THE GOOD: After three seasons of inexcusable Emmy snubs, Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, the remarkable hearts and souls of FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS (which by the way is currently the reigning title-holder of “best show you’re not watching”) finally got some much-deserved Emmy love scoring nods for Outstanding Actor and Actress in a Drama respectively. Also falling under the category “Good” is the fact that for the most part, it’s hard to argue with the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, who for the first time in as long as we can remember, may have [for the most part] gotten things right! Aside from awarding the usual suspects, which include always deserving nominations for the likes of anyone involved in 30 ROCK and MAD MEN (Tina Fey, Alec Bladwin, John Hamm, Elisabeth Moss among others), HOUSE’s Hugh Laurie, and THE BIG BANG THEORY’s Jim Parsons, Academy members rightly deemed it necessary to acknowledge six remarkable seasons of LOST with multiple nominations including Outstanding Drama, Actor (Matthew Fox), Supporting Actors (Terry O’Quinn and Michael Emerson) and Guest Star (Elizabeth Mitchell). More exciting still was the often slow-to-change Academy’s embrace of both newcomers (GLEE! MODERN FAMILY! THE GOOD WIFE!) and relative newcomers (Amy Poehler! Julianna Marguilies! Betty White!) by awarding a plethora of nods to the likes of THE GOOD WIFE’s Christine Baranski and Archie Panjabi, MODERN FAMILY’s Sofia Vergara, Julie Bowen, Ty Burrell, Eric Stonestreet, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and GLEE’s Lea Michele (Outstanding Actress), Chris Colfer (Outstanding Supporting Actor), Jane Lynch (Outstanding Supporting Actress), and Outstanding Guest Actors Kristin Chenoweth, Neil Patrick Harris and Mike O’Malley. Which brings us to…
Search Results for: family
And the 2010 Emmy Nominations Go To…
… us for waking up extra early to report on this mornings Emmy Nominations! What’s that? You’re here for the actual Emmy Nominees? Stay tuned! We’re posting them as fast as MODERN FAMILY’s Sofia Vergara and COMMUNITY’s Joel McHale can read them starting at 8:40AM (5:30AM Pacific)
Outstanding Drama Series
BREAKING BAD
DEXTER
THE GOOD WIFE
LOST
MAD MEN
TRUE BLOOD
Outstanding Comedy Series
GLEE
MODERN FAMILY
CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM
NURSE JACKIE
30 ROCK
THE OFFICE
Our 2010 Emmy Nomination Predictions
With less than twenty-four hours until the 2010 Emmy nominations are announced (which by the way, we’ll be live blogging bright and early starting at 8:30AM est tomorrow) — we at theTVaddict.com, against our better judgement, have decided to go out on a limb and put our picks for tomorrow’s lucky nominees on the record. See for yourself, who we don’t necessarily hope will be nominated (Michael Urie FTW!), but rather think will be nominated (Tony Shalhoub, sad face emoticon), after the jump.
TV Ratings: Tuesday July 6, 2010 (America loves it’s Reality, with TALENT, KITCHEN & WIPEOUT up across the board)
Time | Network | Show | Viewers | 18-49 |
---|---|---|---|---|
8PM | CBS | NCIS (R) | 10.08 | 1.7/6 |
ABC | Wipeout | 8.35 | 2.7/9 | |
FOX | Hell’s Kitchen | 6.29 | 2.9/10 | |
NBC | Losing It With Jillian | 3.85 | 1.2/4 | |
CW | One Tree Hill (R) | 994,000 | 0.4/1 | |
9PM | NBC | America’s Got Talent | 10.39 | 2.9/9 |
CBS | NCIS: LA (R) | 8.70 | 1.5/4 | |
FOX | Hell’s Kitchen | 7.08 | 3.3/10 | |
ABC | Downfall | 4.27 | 1.4/4 | |
CW | Life Unexpected (R) | 588,000 | 0.2/1 | |
10PM | NBC | America’s Got Talent | 12.29 | 3.7/11 |
CBS | The Good Wife (R) | 5.48 | 1.0/3 | |
ABC | Primetime: Family Secrets | 3.66 | 1.2/3 |
18 Going on 80: A look at HOT IN CLEVELAND and PRETTY LITTLE LIARS
How much can TV Land’s HOT IN CLEVELAND attribute its success to the Cult of Betty White? The same following catapulted the 88-year-old actress from perpetual guest star to the subject of a (successful) Facebook campaign that had her host the highest rated episode of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE since 2008, so it’s not unlikely that some of the five million people who tuned into the pilot were following suit. Part of it might also be the nostalgia trip experienced watching the show: stocked with recognizable faces and familiar set pieces, it hits upon every conceivable element of what makes the very reruns TV Land airs so cozy.
