Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Fri, 26 Sep 2008 02:11:18 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Brendan Bernhard :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/Brendan+Bernhard istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/i-am-man-hear-me-out/86368/ Tue, 23 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST It's not often I find myself pondering the duration of an episode of a television series, and whether or not it's the correct length, but the 30-minute doses in which the story of Showtime's "Californication" are doled out have always struck me as being just right. With only half an hour to move the narrative along, scenes are generally kept on a tight leash and points are made quickly. There are no dead spots or meandering passages. Instead, each episode is crammed with quips, confrontations... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/house-the-doctor-will-scold-you-now/85872/ Tue, 16 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST So Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie) is back for a fifth season of "House," limp and Vicodin addiction intact, relationship with Dr. James Wilson (Robert Sean Leonard), the Watson to his Holmes, very much on the ropes. Last season's finale, in which a drunken House inadvertently played a role in the death of Wilson's girlfriend, Amber, left fans of one of the best and most popular shows on television scratching their heads as to how the two men could possibly reconcile. If you thought House might... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/hbos-true-blood-love-bites/85218/ Fri, 5 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST If you're going to make a television show about vampires, it had better be very scary or a hell of a lot of fun. "True Blood," the new HBO series helmed by Alan Ball, who created HBO's "Six Feet Under" and won an Oscar for his screenplay to "American Beauty," certainly has its chilling moments, but its primary goal is unabashed entertainment, and in that it succeeds fabulously. If you want to see vampires treated in a self-consciously "arty" fashion, there's always "New Amsterdam" on Fox. Good... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/sons-of-anarchy-mob-mentality/84970/ Tue, 2 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Think of the new FX series, "Sons of Anarchy," as a kind of Mafia on Motorbikes — which does sound better than "The Sopranos on Skates." The creation of writer Kurt Sutter, a veteran of FX's pulse-pounding police drama "The Shield," and with a pilot episode directed by "Sopranos" alumnus Allen Coulter, "Sons of Anarchy" plunges us into the world of an outlaw biker club in the town of Charming (pop. 17,000), near Oakland, Calif. Despite running guns, blowing things up, and killing people, the... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/gavin-stacey-love-and-lust-in-an-english-manner/84568/ Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST "Gavin & Stacey," the new, sitcom-ish series that makes its premiere tonight on BBC America, has been enjoying some advance buzz because, like "The Office" before it, NBC has picked it up for an American makeover. Don't expect a program of the caliber of the BBC's "The Office," however, let alone an actor as immediately compelling as Ricky Gervais, who created it. But "Gavin & Stacey" — a cult hit in Britain and a surprise winner of two prestigious BAFTA awards — does grow on you, particularly... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/nbcs-life-chuck-its-all-in-your-head/86633/ Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Fans of quirky police procedurals will welcome the return on Monday of NBC's "Life," starring the nifty British actor Damian Lewis as Charlie Crews, the Los Angeles detective with a love for exotic fruit, an oddly caressing voice, a fiery sunburst of clipped ginger hair, an eerily unpredictable smile, and a taste for Zen philosophy developed during a lengthy stint in jail for a crime he did not commit. Flush with a $15 million settlement, Crews is a two-track detective: There's whatever case... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/television-is-back-on-track/85967/ Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST While programming for the spring 2008 television season was full of delays and changes due to the writer's strike, this fall's crop of new series is arriving on time. Two of the best new shows — "Fringe" and "True Blood" — are already underway, but there is plenty more to come. Quite a number of shows are either imports or adaptations of programs that first saw the dim light of evening abroad. But don't worry: They're still not as good as our homegrown versions. One import may be a cult hit... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/fringe-jj-abrams-goes-far-out/85403/ Tue, 9 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST It's better than "Alias" and less confusing than the aptly named "Lost." With "Fringe," a new series making its premiere tonight at 8 p.m. on Fox with an ambitious $10 million, 95-minute pilot, the outrageously prolific writer-director-producer J.J. Abrams has created a compelling "X-Files"-style whodunit in which both the who and whatever they've done are seemingly beyond comprehension. The title refers not to cute Beatles-era haircuts but to the far verges of science — teleportation, mind... