Step Into the TARDIS on DOCTOR WHO

You may have gathered from previous Bacony goodness that we like Doctor Who around here. We like it a lot. If you are suspicious about a 45-year-old, inexpensively made, British sci-fi show, you’re not alone–we wondered about things like metal dogs and talking skin trampolines, too. Now Doctor Who is one of the shows we [...]

JEZEBEL JAMES: Not the Return We Were Hoping For

Amy Sherman-Palladino is an extremely gifted writer, as anyone who watched Gilmore Girls can tell you. Which is why it’s sad to see her misstep so decidedly with her latest project, Fox’s half-hour comedy The Return of Jezebel James.
For starters, the show feels like it was compiled from instructions found in Sitcoms for Dummies. Uptight, [...]

Why I Can’t Stop Watching JERICHO

I’m just gonna come right out and say it: Jericho is not a great show. The production values can’t even begin to compare with the lush beauty of a show like Lost. Many of the premises are utterly implausible and the “science” is generally laughable. The directing is sometimes clumsy, the dialogue can be embarrassingly [...]

BREAKING BAD: Not Really Better Living Through Chemistry

AMC’s Breaking Bad joins a growing number of cable shows (The Wire, The Sopranos, Rescue Me, The Riches, and Weeds, just to name a few) that seem to challenge the reality of the American dream. Tony Soprano might have the lovely wife and the spacious house, but the price for that is occasionally having to [...]

Why Won’t America Watch FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS The Way It Was Meant To Be Played?

Last night’s episode of Friday Night Lights caps an inferior and incomplete (perhaps forever) second season in which more and more unlikely circumstances drove what had been a nuanced and tender look at small-town life farther into the arms of soapy improbabilities. Starting with Landry and Tyra’s misadventures in murder and extending to Riggins’ missteps [...]

CASHMERE MAFIA: No.

You know what I would like to see on my television? Smart, powerful women who own their own damn selves. Smart, powerful women who own their own damn selves and aren’t made the butt of jokes for doing it (Ugly Betty, I’m looking at you). Unlike the caricatures on the offensive, painful mess that is [...]

THE AMAZING RACE: The Cat’s in the (Muddy) Cradle

Horrors! The lesbian ministers, despite exhibiting the terribly reasonable position that God probably doesn’t care if they win a million dollars on a reality show, have gone the way of all flesh. The way of all slow flesh. They were not quick.
Perhaps more awful yet is the pair that gets to stay. My beloved father/daughter [...]

MY NAME IS EARL: The Score Is Orange to None

So sang the brave and generous Timothy Stack on last night’s rebound episode, “Our Other Cops Is On!” And the score really has been orange to none this season, with Earl and the storyline stuck in prison with a bunch of other people in incarceration-mandated jumpsuits (in all fairness, the miscreants in Earl’s prison tend [...]

MOONLIGHT: Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That

It seemed a little unfair to review the initial pilot of Moonlight, what with all the behind-the-scenes changes and shenanigans. In the time it took to go from Showrunner #1 through Showrunner #2 to Showrunner #3, it was possible other changes would occur, from someone getting a haircut to someone getting a nose job to [...]

30 ROCK: “And by the way, GE has a problem with the dog penis sketch”

After this week’s episode, “Rosemary’s Baby,” I am officially awarding 30 Rock the Arrested Development Memorial Award for the Most Subversive Show on Television.
What was it, exactly, that earned the show this prestigious honor? It wasn’t the GE Followship Award (”presented annually to the woman—sorry—person who best exemplifies a follower”), or the word “adverlingus”, or [...]