Television

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 him an offer he can't refuse.”

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 one another about how improbable it was that the characters were able to pay rent on such a large apartment while working as a line cook and a waitress in New York City, we...

Last summer, Netflix released Orange Is the New Black, the based-on-real-events story of an upper-crust white woman sentenced to 15 months in a women’s correctional facility for her involvement years before in a drug-running operation. The show was created by Jenji Kohan, whose previous half hour dramedy “Weeds,” about a suburban mom who sells pot, began a cottage industry of shows about anti-heroines for Showtime, including “Nurse Jackie,” “United...

Late on Sunday nights when I was a kid I used to sneak downstairs to our family TV room, where more often than not my father was asleep in his chair, the news or sitcom reruns droning on. I would do my best to slip the remote control from off his chair, turn down the volume and switch the channel. It was never easy—like fathers everywhere, he had a preternatural ability to awaken from even the deepest of slumbers when the remote left his immediate proximity or a show came on that did not...