TV

We have reached the end.

I revisit the notorious Saturday Night Live episode that gave a grateful world the magical phrase, “Some of y’all are not washing your ass properly!”

Did Louise Lasser have a nervous breakdown while hosting Saturday Night Live or was it all part of the act? Regardless, the result was one of the most excruciatingly awkward episodes in the show’s history.

Charles Schulz spent four years making It’s the Girl in the Red Truck, Charlie Brown, a live-action/animation hybrid starring his own daughter Jill and Snoopy’s unpopular brother Spike. It did not go well.

In this piece collected in my new book The Joy of Trash, I explore the infinite humiliations of Gal Gadot and Friends’ notorious cover of “Imagine” by some jerk.

One of you kind souls paid me to write about the rightfully revered first season of True Detective. I cover episode 2 here. It’s unusual but in a good way!

Peacock’s adaptation of the hit podcast Dr. Death has a lot to say about how chasing the American Dream at any cost can be murder.

Don’t be put off by its title or its gimmicky-seeming central conceit: Pen15 is one of the deepest, darkest and just plain best shows on television.

My crazy , patron-funded zig-zag through the non-musical life of David Bowie hits another weird detour in the form of The Hunger, a soft-core Showtime horror anthology based on the Tony Scott cult classic that Bowie inexplicably hosted for its second season and once even acted in.

The world’s saddest man falls tragically in love with slinky, inky femme fatale Inque and Bruce, Terry and Barbara Gordon take on a silent assassin and the ghosts of the past in two fascinating episodes of Batman Beyond.

My patron-funded exploration of Batman Beyond continues with two particularly trippy episodes about the horrors of high school life, “The Winning Edge” and “Spellbound.”

Al mashes up Tone Loc and Sherwood Schwartz in this guilty pleasure banger from the UHF soundtrack.

Season three ends in a BIG way with a super-sized, Robert Zemeckis-directed Paths of Glory homage about a lily-livered soldier and his general dad starring Kirk Douglas, Eric Douglas, Lance Henricksen and Dan Aykroyd.

Movies about TV month continues with an exploration of 1981’s muddled Pray TV, with Devo as Christian band Dove and Paul Reubens’ feature film debut. It’s like UHF, except terrible.

In the first-ever television-focussed Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 I wrote about the first two episodes of the cult animated series Batman Beyond as the opening entry in an ongoing series on the show.

Writer-director Walter Hill returns for. hard-boiled yarn about a drunk, desperate reporter who would kill for a big story and a comeback.

As part of my ongoing over-thinking of Sesame Street and its legacy, I wonder where the hell all the parents are, and come up with some theories.

The rich feast on the poor in this timely fright fable starring Steven Weber and Rita Wilson.

Foul-mouthed kids stumble upon something very sinister in an evil nursing home in this 1980s throwback graced by a wonderful turn by the great John Glover as one seriously creepy mortician.

Happy 420, bro!