Now That's Entertainment

Television has undergone something of a rennaissance, by comparison to the quality of movies. The Sopranoa, Mad Men, Weeds, 24, Six Feet Under and the like are imaginative, finely observed and compelling in a way that Will Farrell movies and endless superhero, comicbook reworkings are not.

If you reading nothing else this weekend check out James Woolcott's commentary on the topic over on the Vanity Fair website.

Looking forward to seeing:

"In AMC’s disturbingly funny and darkly absurdist Breaking Bad, Bryan Cranston, the wacky dad in Malcolm in the Middle, is Walter White, a chemistry teacher with cancer who turns to meth production in order to provide for his family after his approaching death, racing the clock against his own inner rot. He’s an Arthur Miller Everyman transplanted into a sunstruck no-man’s-land in a show that whips along with the laconic fury of Alex Cox’s Repo Man."

and:

"And although I haven’t screened it yet, Shirley MacLaine is starring in a Lifetime cable biopic about Coco Chanel this September that has to be scary-good. The publicity stills alone of an imperious MacLaine in hat, pearls, and gorgon stare were enough to knock birds out of the sky."

I have to say, in closing, that the reemergence of game shows like Who Wants to be a Millionaire and Wheel of Fortune and the unscripted dirge of New Zealand's Got Talent…serves to remind that it's just TV and no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the average mook stuck in front of the box.

For a British counterpoint you can't go past Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe review of 07







Right then, as you were.