television

John Podhoretz on the creaky, predictable return of the ’90s sitcom ‘Murphy Brown.’

The media exec never denied saying that Trump was good for business.

Robin Leach, 1941-2018.

Royals or celebrities have never been a draw for me, and you would not find me on the streets of Windsor or on Hollywood’s red carpets among the fawning crowds, gasping for breath at the sight of lavish jewels, couture gowns, and perfect bodies.

Sarah Silverman found a new edge: niceness.

Noir series now on Netflix vividly captures the contradictions and dynamism of the Weimar era.

The European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the organization that licenses EU television broadcasts and hosts the annual Eurovision Song Contest, has terminated its contract with a Chinese broadcasting company. The company, Mango TV, cut one of the songs from the contest’s broadcast—the gay-themed…

And would the disgraced host pad around in a bathrobe interviewing his subjects?

The darkest show on TV—Netflix’s tech-dystopian ‘Black Mirror’—is itself a sign of hope for a human future.

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, Jonathan V. Last, Rachael Larimore, and Jim Swift discuss why America fell hard for 16-seed UMBC and Sister Jean's Loyola Ramblers and whether this was the best March Madness ever.

It shouldn't take the popularity of Jordan Peterson or the presidency of Donald Trump to tell us masculinity has been in a bad place. Better evidence abounds. Look no further than long term demographic decline concurrent with the culturally ascendent denial of gender differences. Or consider the…

The Facebook Apology Tour. Earlier this morning I joined our managing editor Christine Rosen on the Daily Standard Podcast to discuss the Zuckerberg walk of shame. Do have a listen! Some supplementary reading: Nick Gillespie at Reason makes the same point I do about regulating FB, and over at the…

Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, Sonny Bunch discusses his cover story on the end of the golden age of television with host Charlie Sykes and Books & Arts editor Adam Keiper.

It's been a while since we talked; have you caught up yet? The second season of Jessica Jones was bonkers; did you manage to make it through The Punisher and The Defenders? What about the new season of Black Mirror—that one episode where they warned against the dangers of technology outpacing our…

Before there was MERYL STREEP! there was Meryl Streep: a sensitive, subtle actor who gave terrific performances in movies like Sophie’s Choice, A Cry in the Dark, and the Bridges of Madison County. But some time around the turn of the century, it became impossible to see her name in anything but…

Back in the 1990s, when I was a student at Cambridge, I met Queen Elizabeth’s sister, Princess Margaret. A party had been arranged in her honor by the historian J. H. Plumb. There was jazz and dancing; the champagne flowed. Her Royal Highness drifted around, making excruciatingly banal conversation…

The second season of the Netflix show The Crown, released on December 8, is compellingly watchable television, a luscious treat for any recovering Downton Abbey addict or sedulous follower of the British royal family. The series is also an intelligent consideration of some crucial years of…

The second season of the Netflix show The Crown, released on December 8, is compellingly watchable television, a luscious treat for any recovering Downton Abbey addict or sedulous follower of the British royal family. The series is also an intelligent consideration of some crucial years of…

A beautiful simplicity seems to unfold when Ronnie O’Sullivan constructs a century break, potting 100 points’ worth of balls on a single visit to a snooker table. No one ever described snooker as an easy game, but when O’Sullivan begins to flow, he makes each moment look natural. Obvious, almost.…

Prep football playoffs have begun in many states and are about to kick off in Texas, home of the Dillon Panthers of Friday Night Lights renown and center of high-school football culture. The crazed Texas playoff system invites countless schools to gargantuan sets of brackets that produce 12 state…

When the series Enterprise went off the air in 2005, the consensus was that the whole Star Trek enterprise (so to speak) was exhausted: The show’s ratings were too low to keep it on the air and the franchise’s two most recent movies were critical stinkers that fared poorly at the box office.

The first season of the Netflix show Stranger Things, released last year, immediately plunged its protagonists into danger. In the first episode we see 12-year-old Will Byers, one of a quartet of Dungeons & Dragons-playing nerds, waylaid by a dark shape on his way home along the wooded back roads…

What happened to ESPN?

Charlize Theron first appears onscreen in her mostly terrific new action thriller, Atomic Blonde, trying to heal her wounded body in an ice bath. She has bruises all over her back. Her face is swollen, one of her eyes blackened. She pulls herself out of the tub, dresses laboriously, and limps into…

A federal extortion trial in Boston last week showed that Teamsters members haven’t lost their knack for cooking up trouble. It all began in June 2014, when the reality TV kitchen competition Top Chef visited the city to film. Let’s just say things got a little hot in Beantown, and we’re not…

The trailer for the new adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express is just weird. For one thing, Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot, trim and blond, looks very little like Christie’s rotund, black-haired sleuth. He overdoes the mustache, adorning his face with an enormous, Chester Alan…

"First Black Bachelorette shines in debut, but is America ready for interracial love?" When NBC executives tweeted that question last week, what exactly did they expect the answer to be? Were they hoping for some racial unrest to boost their primetime ratings? Have they noticed Kanye West and Kim…

Politico reports that funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be eliminated in the Trump administration's proposed budget:

No story illustrates so succinctly the mainstream media's dive deep into the tank for Hillary Clinton than the year-long Easter Egg hunt for supposed outtakes from The Apprentice that would sink the presidential candidacy of its 11-year host, Donald Trump.

