As Black Friday arrives and consumers invade big box stores, technology is predicted to be a hot seller. And while this holiday season is forecast to be lousy for retailers, it's not likely to be as bad as last year. Entertainment technology has been moving beyond television lately, leading some to suggest TV is in decline. Not true.
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Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, veterans of Fox's sketch comedy MADtv, have a new series of their own, Comedy Central's Key & Peele. It is a genial, at times almost genteel, half-hour in which the pair's obvious niceness shines through even their more pugnacious characters. (Key's version of road rage is to shout, "Selfish!") In a roundabout way, that's the point. The sketches are consistently smart and smartly acted and flow easily from ordinary premises to weird conclusions.
Discovery's Bering Sea Gold doesn’t seem at first like it has crossed any new reality TV frontier, relying on elements and structure familiar to the form. Enticingly (to the network), it combines the ocean and the gold and the cold and the reactive testosterone among bad-tempered desperados. To which I am surprised to cry: Eureka, they’ve found it! Bering Sea Gold is a testament to how thoroughly absorbing the genre can still be, when it’s done right.
All Star Dealers, Discovery Channel's sports-memorabilia addition to the bloated auction/pawnshop/storage locker subgenre of reality television, should have been a winner, with endless stories to draw on and a built-in fan base. But rather than find its own formula, it was content to borrow from existing shows, and it borrowed all the wrong things.
Kiefer Sutherland displays his softer side in Fox's Touch, a touchy-feely drama merging paranormal, spiritual and sweetly familial elements. shows off his acting chops, long forgotten, in scene after scene. It's heavier lifting than usual for the actor who was often reduced to caricature in 24. Sutherland is all about vulnerability in a show whose goal is nothing short of proving the interconnectedness of human life. We'll see if audiences can tolerate the notion of profound interrelatedness as weekly entertainment.
Let's jump right to the most obvious of all sentiments when it comes to HBO's new horse racing/gambling series Luck: Do not bet against David Milch in this one. Like a lot of HBO series, Luck will require patience. It's telling a dense story with nuanced characters and it doesn't feel the need to rush in, like a network series, and hammer home the main themes. But each episode is more enriching, more engrossing than the last and there's Hoffman's superb turn at the forefront, even though his story unfolds with the least rush. Luck is a smart and ambitious series that looks to truly pay off in the home stretch.
The timing of FX's animated series Unsupervised is unfortunate. A kind of reversed Beavis and Butt-Head — in which the teenage heroes, while losers in just about every way, are also social strivers yearning for suburban domesticity and dispensing Oprah Winfrey-style affirmations — it has the bad luck of coming along three months after the original was revived by MTV. The new show looks awfully pale by comparison.
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