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/clowns-and-stars-at-the-five-ring-circus/83633/ Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST "Fatigue makes cowards of us all," Vince Lombardi once said, and the mere thought of having to watch Bob Costas's Bambi eyes grow ever larger in his enthusiastically fact-crammed skull for two weeks straight had pretty much left me limp and exhausted, afraid even to turn on the TV before "The Games of the XXIX Olympiad" (otherwise known as "the 2008 Olympics") had begun. But television critics are made of sterner stuff than (for example) florists, so I dutifully raised my carcass from the couch... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-world-operating-in-the-red/83157/ Tue, 5 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST "At night Chinamen jump / on Asia with a thump," the poet Frank O'Hara wrote in the early 1950s, and continued, "while in our willful way / we, in secret, play / affectionate games / and bruise our knees / like China's shoes." For a wacky avant-garde poem more than half a century old, that's not a bad summation of "China Inside Out: Bob Woodruff Reports," ABC's thoroughly prosaic, factual, and sober documentary, which airs tomorrow at 10 p.m., just two days before the start of the Olympics in... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/mccain-and-obama-court-the-television-vote/82768/ Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST When Senator Obama stepped away from the podium after delivering an extraordinarily poised speech before 200,000 people in Berlin on Thursday, the airy idealism of his oratory, along with the luminous beauty of the scene and the princely demeanor of the man himself, was enough to lead the ordinary viewer to wonder if he might be watching a virtual reality game in which an avatar goes to Europe as a presidential candidate, draws an enormous crowd, and dissolves decades of anti-American sentiment... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/elite-athletes-how-the-best-beat-the-rest/82610/ Fri, 25 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST With "the Games of the XXIX Olympiad" (as Bob Costas would say) looming ever larger on the horizon, a new documentary, "Elite Athletes," provides a welcome measure of insight into what it takes to become the kind of athletic powerhouse soon to cavort 'neath Beijing's temporarily de-polluted skies. The documentary makes its premiere on Friday at 8 p.m. on the cable channel Treasure HD and over the Internet (on which much of the Olympics will be shown, so you may as well get used to it), at... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/mad-men-return-after-a-five-martini-lunch/82351/ Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST The new season of AMC's "Mad Men," which makes its premiere at 10 p.m. on Sunday, comes with a special request that critics not give away the "pivotal storyline moments" in the first two episodes, and allow the audience to discover them for themselves. That's presuming they can find them, of course. One of the retro charms of the first season of "Mad Men" was that it moved at the stately pace of someone returning to work from a five-martini lunch, and that continues to be the case this year, as... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/heidi-fleiss-dreams-of-a-brothel/82139/ Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST From "b----es to birds" — that would be the crude but accurate summation of Heidi Fleiss's journey from being Hollywood's "Madam to the Stars" to a reclusive collector of macaws, African gray parrots, cockatoos, and other brilliantly plumed creatures in the arid scrubland of Nevada. Furthermore, the words are her own. If Nick Broomfield's 1995 BBC documentary, "Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam," memorably exposed Hollywood's putrid underbelly, then the new HBO documentary "Heidi Fleiss: The... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-cleaner-invokes-a-higher-power/81864/ Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Who says the sun always shines in Los Angeles? In "The Cleaner," a new series on A&E beginning Tuesday at 10 p.m., the streets are wet, the neighborhoods downscale, and the prevailing atmosphere more reminiscent of the cold junkie dawns of a William Burroughs novel than the glossy, bright-eyed metropolis usually depicted in television shows set in Los Angeles not named "The Shield." The subject matter of "The Cleaner" is grim: addiction. Not just to drugs or alcohol, but to sex, gambling, and... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/generation-kill-introducing-the-latest-generation/81653/ Fri, 11 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST You may not be interested in war, but HBO is interested in you. "Generation Kill," an ambitious seven-part miniseries beginning Sunday at 9 p.m., rubs the viewer's face smack into the first weeks of the invasion of Iraq. The series re-enacts the journey of a colorfully foul-mouthed group of Marines in under-armored Humvees as they push through the desert toward Baghdad, meeting sporadic resistance and occasional smiles from the locals along the way. "Salaam aleikum, vote Republican," Sgt. Brad... