Robert Lloyd

The Mists of Avalon, a two-part TV adaptation of novelist Marion Zimmer Bradley‘s 1983 Wiccan-”herstorical“ retelling of the legend of Camelot, is not my usual flagon of mead, but it has been brewed much to my liking. Even the relative modesty of the budget works in the movie’s favor, since......

Six Feet Under, which concerns the Fishers, a family of Southern California undertakers, is HBO‘s first new dramatic series since The Sopranos, and as such it is automatic big news and under concomitant pressure to impress, if not necessarily (in the good old Nielsen way) to perform -- to fill......

Joan Cusack has come to series television, ladies and gentlemen, and you can send executive producer James L. Brooks (and his producing pals David Richardson and Richard Sakai) a little thank-you note for bringing her there. I am still slightly skeptical of What About Joan (its meaningless title might as......

Armistead Maupin’s Further Tales of the City is the third of the writer‘s “Barbary Lane” novels to be made into a miniseries, and though it is the least of them so far, it is a pleasant enough place to hang out -- depending, to be sure, on how you feel......

That there would be an entire television network devoted to food seems to me the most reasonable thing in the world, certainly more likely in a basic human sense than networks devoted to history or cartoons or auto racing or the purchase by telephone of crap whose common distinction is......

The recent passing of Inspector Morse seems to stand not only for the end of that worthy series, but (I perhaps rashly judge from limited transatlantic intelligence) for a sea change in English detective TV. The straightforward homeliness that marked the adventures of Morse, Holmes, Marple, Poirot, Jane Tennison and......

Once you excuse -- or embrace -- the cable-required gratuitous female nudity, The Chris Isaak Show, a new series from Showtime starring the chiseled-visaged retro-pop singer as a version of himself, proves itself a rendezvous of semisophisticated charm, sweet temper, sly wit, sure craft and, um, naked girls. Certainly it‘s......

Photo courtesy Photofest Enlarge image Though it is watched by so many more people so much more often, and penetrates and permeates our culture and nearly everyone’s like no other medium on Earth, television is still seen — sees itself, I can well imagine, from some corner of its industrial......

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality --T.S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton” The bird was wrong: Human kind can‘t get enough reality, at least as currently defined: that is, an edited version of an artificial situation in which people who have no reason to be......