TV Round Up
Roger Ebert, already sidelined by illness, and his co-host Richard Roeper are departing the At the Movies review show after failing to come to contract terms with its owner, Disney. Ebert had already been withholding rights to the trademarked “Two Thumbs Up” from them for several months. Disney has announced plans to replace Roeper and permanent fill-in Michael Phillips with two younger critics, Ben Lyons and Ben Mankiewicz. Lyons is a second generation critic; Mankiewicz descends from a storied clan of Hollywood writers. As they pursue a younger demographic, the suits at Disney are no doubt secretly thinking that the new guys will enthusiastically recommend all the crap blockbusters and ignore those stupid small and subtitled films that only cineastes care about. Critics have a way of growing into the job, though-as Roeper has over the years. He started as positively cringeworthy, but expanded his horizons, becoming especially loose and confident during Ebert’s convalescence. Phillips I’ve never warmed too, though. He’s a tougher critic than either Ebert or Roeper, who actually tend to support any halfway decent popcorn flick. Phillips’ higher bar would be a positive if only he backed up his headmasterish judgments with argument or example. Without having seen the new guys, I hold out hope that they’ll eventually disappoint the suits and do more than cheerlead for the publicity machine.
Roeper and Phillips, possibly in conjunction with Ebert, are shopping a new show to interested parties.
In police procedural news, Chris Noth is leaving Law and Order: Criminal Intent. This time he seems to be departing the L&O franchise voluntarily. Replacing him in the swapped-off lead role is Jeff Goldblum, who was very cool in the short-lived cop show Raines. Now he and alternate lead Vincent D’Onofrio can engage in an epic weird-off. I look forward to the battle of the off-kilter line readings.
And finally, the second season of Mad Men starts this Sunday on AMC. Now that The Wire is off the air, this is unquestionably the best series on American TV. Like The Sopranos and Deadwood, it gets much of its charge from its portrayal of an exotic milieu-in this case, New York ad agencies in the alien era of the early sixties. What distinguishes it from those shows is the slippery, elusive structures of its individual episodes. It abandons the classic model of establish A story, establish B story, develop A and B stories, wrap up B story, wrap up A story to weave surprising narratives that reveal themselves only in retrospect as part of a cohesive whole. If you haven't gone there yet, rent the first season pronto and queue up the second on your recording device of choice.