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History of TV: The sardonic sincerity of MTV’s ‘Daria’

November 4, 2021

The glasses. The boots. The sardonic quips and monotone voice. You either get it — or you don’t, which is core to what made Daria, Daria. The adult animated sitcom premiered in 1997 on MTV and went on to deliver five seasons of sneers, satire, and pl...

History of TV: Celebrating Halloween with a 'Supernatural' retrospective

October 28, 2021

The fantastic part about Supernatural is that it opens with a Halloween episode, complete with flickering lights and a spooky house — perfect for both a series based in the paranormal and the fact that Allhallows Eve is right around the corner. But a...

History of TV: 'The Walking Dead' is a master class in horror writing

October 21, 2021

There are some shows I know going in that I may never sleep again, and when I watched The Walking Dead pilot for the first time, it was no exception. But I subjected myself to sleepless nights for the same reason I did a decade ago for Scream 4: Ther...

History of TV: The wild, villainous and always over-the-top ‘Gotham’

October 14, 2021

“However dark and scary the world seems right now, there will be light. There will be light, Bruce.”

History of TV: Revisiting the Crashdown Cafe in 'Roswell'

October 7, 2021

"I’m Liz Parker and five days ago I died. After that, things got really weird."

History of TV: ‘Glee’ never stopped believin’

September 30, 2021

Tackling Glee definitely gave me pre-writing jitters. But what struck me most is there’s nothing quite like a good ensemble show. They have a special kind of energy that sucks you in. Gossip Girl. Friends. The Wire. Wildly different genres with one t...

History of TV: The hilarious and heartwarming 'One Day at a Time'

September 24, 2021

Family-centric sitcoms will thankfully — hopefully — never go out of style. What they will do is evolve to give us a heartwarming take on the times. One such piece of recent treasured television history is about a Cuban-American family living in Los ...

History of TV: Why Showtime's ‘Weeds’ is lit

September 16, 2021

Before Walter White, there was Nancy Botwin; the suburban SoCal widow (played ever-so-coolly by Mary-Louise Parker) who sold cannabis to support her family, including four (dead) husbands and three children. She faced danger, death, several cities to...

History of TV: The far from elementary 'Sherlock'

September 9, 2021

Some characters grab a hold of the collective psyche to be reincarnated over and over again. First created in 1887 for A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes originally appeared in four novels, 56 short stories, and overall, a ...