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/burn-notice-firearms-and-foreplay/81380/ Tue, 8 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Matthew Weiner, the creator of AMC's "Mad Men," may have been last summer's most critically acclaimed television auteur, but it was another Matthew, 36-year-old Matt Nix, who came up with the summer's biggest and most neatly conceived new cable show. If nothing else, his USA series, "Burn Notice," lit a fuse to "Mad Men" in terms of viewership: 2.9 million Americans tuned in to it weekly, compared with the 900,000 who made it over to AMC to catch up with "Mad Men" and its painstaking... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/obama-ties-comedians-tongues-soccer-takes/80985/ Tue, 1 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST There was an interesting, possibly pivotal moment on "The Daily Show" last week when Jon Stewart, in the midst of poking gentle fun at Senator Obama for his faux-presidential seal and his decision to opt out of the public finance system in the general election, reminded his studio audience that they were "allowed to laugh at" the man compared in this week's edition of New York magazine to "Lincoln, Gandhi, Cicero, Jesus, and all our most cherished national acronyms (MLK, JFK, RFK, FDR)." Mr... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/take-the-money-and-make-more/80521/ Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST The rich are different from us; they have worse taste. Well, the "super rich" do, at any rate, and they are the subject of CNBC's welcome documentary (though it should really be a series), airing Thursday at 10 p.m., "Untold Wealth: The Rise of the Super Rich." There is a scene in which a 43-year-old hedge fund executive named Anthony Scaramucci is seen rising at dawn in his Long Island mansion, frighteningly awake and ready to do battle in the canyons of downtown Manhattan. Before you know it... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/weeds-growing-out-of-control/80109/ Tue, 17 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST For three years, Showtime's "Weeds," which kicked off its fourth season last night, has tried, sometimes successfully, to be funny and subversive in a deadpan, hipster way. But at last it has grown weary of trying to impress what's left of the bourgeoisie, and now it is attempting to be evil in a deadpan, hipster way. It's as if Jenji Kohan, the show's creator, were performing an experiment on America's high-end cable audience: "How vicious and sick can I make this series and still win... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/call-girl-dresses-down-the-world-of-prostitution/79916/ Fri, 13 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Blame it on Showtime's delay in getting "Californication," its raunchy hit from last summer, back on screen as soon as possible for a second season. To plug the gap, and provide a second place-setting alongside the return of "Weeds," HBO's rival has imported an eight-part British show with the super-subtle title "Secret Diary of a Call Girl." Wonder what that's about. Billie Piper, the 25-year-old pop star (she's charted three no. 1 singles in Britain) and actress ("The Canterbury Tales,"... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/models-of-inconsistency-tv-lands-shes-got-the-look/79615/ Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Gore Vidal was once questioned as to whether his first sexual experience had been with a male or a female. "I was too polite to ask," he replied. I was reminded of this bit of drollery, for reasons which will become apparent, during the first episode of TV Land's "She's Got the Look" (the second episode airs tomorrow at 10 p.m.), a somewhat staid but not entirely uninteresting six-part reality series in which 10 women over the age of 35 compete for a modeling contract with the renowned... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/this-isnt-mr-rogers-neighborhood/79126/ Tue, 3 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Those were the days. (Were they really the days?) Yes, they were, at least according to the pilot episode of CBS's enjoyably swinging new series "Swingtown," which takes us back to the summer of 1976, when Quaaludes, martinis, health shakes, cigarettes, open marriages, jogging, orgies, and un-self-conscious patriotism all blended into a hedonistic swirl. This, after all, was the decade when Jimmy Carter confessed to having "lust in [his] heart" to Playboy magazine, so why shouldn't everyone... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-bumpy-road-to-reconciliation-on-the-sundance/79129/ Tue, 3 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST 'On the Road in America," a 12-part series about four young Arabs visiting America, makes its premiere tomorrow night at 9 p.m. on the Sundance Channel. The creation of Jerome Gary, a producer of the 1977 documentary "Pumping Iron," it has already been shown on the Saudi-owned television channel MBC, drawing millions of viewers in the Middle East. At the start of the program, one of the hundreds of young Arabs considered for the show states his belief that "There no longer is a country that... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/in-plain-sight-a-professional-protector-who/78917/ Fri, 30 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Mary Shannon (Mary McCormack), the heroine of "In Plain Sight," a new series on USA making its debut at 10 p.m. Sunday, is a U.S. Marshal in the most secretive and dangerous branch of the federal witness protection program. She's also one tough broad. She has a handsome, bronzed lover, Raphael (Cristiαn de la Fuente), but he's the one who yearns for emotional connection, while she's all wham-bam-thank-you-man, zipping up her jeans and donning her leather jacket and shades without bothering to... