Few things can humble me more quickly than a brief trip to the Home Depot. I recently found myself lost among the store’s countless plumbing supplies, and when I sought the help of an employee, he looked at me with what appeared to be the disgust of an English professor being asked to spell ca

‘Wolf Hall’ and the emergence of Thomas Cromwell

Life and loss in ‘Call the Midwife’

If you are wondering how many seconds pass before The Italian Americans, PBS's two-part series premiering Feb. 17, mentions The Godfather, here's a spoiler: precisely zero. Surprisingly, the documentary opens cold with Marlon Brando rasping the familiar line, “I'll make h

Fifteen years after the premiere of “The West Wing,” there are more television shows about politics than ever before, with “Scandal” among the biggest hits on broadcast television and a half-dozen others in production on various platforms. But the trend is not likely to boost

This month Friends turns 20. When I was that age, 20 years ago, I lay on the hardwood floor of my first apartment on Chicago’s North Side with my own group of friends and cynically watched NBC’s newest collection of beautiful people trying to be funny. As we made sarcastic comments to on