Shows You Should Be Watching
Honest reviews. Zero hype.
Babylon 5 is the one space station television ever built that behaved like an actual city: a neutral port where ambassadors scheme in corridors, dock workers strike, and a bartender pours whiskey for everyone about to make a terrible decision.…
A room full of Canadian kids, a writers’ room that later ran half of American television comedy, and one rule that outlived the show itself: when a kid in a vest says “I don’t know” while the green slime descends,…
The WB’s answer to Married… with Children was to add a narrator who openly despises the family, rewrites their scenes mid episode, and dates the daughter. Unhappily Ever After took Ron Leavitt’s instinct that a sitcom family could be cruel…
Tim Taylor hosts a home improvement show called Tool Time, grunts at anyone who disagrees with him, and invents power tools that violate three building codes at a time. Tim Allen built the character from stand up timing: the alpha…
Don Johnson spends the late nineties as a San Francisco inspector whose real calling is restoring classic cars he cannot afford, playing each case the way he plays the garage: loose, smirking, jazz where the script asks for sheet music.…
A former Navy SEAL turned estate security man on Oahu, driving a Ferrari he does not own, taking cases the resort needs solved while Higgins clocks his hours. The 2018 reboot understands that the original was a character piece pretending…
John Kricfalusi took the buddy cartoon, deleted the plot, and filled the space with faces: the gross up close of Stimpy’s tongue on a honeycomb, the sweat, the snot, the veins. The Ren and Stimpy Show is the reason nineties…
What begins as the true story of a Missouri boy whose best friend Ken gets shot by the boy’s own father becomes, in one of the great cold opens in sitcom history, the story of a family that simply decides…
Jay Sherman reviews movies on a local Boston television show watched by almost nobody, hates nearly everything, and does it brilliantly. Simpsons alumni Al Jean and Mike Reiss built the sharpest Hollywood satire of the decade around Jon Lovitz’s nasal…
Four mutant turtles, a rat sensei, a pizza fixation, and a theme song that infected a generation. The 1987 series took Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s indie comic, ran it through the kid friendly filter of the decade, and became…