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/reconsiderations-the-fiction-of-george-orwell/78703/ Wed, 28 May 2008 00:00:00 EST The reputation of George Orwell the novelist — as opposed to George Orwell the journalist, essayist, and author of such classic works of long-form nonfiction as "Down and Out in Paris and London" and "Homage to Catalonia" — rests almost entirely on two books, "Animal Farm" (1945) and "1984" (1949). One can argue with the fairness of this judgment, and for the continued relevance of the novels that preceded them — particularly the anti-colonial "Burmese Days" (1934) and the Gissing-esque... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-prison-chaplains-death-row-choice/78609/ Tue, 27 May 2008 00:00:00 EST 'At the Death House Door," which premieres Thursday at 9 p.m. on IFC, is a somber, moving, and slightly manipulative examination of the Texas death penalty system. It is also a riveting character study of Pastor Carroll Pickett, a sturdily built, white-haired man who, as a prison chaplain, reluctantly, stoically, and at times even heroically presided over 95 executions at the "Walls" prison in Huntsville, Texas, until he could stomach no more and quit after 13 years' service in 1995. Mr... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/whos-counting/77323/ Fri, 23 May 2008 00:00:00 EST "What's his motivation?" That's the Hollywood mantra for analyzing a character when a film is still in the larval stage and hasn't yet cost anyone a fortune: What does he or she want? It's hard to conceive of a film in which more principal characters have clearer motivations than in "Recount," Jay Roach's smooth, if bland, choreographed account of the fevered five weeks in late 2000 when the country waited to learn whether George Bush or Al Gore would be declared President of the United States... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/men-will-be-men/76701/ Tue, 20 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Tim Vine, one of the three stars of "Not Going Out," the new BBC America sitcom beginning tonight at 8:40 p.m., holds the Guinness World Record for telling the most jokes (499) in one hour. Yet here he plays the straight man (Tim) to fellow comedian Lee Mack (Lee), a verbally hyperkinetic wisecracker who sounds as if he could tell at least as many jokes in half the time. This is a pretty good sign for a sitcom, even a fairly conventional one about a group of 30-somethings who float on a vague... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/who-do-we-think-we-are/76335/ Tue, 13 May 2008 00:00:00 EST How you react to "Molotov Alva and His Search for the Creator: A Second Life Odyssey," a half-hour documentary airing Thursday on HBO, Cinemax, YouTube, iTunes, and possibly on the soles of your sneakers, is likely to depend on your familiarity with online gaming, virtual reality, and other high-tech ways of dribbling away your time. For the uninitiated, Second Life, the subject of this documentary, is an online community in which people can live a virtual existence either as themselves or as... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/visions-of-debasement/76161/ Fri, 9 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Even the most skillful actors occasionally find themselves saddled with roles they can't make sense of. This is Catherine Keener's misfortune in "An American Crime," a dramatization of a horrific act of communal sadism that took place in Indiana in 1965, culminating with the death of a teenage girl. As Gertrude Baniszewski, the chain-smoking, drug-addicted single mother of seven who acted as the ringleader, Ms. Keener does her best to humanize a woman who behaved monstrously without losing... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/how-sweet-the-sound/75903/ Tue, 6 May 2008 00:00:00 EST In the 1940s, the great American novelist and composer Paul Bowles remarked that, all in all, the modern world was so rife with irritating noises that the thought of losing one's hearing was not entirely without appeal. But Irene Taylor Brodsky prefaces "Hear and Now," her superb new documentary about the decision of her deaf parents, Paul and Sally Taylor, to undergo cochlear implant surgery at age 65, with a well-known epigraph from Helen Keller to the effect that being deaf is worse than... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/happiness-is-a-steel-bun/75494/ Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Thou shalt pound treadmills, pump iron, and worship the gods Ab, Pec, and Quad. Thou shalt submit to the caliper and the scale. Thou shalt throw out the junk food and bow down to the Salad. Thou shalt be thin, thou shalt be defined, and thou shalt be fabulous. Thou shalt also probably be "hetero-flexible." Thou shalt not be hung up. All this I have gleaned from the first two episodes of the third season of "Work Out," whose third episode airs tonight on Bravo. "Work Out," it should be stated at... