Robert Lloyd

A friend of mine, asked once what he wanted out of life, replied, “I want to be entertained.” This was an amusing thing to say, but he wasn’t kidding, and he wasn‘t alone. After a long day under the fluorescent lights, many if not most of us would rather be......

Photos by Neal Slavin & Ava V. GerlitzTV MOVIES GALORE. PRETTY GOOD ONES. BUT FIRST, the news. In what amounts to a corporate research grant, a group of 11 major advertisers, including Procter & Gamble, General Motors, IBM, Sears, AT&T and Wendy's International, will fund the writing of "family-friendly" scripts......

THOUGH ITS PALETTE RUNS TO GRIME BROWN, dirty-brick red, fire-escape gray and haze yellow, and its settings to skanky digs and dingy subways, Downtown, a new animated series from MTV, is to my eyes one of the loveliest shows on television -- not that loveliness is a quality much pursued......

MTVTHE TALK SHOW MAY BE TELEVISION'S ESSENTIAL format, its most original and idiosyncratic invention. With its comfy chairs and tables and mugs of "coffee" and its (semi-) informal, (semi-)unscripted air of hanging out, it reflects the room in which its viewers sit, completing a kind of inclusive family circle, making......

Photo by Doug HyunTHE HUNLEY, THE LATEST INSTALLMENT IN TED Turner's campaign to re-create the entire Civil War, tells the story of the first successful military deployment of a submarine -- depending, that is, on how you define success, since in its brief career the machine killed four times as......

Photo by Michael GibsonSHOWTIME'S THE HOOP LIFE IS THE THIRD AND LATEST series from the so-far reliable production team of Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana, after the recently canceled Homicide: Life on the Street and the ongoing edgy prison drama Oz, which begins its third season July 14. Like those......

Photo by Mark HillTWO NEW SERIES DARE TO TURN THE LENS BACK UPON THE factory of their making. One is among the last creations of the late television wunderkind Brandon Tartikoff, an apparently semiautobiographical satirical critique of the world in which he daily moved, brought to posthumous completion by a......

THE RARITY WITH WHICH TELEVISION ENGAGES higher culture may be measured by the inordinate pride a network displays when it does adapt a literary classic or give airtime to an opera singer, master thespian, dance troupe or museum-approved artist. Even public TV, originally known as "educational," flirts increasingly with inconsequentiality,......

Photo by M. GrossmanWITH THE NEWS THAT GARY OLDMAN HAS SIGNED to play Pontius Pilate in an upcoming CBS TV movie about the life of Jesus -- the rest of the cast, as of this writing, has yet to be announced, but I'll be surprised if Armand Assante isn't in......

Photo by Walter WoodwardTHUG LIFE IN D.C., AN "AMERICA UNDERCOVER" documentary from HBO about incarceration in our nation's capital -- not in the actual Capitol, but close enough for discomfort -- begins with the Ripleyesque statistic that in the District of Columbia every other black male aged 18 to 35......