The show is an interesting creature, seemingly manufactured to reconfigure the traditional sitcom for 2010: it’s filmed in front of a live studio audience, casted with sitcom favorites of yesteryear (Valerie Bertinelli, Jane Leeves, and Wendie Malick), and is rife with set ‘em up, knock ‘em down jokes, but also (awkwardly) incorporates newfangled concepts like the internet and “manscaping.” It’s the equivalent of “New Look, Same Great Taste.” This would be perfectly fine if the fondness for ‘80s sitcom tropes were easily transferable, but here it just comes across as a comedy bogged down by…‘80s sitcom tropes. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with this (if you like your yuks foreseeable from the opening credits, you’ll love it), but it feels like too much of an easy way out — that masquerading as a kitschy throwback should be enough.
The trio arrives in the titular Ohio city after their plane from Los Angeles to Paris is forced to make an emergency stop. And seemingly right out of the sitcom handbook, they each find one reason or another to stay, the three of them living together in a house leased by Melanie (Bertinelli), a self-help book author who recently separated from her husband. White’s enduring charm is tested here: much like how the show plays on our memories of past comedies to get us to laugh, White commands much of her laughs from her age: as house caretaker Elka, she gets plenty of old-lady-being-raunchy material, which by the third episode I screened grew tiresome. An actress as adept as White could easily handle meatier lines, not that her equally capable co-stars are stealing any good dialogue. Malick, who plays washed-up soap opera star Victoria, does manage to gussy up some of her lines with her snappy delivery.
Much is made of the stars’ age, mainly that they are all Women Of A Certain Age. Upon arriving in Cleveland, they hit a bar packed with everything that they thought existed only in fables: women who eat, men who don’t look past them for their age, and who greet them with old fashioned Midwestern kindness. But this isn’t GOLDEN GIRLS, a show that was much more attuned to how to examine the relationship between age, sex, and identity from a comedic vantage point. It’s disappointing, because with a cast as seasoned as this, there was (or is, if you’re at all confident that things could turn around) ample opportunity to offer a fresh take on the elder modern woman.
On the flip side, it was hardly a surprise to hear that PRETTY LITTLE LIARS, ABC Family’s latest melodramatic teen soap, quickly shot to the top of the ratings chart. The network formally owned by televangelist Pat Robertson has heavily refocused its image in the past few years, going from FULL HOUSE reruns to teen dramedies packed with hyper-emotive (though impressively stoic) young actors with shampoo commercial hair. Yes, any of the principal actors in LIARS (based on the young adult novels by Sara Shepard) could easily reminds us that they’re worth it.
Haircare aside, this is right on brand, complete with drama-inducing setup: four best friends living in the posh Pennsylvania suburb of Rosewood suffer a falling out after their friend Alison (Sasha Pieterse) goes missing. A year later, each begin receiving messages threatening to expose their secrets from someone who signs as “A,” to which the girls presume to be Alison. These are Big Dark Secrets like lipstick lesbianism, boyfriend stealing, kleptomania, and your run-of-the-mill adultery. But this will all seem rather meek if you’ve spent even half a second watching GOSSIP GIRL (or whatever prime time soap you explain to watch for its “creative storytelling”).
The allure of shows like this is how easily you can relish in the soft-focused, retouched soapy goodness of both the story and the acting, but LIARS seems to be an indicator of a potential saturation point for ABC Family, whose insistence on creating “a new kind of family” may have gone to their heads. The show has seemingly chewed through an entire season’s worth of story lines in three episodes, moving so hastily that basic character development feels rushed, leapfrogging the important moments in between. A good soap is a long, slow burn and is not the place to be cutting corners.
Ironically, before becoming a bestselling book series, the project was presented as a television series by the same production company that helms GG and THE VAMPIRE DIARIES — a “DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES for teens.” It’s unclear whether this is still the intent of PRETTY LITTLE LIARS, which has assembled a stable of decent actors (including the always exceptional Laura Leighton as the mother of a teen shoplifter) and a promising premise (better shows have been made from slimmer setups), but has mishandled them. My suggestion: catch some reruns.
WEEDS First Look: The Botwin Clan are Born to Run!
Wondering how the Botwin clan plans to deal with the fallout from last season’s shocking WEEDS finale that saw youngest son Shane club Pilar (the ex-wife of Nancy’s on-again-off-again Mexican Mayor/drug lord babydaddy!) in the head with a croquet mallet after she suggested that Nancy’s “extraneous” sons weren’t quite needed? In a word, run!