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/real-men-real-danger-real-reality/75112/ Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Captain Sig Hansen, taking a break from the rigors of the Bering Sea, dropped in on "The Martha Stewart Show" on Friday to discuss Alaskan king crab, being an industrial fisherman, and, of course, "Deadliest Catch," the hit reality series on the Discovery Channel on which Mr. Hansen is one of the stars. With him was his little brother, Edgar Hansen, and Ms. Stewart asked the latter what he absolutely had to have with him onboard before setting sail for another perilous season of crab fishing... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/sending-a-get-well-card-to-ourselves/74702/ Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST "Sick Around the World," the title of a new Frontline documentary airing tonight on PBS, is arguably a misnomer. Voyaging to five different countries — Britain, Germany, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Japan — the veteran Washington Post foreign correspondent T.R. Reid discovers that under various forms of nationalized health care, those fortunate enough never to deal with an HMO are practically drowning in wellness. This is an election year, and as interest in the war in Iraq wavers, the drive to... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/life-aglow-in-its-waning-moments/74348/ Tue, 8 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST A television critic inevitably spends a fair amount of time bemoaning what is on television. My mother, especially after illness made it increasingly hard for her to read novels, was a reminder of the immense gift television can be. She had friends, visitors, and telephone calls, but there was also a continuous visual (she was a painter) and informational thirst that only television could assuage. "I don't know what I'd do without television," was a sentence I often heard her utter. When I... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/have-we-overcome/73980/ Tue, 1 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST If you're going to make liberal use of a voice-over narration, it helps not to have a voice that makes people want to leave the room. Soledad O'Brien, who narrates a new CNN documentary on Martin Luther King Jr., airing Thursday, "Eyewitness to Murder: The King Assassination," has a delivery that is by turns tone-deaf, hectoring, and steeped in clichιd TV-reporter emphases and intonations. Her task is to recount the events that led up to the death of Rev. King — 40 years ago this Friday — whom... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/if-you-cant-con-them-join-them/73093/ Tue, 18 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST "As a general rule, nobody has money who ought to have it," the British statesman Benjamin Disraeli once said. That would make a good epigraph for "The Riches," which begins its second season tonight on FX. When it first appeared a little more than a year ago, "The Riches" was one of the more promising series on television — at least for a handful of episodes. First of all, there was the subject matter, which concerned a family of Irish Travelers, or gypsies, named the Molloys, who half-conned... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/two-strangers-stage-a-sister-act/72703/ Tue, 11 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Since "The Return of Jezebel James" is only a sitcom, how hard should the reviewer be on it? How critical the critic? After all, it's only a sitcom, and ripping it to shreds on the grounds of implausibility, strained jokes, overly broad comic acting, and a host of other faults is a bit like complaining that the frozen dinner you brought home from the supermarket last night was a little lacking in culinary subtlety. What did you expect? On the other hand, judged as a sitcom, "Jezebel," which... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/oldest-new-guy-in-new-york/72280/ Tue, 4 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST There are good ideas, and then there are good scripts. "New Amsterdam," a new series directed by Finland's Lasse Hallstrom that makes its premiere tonight on Fox, comes with a reasonably intriguing premise: John Amsterdam (the Danish actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), a Dutch-born (this is all very Nordic) New York homicide detective, has been living in Manhattan since 1642 because, like many people on television these days, he's … immortal! So please excuse him if he occasionally feels a little... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/not-exactly-a-walk-in-the-park/71878/ Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST Whatever your opinion of "The Gates," the mammoth saffron-colored environmental art exhibit mounted by the artists Christo and his wife Jean-Claude in Central Park in February 2005, there's no doubt that the documentary about the project, also called "The Gates," showing tonight on HBO, makes for fascinating viewing — at least for its first half hour. Christo originally proposed the project in 1979. Fortunately for us, the legendary documentary filmmakers Albert and David Maysles were on hand... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/celebrities-in-a-strange-land/71152/ Tue, 12 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST ANGERS, France — The euro waxes, the dollar wanes, yet when it comes to making democracy exciting, DollarLand beats EuroLand hands down. That much was demonstrated by the rapt curiosity about Super Tuesday and its aftermath shown by global news outlets such as BBC World, France 24, Al Jazeera English, Deutsche Welle, Sky News, and our very own CNN International — the American network only Americans abroad get to watch, though that doesn't mean you can avoid Wolf Blitzer. Predictably, the... