Robert Lloyd

Survival

Robert Lloyd
A friend asked me to tape the final night of Survivor for him because he was going to a ball game and his wife couldn’t work out how to set the VCR. I probably wouldn‘t have watched it otherwise, if only to prove to myself that my life was made......

B-Pictures

Robert Lloyd
Stanley Tucci has turned up suddenly, surprisingly, in the cast of Bull, the first dramatic series from TNT (though it is ultimately a co-production of Warner Bros. Television, which has done this sort of thing before). A first original dramatic series or sitcom is a kind of rite of passage......

Who Wants To Be a President?

Robert Lloyd
I did my duty, patriotic and professional, and checked out the coverage of the Republican convention, but it had me on the ropes fast, and I soon rejoined the majority of my fellow Americans in looking elsewhere. I prefer my television fictions undisguised as statesmanship, in any case. The Grand......

Harvest Time

Robert Lloyd
Like a lot of speculative fiction, the TNT made-for-TV movie Race Against Time takes as a given the corporate takeover of the world and the increasing cheapness of human life. Where do they get that stuff? Actually, in this case life is not especially cheap -- it‘s worth exactly $300,000,......
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Pretense & Sensibility

Robert Lloyd
Photo by Debra DiPaolo Carolyn See writes — in longhand! — lovely books in which terrible things happen to good people, and to bad people, and to all sorts of people, things as localized as a hit-and-run accident and as all-encompassing as the Third World War. As in the acclaimed......

Desert Island Bisque

Robert Lloyd
Can 24 million Survivor fans be wrong? Call me un-American, but apart from a mild antipathy for an obnoxious castaway or two and a superficial physical attraction to a couple of others, I can’t work up even an iota of concern over which of them will next be kicked off......

American Families

Robert Lloyd
One hundred years ago, Kodak introduced the Brownie, selling 250,000 of the cameras in the first year at a dollar a pop and changing the way in which history was recorded and, as a result, what history was recorded. With the means of commemoration made widely available, humankind began to......

Up Close

Robert Lloyd
Photo by Jimmy Malecki The Real World, MTV’s most enduring gift to television, is about to begin its ninth season, with the latest gang of seven deposited in a Greek Revival mansion smack on St. Charles in New Orleans’ upscale Garden District. (“That’s Tara!” says one upon arrival. “Who’s Tara?”......

Dropped Bombs

Robert Lloyd
Nuclear holocaust is back on TV, and it‘s about time. We’ve gotten so used to all those bombs sitting around not going off that it‘s tempting to imagine they never will, and while it’s nice not to have to go around rehearsing the old duck and cover 24-7, a little......
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What's Welsh for Zen?

Robert Lloyd
The first memoir by a member of the Velvet Underground, the cult band that could, John Cale’s perversely entertaining trip through the past darkly will interest almost exclusively — will often only make sense to — those already interested in his music. But qualified readers will have a good, gossipy,......