Chances are if you haven’t seen it yet, you soon will: It’s the ad for the new fall series My Kids Are Grown and They Won’t Move Out! Oops, no, I mean, the new political ad that depicts adult children who’ve moved back home with their dying-to-retire mother and they can’t move out because, you know, Obama killed the economy. It’s an ad co-produced by Larry McCarthy, who brought you the Willie Horton scare ad in 1988 (you love ’80s nostalgia, right?), and Karl Rove: Featuring waxy animation that has the mom age in a manner destined to send shivers down the spine of anyone who had to sit through The Polar Express, the ad titled simply “Basketball” makes life seem an animatronic hell for ... Continue reading →
Chuck Brown: An Elegy for Chocolate CityOn the legacy of the go-go pioneerBy Jeff Chang on May 22, 2012I first saw Chuck Brown in the summer of 1987 at an all-ages show at the Celebrity Hall not far from Howard University. During the day I was working as an apprentice labor organizer alongside a Chicano from West Berkeley and a Japanese American from Santa Cruz, and they had joined me that evening out of boredom. Looking back, the three of us must have presented a spectacle — three non-blacks from California five years above the median age. Earlier that week we had driven across the Anacostia River to knock on doors and leaflet residents in the weed-strewn projects of Southeast. When we came back across ... Continue reading →
Chuck Brown: An Elegy for Chocolate CityOn the legacy of the go-go pioneerBy Jeff Chang on May 22, 2012I first saw Chuck Brown in the summer of 1987 at an all-ages show at the Celebrity Hall not far from Howard University. During the day I was working as an apprentice labor organizer alongside a Chicano from West Berkeley and a Japanese American from Santa Cruz, and they had joined me that evening out of boredom. Looking back, the three of us must have presented a spectacle — three non-blacks from California five years above the median age. Earlier that week we had driven across the Anacostia River to knock on doors and leaflet residents in the weed-strewn projects of Southeast. When we came back across ... Continue reading →
With the last gaspings of season and series finales this week, the 2011-12 season comes to a close. And any season that gave us Homeland, Girls, a great batch of Breaking Bad, Enlightened, and what’s shaping up as a terrific run of Mad Men must be deemed a success, right? Or is the quality outweighed by the soggy awfulness of Free Agents, Two Broke Girls, The Playboy Club, and H8r (oh, let’s face it, everything on the CW except Supernatural and the attempt to bring back Sarah Michelle Gellar, who really should have been the star of Revenge, not Ringer)? By any measure, it was an odd season, with every putative trend yielding a denial of that trend. “The network sitcom is back!”? With the ... Continue reading →
Enlarge Vicki Farmer Though he's not yet 25, Fullbright's music sounds like he's lived through a lot — or at least thought it through. Vicki Farmer Though he's not yet 25, Fullbright's music sounds like he's lived through a lot — or at least thought it through. John Fullbright's voice rises up and around the guitar chords in "Me Wanting You," his tone intended to haunt the person he's addressing. His desire, his "me wanting you," is as direct as he can possibly make it — it's not a cry of despair or hope or lust. It's the sound of someone intent on making as strong a connection with the listener as he possibly can. For a guy who's not yet 25, Fullbright sounds as ... Continue reading →
Image Credit: Byron Cohen/Fox House shuttered itself on Monday night. The first hour, titled “Swan Song,” consisted of a retrospective of the series’ eight seasons, 177 episodes, with lots of behind-the-scenes interviews with the crew and co-stars, some of them conducted by star Hugh Laurie, and a paintball fight. The second hour, “Everybody Dies,” featured a typically baffling medical case for Dr. Gregory House, which was only a first-half-hour cover for what really mattered, including numerous guest faces from the past, and which requires in this spot a SPOILER ALERT. The final struggle for the life and soul of Dr. House involved him sprawled in a burning building, his self-described “smack-addled brain” having visions of previous co-stars, including Jennifer Morrison, Anne Dudek, Sela Ward, and ... Continue reading →
A lot of you have asked my take on the NBC firing of Dan Harmon from COMMUNITY – a show that he not only was running but created as well. First I should mention that I don’t know Dan Harmon, nor have I personally had any involvement with the show. So it’s like when there’s a big news emergency and networks bring on so-called “experts” like earthquake psychics or terrorist cell consultants and they sound incredibly knowledgeable but then you realize they don’t know shit. That’s me in this situation. Ken Levine – former showrunner expert. That said, here are some random thoughts: Networks have been firing showrunners for years. You just never heard about it. Before social networks and the internet, showrunners were essentially ... Continue reading →
