Show: “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (Season 3, episode 10) Airdate: Dec. 15, 1998 Overview: This episode is the structural midpoint of the franchise; it’s sort of a backdoor pilot for “Angel” and it introduces the First Evil. It’s also a great Christmas episode, as an inexplicable higher power intervenes in Buffy’s and Angel’s little lives, allowing […]
Show: “Futurama” (Season 2, episode 8) Airdate: Dec. 19, 1999 Overview: In the year 3000, Christmas is known as Xmas and Robot Santa Claus has been programmed with too strict of a “naughty or nice” judgment, so he judges everybody as naughty and guns them down. (Actually, it turns out that Zoidberg is judged to […]
Show: “My So-Called Life” (Episode 15) Airdate: Dec. 22, 1994 Overview: Rickie’s getting beat up at home, Angela wants to help him and a homeless guitar-playing girl, Brian’s lonely and Danielle doesn’t know what’s going on (she just lives there). For Claire Danes’ performance (I know she’s still a good actress, but nothing will ever top […]
Show: “The Simpsons” (Season 1, episode 1) Airdate: Dec. 17, 1989 Overview: This is a classic not only because it’s a Christmas episode, but also because it’s the very first episode of “The Simpsons.” Sometimes when you go back and watch the first episode of a long-running series, it’s jarring how slow and boring it […]
I don’t actively seek out mainstream pop hits like I used to, so when two songs are bouncing around my brain at the end of 2010, you know they were the two most ubiquitous songs of the year. I had heard about “California Gurls” before I heard it, and I assumed it would be good, since Katy […]
1. Jenny and Johnny, “I’m Having Fun Now” — When two musicians in a relationship make an album together, it rarely results in good music; at least that’s the stereotype. We think of John and Yoko or the church couple from those “Saturday Night Live” skits. But Jenny Lewis and Johnathan Rice blow that stereotype out of […]
Seth MacFarlane probably had the idea for “Blue Harvest” kicking around in his head for a while, and when it became an actual episode of “Family Guy” in 2007, he probably thought, “Wow, we really did a ‘Family Guy’ ‘Star Wars’ parody.” Some of the giddy excitement was still intact for the “Empire Strikes Back”-themed sequel, “Something, […]
This was the year when TV changed from low-definition to high-definition and from squares to rectangles (I still have a square, and I know I’m missing some things off to the sides, but at least I can hear everybody). Also, TV has never before been as accessible; unless it’s on a premium network, rare is […]
TV review: “The X-Files’ ” fourth season treads water with the grand mythology story yet still delivers some of the show’s best episodes.
Author Nick Hornby writes the words and musician Ben Folds puts the music to them. The September album “Lonely Avenue” is, on the surface, hard to resist. It features one of my favorite authors and the man responsible for what I think is a perfect album, 2001’s “Rockin’ the Suburbs.” And I can’t think of a previous […]