Some endnotes and digressions from the latest episode of the Weekly Substandard podcast:

The next big new thing is here—Black Mirror—and you have to watch it now. The British television series, created by Charlie Booker, has recently begun its third season on Netflix and it deserves our limited attention spans. Why? Because Black Mirror theorizes the consequences of future technology…

In 1965, Michael Novak was a young academic living in Los Angeles when Stanford University hired him for a teaching position. He was a Dodgers fan, and as he wrote in his fine book, The Joy of Sports (1976), he moved his young family to Palo Alto only to discover that he couldn't tune in the…

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat last week wrote an extremely controversial column about a topic that wouldn't seem so controversial on the face of it: late-night comedians. The peg was Donald Trump's recent appearance on The Tonight Show. Host Jimmy Fallon had a good-natured chat with the man…

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat last week wrote an extremely controversial column about a topic that wouldn’t seem so controversial on the face of it: late-night comedians. The peg was Donald Trump's recent appearance on The Tonight Show. Host Jimmy Fallon had a good-natured chat with the man…

Aboard her nifty new plane, Hillary Clinton took tough questions from the media on Thursday—about what TV shows she likes.

Sir Antony Jay has died at age 86. Jay is best known as the co-writer, along with Jonathan Lynn, of the beloved television shows Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. To be honest, I knew next to nothing about Jay's life prior to his death, and to remedy that I recommend the Telegraph's fine…

Donald Trump's first television ad of the general election, released Friday, hits Hillary Clinton for her stance on border security and immigration.

John McLaughlin was a Jesuit priest, unsuccessful Senate candidate in Rhode Island, and White House aide to Richard Nixon. But he won't be remembered for any of that because he did something a lot bigger. He changed TV political commentary and made it faster, funnier, and far more watchable—in…

At a time of historical distrust in the nation's capital, it should come as a bit of comic relief to a faithless public that we can't even believe in Fourth of July fireworks anymore.

The cathartic and palliative HBO political satire Veep has been a weekly spoonful of Mylanta to soothe our stomachs this emetic election year. The show's recently concluded fifth season chronicles the browbeating Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), the titular former vice-president, laboring to…

Deutschland 83, a hit German television show, available on Sundance Channel, has been lauded for its authentic evocation of early-1980s Cold War-gripped Europe. That much is true, but as far as the nonaesthetic elements of the series go, it is derivative, hackneyed, and predictable. When, several…

The New York Times has a lengthy report about what's going on at The Late Show on CBS since Stephen Colbert took over for David Letterman nearly a year ago. The Times's write-up bends over backwards to put a brave face on it, but Colbert's show thus far has been a pretty big failure. CBS just hired…

The star of the hit political comedy Veep said Tuesday night that the wacky events depicted in her show are not all that far removed from reality.

In case you haven't seen it, there is a new television show out there more terrifying than anything that has ever made it to TV before (yes, even more than Thursday night's GOP debate). It is a horror-fest beyond imagining, brought to fruition by perhaps the most twisted mind in Hollywood, with a…

My combined roles as television couch potato and language snob have not been easy on me. What I most watch on television is sports and news, with a fair amount of DVDs, these chiefly of English detective stories. Much of this television watching is done in the evening, when, as they say about…

"Finally, somebody whiter than us!" So must have cheered the brain trust at Saturday Night Live last week, after the uproar about the conspicuously monochromatic nature of this year's Oscar nominees. NBC's late night comedy staple produced a sketch about the kerfuffle, which is actually not…

On Sunday night, The X-Files returned to television.

The Donald Trump and John Kasich campaigns are out with their debut television ads. Ted Cruz's affiliated Super PACs, meanwhile, are out with some big ad buys themselves, which attack Marco Rubio.

In many ways, the current TV scene resembles a time warp. From The Muppets to Fargo, it's a good season for nostalgia. As the first ads for a miniseries revival of The X-Files begin to air, production is well underway on another '90s cult classic: Twin Peaks. Of course, the sudden spate of remakes,…

Are you watching Scream Queens? Me neither. But I did catch a scene of the FOX slasher-comedy and was surprised to see that my father, Justice Antonin Scalia, made a cameo appearance. Sort of.

This past week I decided to change living arrangements chez Epstein. I turned my office into a den and our spare bedroom into an office. Sounds simple enough. I soon realized that I would have to hire professional movers to lug a couch, a weighty television set, and several bookcases and a few file…

Matthew Continetti, writing at the Washington Free Beacon:

Instead of disparaging all popular culture as a “vast wasteland” of cultural and moral decay, conservative critics should tease out those elements that reinforce conservative values in the arts. Russell Kirk used to lament the falling-off in depictions of normative behavior; but whereas Kirk…

Today, Claudia Rosett goes over the timeline following the Benghazi attacks and points to one of the enduring mysteries: Where was the President while the attack was happening?:

There is a venerable tradition of conservative books on Hollywood’s pervasive liberalism. 

The War for Late Night

On January 18, MTV premiered “Skins,” an egregiously semi-pornographic television show featuring underage kids engaging in drug deals, sex, and sex talk of every sort, while consistently outsmarting their enraged and clueless parents. The reaction on the right has been predictable: Parents…

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

One of the more preposterous institutions in Washington—in a city with an abundance of them—is the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, awarded since 1998 by the same people who invented the Kennedy Center Honors. I have no idea who or what committee of the board at the John F. Kennedy Center for…

Ever since then-CNN president Jon Klein declared himself “firmly in the Jon Stewart camp” after the comedian's bombastic appearance on Crossfire in 2004, something like an anti-cult has formed around that very camp—including as it does The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and the many books and…