a Victorian-era gentlewoman with the vapors? And Bill Maher threaten to kick the ass of a disruptive audience member at......

Drew Carey started his hosting duties on The Price is Right Monday, taking over for Bob Barker after the rangy emcee retired with 35 under his belt, and the first thing I noticed was how much faster Carey talks. I’ll admit, I had not watched this CBS prize-giveaway institution since......