Word: drama
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...prefer your drama less quantum-physics-based and easier to follow, NBC returns Friday Night Lights for Season 3 (Fridays, 9 p.m. E.T.). Calling FNL a high school football drama is a disservice, though it is one; it's really a drama about small-town life. FNL's Dillon, Texas, is a microcosm of America--overextended, burdened at home and at work but still undyingly willing to have faith and hope. Shot intimately with handheld camera, it's a moving but unsentimental celebration of community, of pulling together not just because it's right but also because it's necessary...
Just as Zeitgeisty but less uplifting is Fox's Lie to Me (Wednesdays, 9 p.m. E.T.), which may be the most cynical TV drama ever made. That's not an insult; it's a tribute to how well the show executes its purpose. It follows Cal Lightman, an expert on "microexpressions" who reads blinks and grimaces to catch deceptions and solve crimes. Lightman is played pugnaciously by Tim Roth, who expands on the successful Fox philosophy, embodied by Simon Cowell and Gordon Ramsay, that Americans long to be judged by crabby Brits...
Working the other side of the deception business is Trust Me (TNT, Mondays, 10 p.m. E.T., debuting Jan. 26), set in the world of men and advertising. It has the misfortune of sharing this subject with the masterpiece Mad Men, though its period (the present) and tone (comedy-drama) are far different. Mason (Eric McCormack) and Conner (Tom Cavanagh) are partners at a Chicago agency, getting by on caffeine and zingers. It's innocuous fun--Cavanagh (Ed) exhales charm as effortlessly as most mammals do carbon dioxide--but predictable, down to the pilot's last-minute-inspiration-in-the-pitch...
Tara could take a few tips from HBO's polygamy drama, Big Love (Sundays, 9 p.m. E.T.), which returns in top form for Season 3. Its premise is just as outlandish: a multiple marriage among religious Fundamentalists in Utah. (On Big Love, a man has three wives; on Tara, a man has three and a husband.) But Big Love quickly settles you into its odd setting. The particulars of the Henricksons' lives--their intrigues and secrecy, yes, but also their familiar family dynamics and sincere faith--are presented, simply and unpatronizingly, as the reality of the show's universe...
...numbers are telling. At the domestic box office, this no-star drama has already earned more than $34 million - about double the cumulative take of three Golden Globe winners from last year (La Vie en Rose, Julie Christie as an Alzheimer's sufferer in Away from Her and Cate Blanchett's Bob Dylan impression in I'm Not There). It has already made more than what 2008's film drama winner, Atonement, had cadged by this time last year. Remember that Juno came out of nowhere a year ago and revved up to a $143 million domestic gross. Not that...