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/lipsticks-on-the-wall/70747/ Tue, 5 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST As recently as the early 1990s, New York City was still considered a relatively dangerous place to live. Drug dealers abounded on every downtown corner, muttering, "Smo, smo, smo" ("Smoke"), from the shadows. There were, of course, a lot of vagabonds around, and squeegee men, and people who talked to themselves loudly on the street without the excuse that they were holding a cell phone. Even thugs who were apt to put a gun to your head when asking for money. Some of them went on to pull the... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/not-for-prophet-practice-of-law/70346/ Tue, 29 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST So what do you do when you discover George Michael singing "Faith" live in your living room while you're making love to your fiancιe? What happens when you hear bursts of organ music and choral singing when you're trying to do your job as a corporate lawyer in a skyscraper perched atop San Francisco? What's your next move if someone says you may be a prophet destined to perform good works rather than win high-profile legal cases? Such is the dilemma facing the title character (Jonny Lee Miller)... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/finding-life-where-we-wait-for-death/69505/ Tue, 15 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST "Andrew Jenks, Room 335," a moving and provocative new documentary showing on Cinemax tonight, begins as a whimsy when a 19-year-old decides to spend a month in an upscale assisted-living facility in Florida. But any hope that Mr. Jenks, the film's precocious director and star, will turn out to be a waxen-fleshed, computer-age decadent prematurely bidding adieu to life's bliss is quickly dashed. Tall, dark, relatively handsome, and sloppily dressed (shorts, sweatshirts, sneakers, etc.), Mr... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/this-is-your-child-on-drugs/69126/ Tue, 8 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST The latest edition of PBS's documentary series, "Frontline," arrives under the title "The Medicated Child," but the film, which airs tonight at 9 p.m., could just as easily have been called "The Foolish Adult." As is so often the case with this documentary series, its subject — the over-prescription of psychiatric medicine to children as young as 3 — is worthy and honorable and of more than passing interest. Yet the overall tone is so tediously neutral that it's enough, to quote Raymond... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/gender-wars-and-the-city/68835/ Thu, 3 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Over lunch in a fashionable restaurant near Union Square, a French friend told me that in life, or at least in social life, men come first, women second, and that is simply the natural order of things, even if it's not acceptable to say so in today's New York. Then she scrolled through her BlackBerry to see which literary legend had decided to text her during the five minutes since we'd sat down at our table. She was — is — young, successful, bi-continental, a go-getter, and definitely... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/put-downs-and-come-ons/68691/ Fri, 28 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST When it comes to television moments from the past year that stick in my mind, I can't decide whether to start with the sight of a cheetah chasing down a gazelle on PBS's "The Best of Nature" or a Mormon missionary chasing down a big-city pedestrian in another PBS documentary, "The Mormons." The pedestrian got off light by comparison (he lived), but both incidents made for riveting television. It must be something about chase scenes that don't involve Matt Damon driving on the wrong side of the... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/what-the-world-needs-now-is-better-news/68259/ Tue, 18 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST This is the time of year when it's traditional for critics to sum up "the year on television." Instead, I'm going to write about something I'd like to see on TV but rarely do, mainly because it can't be found in any program lineup, no matter how many satellite dishes you nail to the roof. What I have in mind is a news channel dedicated solely to the coverage of the powerful, the influential, and the stinking rich — a smart, vital, entertaining, investigative information pipeline that would... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/something-extra-for-the-holidays/68121/ Fri, 14 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST Clocking in at 80 minutes, the two-episode season finale of "Extras" ("Extras: The Extra Special Series Finale"), which will air Sunday on HBO, comes close to being a standalone movie. It's also a Christmas movie of sorts, with sentimental passages, a fleeting biblical reference or two ("No room at the inn…"), marquee names (Clive Owen, George Michael, Gordon Ramsay), and a self-loathing narcissist as its hero who gains a sneak peek at redemption at the end. The latter would of course be Andy...