According to TV Guide Magazine’s William Keck, when the hit Showtime series returns for its sixth season on August 16, Nancy, Silas, Shane and Andy will be doing so in a Winnebago. “Nancy would never leave her family behind so we’re all on the run together. We pick up and move states. It’s cool to see this family outside of their world,” explained Hunter Parris, who plays Nancy’s eldest child Silas. “We’ve only had one consistent set in the nine out of thirteen episodes we’ve shot so far, we’re filming on location a lot.” And here with a sneak peak of a few of those locations, including a hotel lobby, kitchen, and convenience store is theTVaddict.com. More first look photos of which can be found after the jump.
TV Ratings: Wednesday June 30, 2010 (America’s Got Talent, and Viewers)
Time | Network | Show | Viewers | 18-49 |
---|---|---|---|---|
8PM | NBC | America’s Got Talent (R) | 6.46 | 1.5/4 |
FOX | So You Think You Can Dance | 5.68 | 2.1/8 | |
ABC | The Middle (R) | 4.07 | 0.9/4 | |
CBS | How I Met Your Mother (R) | 3.59 | 1.1/4 | |
CW | America’s Next Top Model (R) | 1.09 | 0.4/2 | |
8:30PM | ABC | The Middle (R) | 3.89 | 1.0/4 |
CBS | Rules of Engagement (R) | 3.64 | 1.2/4 | |
9PM | NBC | America’s Got Talent | 12.37 | 3.3/11 |
FOX | So You Think You Can Dance | 5.88 | 2.2/7 | |
CBS | Criminal Minds (R) | 5.81 | 1.3/4 | |
ABC | Modern Family (R) | 3.92 | 1.3/4 | |
CW | America’s Next Top Model (R) | 809,000 | 0.4/1 | |
9:30PM | ABC | Cougar Town (R) | 2.98 | 0.9/3 |
10PM | NBC | Law & Order: SVU (R) | 6.10 | 1.8/6 |
CBS | CSI: NY (R) | 5.87 | 1.1/3 | |
ABC | Castle (R) | 3.30 | 0.7/2 |
Must Read TV: THE OFFICE, PRETTY LITTLE LIARS, BEING HUMAN & More!
• From the department of didn’t we already know this, Steve Carell confirms that next season will definitely be his last on THE OFFICE.
• ABC Family loves liars, especially pretty little ones! Orders 12 more episodes of their hit summer series.
• Kings breakout, with A&E picking up the series after FOX passes.
• From SMALLVILLE to Syfy, Sam Witwer signs onto the U.S. remake of the U.K. supernatural dramedy BEING HUMAN.
• Third time’s the charm? FOX gives Christian Slater’s BREAKING IN a new lease on life.
• Casting Couch: Cheyenne Jackson signs onto the upcoming eighth season of CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM.
Review: HUGE
Is the casting of “real” people reason enough to endorse a show?
That’s the question we find ourselves struggling with as we sit down to compose our thoughts on HUGE, a new series premiering tonight at 9PM on ABC Family.
On the one hand, HUGE should be applauded. The series, which follows the lives of seven teens and the staff at a weight loss camp is unequivocally unlike anything that we’ve ever see on television before. Which, in an era that has primetime populated with a vast array of stick figures (see: Courteney Cox, Rose Byrne, the cast of GOSSIP GIRL, among others) that make the very normal and beautiful looking Sarah Rue — formerly of LESS THAN PERFECT fame find herself labelled, well, less than perfect. It is a breath of fresh air to see a show starring people look more or less like you and me… you know, the people actually watching TV!
TV Ratings: Sunday June 27, 2010 (And the Winner Is…. the 37th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards)
Time | Network | Show | Viewers | 18-49 |
---|---|---|---|---|
8PM | NBC | Dateline | 5.11 | 1.0/4 |
CBS | I Get That A Lot (R) | 4.75 | 1.1/4 | |
ABC | Extreme Makeover: HE (R) | 4.62 | 1.2/4 | |
FOX | The Simpsons (R) | 3.86 | 1.7/6 | |
8:30PM | FOX | Cleveland Show (R) | 3.49 | 1.6/5 |
9PM | CBS | 37th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards | 5.81 | 1.2/3 |
NBC | Law & Order: CI (R) | 4.92 | 1.1/3 | |
FOX | Family Guy (R) | 4.43 | 2.2/6 | |
ABC | Scoundrels | 3.74 | 1.1/3 | |
9:30PM | FOX | American Dad! (R) | 3.83 | 1.9/5 |
10PM | CBS | 37th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards | 5.51 | 1.0/3 |
NBC | Law & Order: CI (R) | 4.91 | 1.2/3 | |
ABC | The Gates | 3.31 | 1.1/3 |