Thursday TV: Ballet Dancers, Mountain Men
From a network whose other new reality show this week, “The Catalina,” was so tawdry that E! wouldn’t have touched it, tries to class things up with “Breaking Pointe” (The…
‘America’s Next Top Model’ Not American
She may not become a top model either, but for sure the latest “America’s Next Top Model” is not American. For the finale of the “America’s Next Top Model: British…
Chuck Grassley’s History Problem
The success this week of its big “Hatfields & McCoys” miniseries brings greater attention than ever to the History Channel, which beat even broadcast numbers. It made me wonder how…
Wednesday TV: Dogs and Hockey on Network TV
You know things are going to be thin on network TV this summer when one of the first new shows is a straight up knockoff of “The Dog Whisperer.” “Dogs…
Bill Paxton on Language That’s the Real McCoy
When Bill Paxton was researching his role as Randall McCoy for the current hit miniseries “Hatfields & McCoys,” he did a lot of reading, but he could only do so…
Tuesday TV: Al Qaeda in Yemen, Jeans in the East
Leave it to brave journalists to infiltrate the Al Qaeda compounds in Yemen. The Guardian’s Ghaith Abdul-Ahad does so, and with a camera crew for “Frontline” (PBS, 10 p.m, check…
Becoming Hemingway
4Among his many roles, Clive Owen has portrayed Sir Walter Ralieigh and King Arthur. But becoming Ernest Hemingway in the new HBO romantic film, “Hemingway & Gelhorn,” he says, “was…
‘Hemingway & Gelhorn’ vs. ‘Hatfields & McCoys’
Among its other uses, Memorial Day is a time to mark summer’s start, when people spend less time with their TV shows, networks take off their best shows, fill time…
Also on Monday: Memorial Day Fare
One of the few good things to come out of the current, seemingly endless wars are some stellar documentaries, reflecting what’s really going on in places like Afghanistan. There, the…
On Tonight: Fraud in Fins
One of P.T. Barnum’s first major frauds was something he called the Feejee Mermaid, a kind of lurid combination of monkey and fish with paper mache that brought in the…