With all its talk of getting down to the basics, it was only a matter of time until Survivor tried the boys-against-girls tactic. In recent years, the reality-show franchise has gone beyond its original premise and trotted out a whole new set of tricks to keep both viewers and contestants off-kilter. Instead of having two […]
Noy Thrupkaew
Noy Thrupkaew is a Prospect senior correspondent.
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Greek Orthodox
Nia, the heroine of the new CBS series My Big Fat Greek Life, is gabbing at an airport luggage carousel. She just came back from her honeymoon; she’s Greek and she married — gasp! — a non-Greek guy. Her crazy family freaked out, of course, but now everything is OK. “Yeah,” she says to the […]
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Open Mic
Jay Leno and David Letterman should take lessons from one of the newer talk-show hosts on the block: Isaac Mizrahi. The garrulous fashion designer has been chatting up celebrities on the TV channel Oxygen for nearly three seasons now (new episodes start next week), and with his artfully disheveled hair and artless charm, he has […]
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Fashion Forward
The Learning Channel (TLC) comes on like a bossy best friend — clucking over your curtains with disapproval, pointing out your flab, making you watch her birthing video. She’s insufferable and doesn’t understand the meaning of “too much information,” but the combination of tough love and shared intimacy hooks you every time. To fulfill the […]
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The Gambler
The star of FX’s new half-hour show Lucky is pretty lucky himself. Things are looking up for actor John Corbett — now that he’s wandered out of fluffy romantic-lead land and into the wilds of dark and depraved comedy. Corbett started strong in the early ’90s as the musing DJ Chris Stevens on CBS’ dearly […]
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Platinum Hit?
UPN’s new Tuesday night lineup might help the network achieve the TV producer’s dream: a racially integrated viewing audience. America’s boob-tube viewing preferences and TV-show casts are deeply segregated — a divide that would trouble Martin Luther King Jr. and, for far less noble reasons, should trouble TV execs looking to make big bucks. In […]
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Will and Testament
Abbas Kiarostami was philosophical about the whole mess. U.S. officials had just denied the world-renowned filmmaker — and “axis of evil” Iranian citizen — a visa to attend last fall’s New York Film Festival. “I certainly do not deserve an entry visa any more than the aged mother hoping to visit her children in the […]
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Filmic Face-lift
fracas n a noisy, disorderly fight or quarrel; a brawl The white guy had no idea he was about to do filmmaker Justin Lin a huge favor. After watching Lin’s tale of Asian American high-school overachievers gone bad, the journalist didn’t stand up to applaud the young director. He got up because he was furious. […]
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Magic Wanda
Wanda Sykes can be devastatingly funny. An Emmy Award-winning writer and comedian, Sykes is a regular on HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm and Inside the NFL — and also on Crank Yankers, a Comedy Central offering that features puppets acting out nasty, real-life crank calls made by a stable of comics. As Wanda Murphy, Sykes called […]
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Paved With Good Intentions
What would Graham Greene do? Or more to the point, what would he write about our current time, its terrorist horrors, its shadows of war on the horizon? Perhaps our situation would sound familiar to the author, who set a similarly foreboding scene in his 1955 novel The Quiet American, the subject of Phillip Noyce’s […]
