Z on TV: HBO - Sun critic David Zurawik writes about the business, culture and craziness of television

September 17, 2009

Larry David talks 'Seinfeld' and Jewish TV identity

Larry David

Despite having created and written for some of the most widely known Jewish characters in TV history with NBC's "Seinfeld" and HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm," Larry David has always seemed reluctant to discuss matters of ethnic identity and television.

I'm not complaining -- that's his right. But when I was writing a book on the topic, "The Jews of Prime Time" (Brandeis University Press, 2003), David was one of the only Hollywood writer-producers who declined to be interviewed.

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Posted by David Zurawik at 7:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)
Categories: HBO

July 12, 2009

Ted Kennedy lionized in HBO documentary

Don’t come looking for a balanced portrait or a warts-and-all analysis in a documentary titled in part "in his own words."

Teddy: In His Own Words, a 90-minute film that premieres Monday night launching an outstanding HBO summer documentary series, is far from balanced. It is instead an elegy and a celebration of a man who has stood so close to the flame of 20^th Century history that the burns will never heal – burns that might have consumed a lesser man.

With Ted Kennedy, they helped forge an ironclad progressive liberal leader who fights on for his ploitical vision even today as he battles brain cancer.

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Posted by David Zurawik at 1:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: HBO

June 28, 2009

Preview: HBO's new Sunday drama better than its title

HBO continues on its erratic journey of trying to find winning Sunday-night dramas in the post-Sopranos era with the premiere of Hung Sunday night at 10.

The series is smarter than its title, but not nearly wise enough to be judged a keeper based on the episodes made available for preview.

Hung is the chronicle of a former high school sports star, Ray Drecker (Thomas Jane), now working as a third-rate high school basketball coach in suburban Detroit. His wife leaves him for a plastic surgeon. His kids move out after a fire that wrecks the house he inherited from his parents. Living in a tent on his front lawn and increasingly losing his grip, he takes the words of a motivational speaker to heart and decides to try and make a new life based on exploiting his "best tool." That asset is the size of a certain body part referenced in the slang title.

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Posted by David Zurawik at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: HBO

May 31, 2009

Into the Storm: HBO revisits Churchill after the war

It is not in a league with its earlier Winston Churchill-World War II drama, The Gathering Storm, but HBO's Sunday night companion film, Into the Storm, has rewards of its own.

Chief among them, the performance of Janet McTeer as Churchill's wife, Clementine, and a psychologically-nuanced script from Hugh Whitemore, who also wrote the The Gathering Storm.

The bad news: I am not that crazy about the performance of Brendan Gleeson as Churchill. I know this was a down period for the charismatic prime minister, but there is no sense of the dark depths or fiery passion Albert Finney brought to the role in the 2002 HBO look at Churchill on the eve of the war.

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Posted by David Zurawik at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Categories: HBO

May 17, 2009

In Treatment: Is anybody else hooked on this gem?

As HBO's In Treatment starts down the homestretch of its last two weeks Sunday night, I have to wonder whether anyone else out there is as addicted to this series as I am. Readers ask what shows I watch religiously week in and week out, and this is one of them. I haven't missed an epsiode. Until Mad Men returns to AMC in August, In Treatment is far and away the best drama on TV.

And yet, when I write about In Treatment on this blog, there is very little reaction. Even a profile I did of Aaron Shaw, a remarkable 12-year-old actor from Perry Hall who has a featured role in the series, drew next to nothing in the way of comments compared with anything I write about, say, Jon & Kate Plus 8 -- or House.

Maybe it's the economy; maybe so many people have cut back and dropped HBO that they will never see the series -- or will wait until it arrives on DVD. I can certainly understand that.

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Posted by David Zurawik at 9:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (24)
Categories: HBO

May 6, 2009

HBO picks up David Simon-Eric Overmyer series

HBO is picking up the David Simon-Eric Overmyer New Orleans drama, Treme, as a series, Variety reports.

The pilot has already been made, but production will not start on the series until fall after hurricane season in New Orleans where the series will be filmed, according to the trade publication.

The cast includes Wendell Pierce, Melissa Leo and Khandi Alexander. Overmyer lives in New Orleans.

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Posted by David Zurawik at 9:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Categories: HBO

April 11, 2009

HBO's Thrilla in Manila: a knockout documentary

The great sports documentaries are the ones that manage to wed their game stories to the culture and politics of the times in which they were played.

HBO’s Thrilla in Manila, which chronicles the epic rivalry between heavyweight boxers Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali, is steeped in the racial and social class issues that separated the two men and fueled the famous 1975 showdown in the Philippines from which the film’s title is drawn.

If Thrilla is not a great sports documentary, it’s on the waiting list – only a half cut or so off the pace. Catch it. If not Saturday night in its premiere at 8, then in one of its many HBO replays: Sunday, Tuesday, Friday or April 19, 22 and 28.

There is an added treat for Baltimore and Maryland area viewers: Radio station WYPR newsman Sunni Khalid is featured as one of the talking heads in the documentary, and Khalid is on the money time and again in his analyses of the fighters and the post-1960’s racial politics at play.

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Posted by David Zurawik at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)
Categories: Documentaries, HBO, TV Review

April 6, 2009

12-year-old Baltimore actor debuts on HBO tonight

If you have HBO, tonight is the night to see Aaron Shaw, a 12-year-old actor from Baltimore County, make his debut in a featured role on the premium cable channel's acclaimed drama In Treatment.

The second season of the series started Sunday night with Golden Globe winner Gabriel Byrne back as psychologist Paul Weston and Emmy Award winner Dianne Wiest as his Maryland-based therapist.

Those who tuned in Sunday night met two new patients of Dr. Weston's played with edge and bite by Hope Davis and Alison Pill. Tonight, they will meet two more -- John Mahoney as a CEO losing control, and Shaw as a child patient with eating and body issues complicated by the abandonment he feels as his parents go through divorce. Shaw, who never had a formal acting class, is terrific.

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Posted by David Zurawik at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Baltimore Television, HBO, Scripted Series

March 18, 2009

Will Ferrell's satire of Bush a ratings winner for HBO

HBO's live telecast of Will Ferrell's stage production You're Welcome America -- A Final Night With George W. Bush was seen by an audience of 2.3 million viewers Saturday night.

That's a big same-day audience for the premium pay cable channel. It is biggest for an HBO comedy program since the first showing of Chris Rock: Never Scared in April 2004, according to Variety.

You can read read my review of the Saturday night telecast here.

Posted by David Zurawik at 9:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: HBO, Ratings

March 16, 2009

Sopranos creator David Chase to do HBO miniseries

Associated Press Photo
David Chase in 2007

Finally, some news for HBO susbcribers to really get excited about: Sopranos creator David Chase is going to develop a new series for the premium cable channel based on the founding of Hollywood.

Here is the release from HBO:

David Chase, multi-award-winning creator of “The Sopranos,” is returning to HBO to develop a miniseries about the invention of cinema and subsequent growth of the Hollywood film industry, it was announced today....
Entitled A RIBBON OF DREAMS, the miniseries will begin in 1913 and follow two men, one a college-educated mechanical engineer, the other a cowboy with a violent past, who form an unlikely producing partnership and together become pioneers and then powers for a time in motion pictures.

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Posted by David Zurawik at 1:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Coming Soon to TV, HBO

March 14, 2009

HBO, Ferrell shine in bringing Bush stage satire to TV

I just watched the HBO's live telecast of the New York stage production, Will Ferrell: You're Welcome America, A Final Night With George W. Bush, and I loved it.

I loved the concept -- even though it dates back to the earliest days of TV in the late 1940's -- of trying to use the medium to extend the Broadway stage into homes across the country. The idea has largely been abandoned, but it can still work for both the theater world, which needs TV money more than ever, and the pay cable industry, which desperately needs daring and exclusive programming that viewers cannot get anywhere else.

You're Welcome America certainly offered a healthy dose of vibrant, engaging, liberating and socially relevant programming Saturday night. And it offered me something I could not find anywhere else in popular culture -- closure to the eight-year presidencty of George W Bush. After seeing Ferrel's inspired mockery of Bush and his dangerously hapless tenure in office, I can finally let go of Bush, Cheney, Rove and all the rest.

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Posted by David Zurawik at 11:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)
Categories: HBO, TV Review, TV and Politics

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