Falco Makes a Naughty, Irresistible Nurse Jackie

NBC musical dazzles critics... mostly

(NEWSER) - If you watched the Super Bowl, you just might have heard of Smash, NBC's new drama about the making of a Broadway musical. It premiered last night, and critics are (mostly) giving it a standing ovation:

• The buzz has gotten so intense that the conversation isn't even about whether it'll be good. "Good? Darling, it's great!" gushes Mary McNamara of the LA Times . The creators have "managed to capture the grand and sweeping gesture that is musical theater and inject it with the immediate intimacy of television," an impressive, unprecedented feat.

Critics: New reality show 'upsetting,' 'uncomfortable'

(NEWSER) - Joan Rivers’ new reality show on WE, Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best?, follows the 77-year-old comedian as she moves in with her daughter in Los Angeles. It’s as artificial as the botox Rivers extols:

• The show is “upsetting,” writes a pained Linda Stasi in the New York Post . From pushing her daughter to pose nude to giving “away all of her living room furniture,” “it's all so wrong that as much as I love her, I have to say, in this case, ‘Joan Knows Worst.’”

Laura Linney's new series doesn't impress everyone

(NEWSER) - Critics are split on The Big C, Showtime's Laura Linney-starring comedy about a woman with cancer living out the last year of her life, which debuts tonight:

• The cast is perhaps a bit large for a half-hour show, writes Mary McNamara in the Los Angeles Times , and the whole thing is so determined to be unsentimental that it is instead jammed "with so many over-blown characters and wacky antics that it's impossible to attach meaning to any of them."

Moments of actual sincerity shine through

(NEWSER) - Glee, which took its season-ending bow last night, might seem like a meaningless confection, but it’s actually an important piece of popular art, writes Matt Zoller Seitz of Salon , calling it “one of the most stylistically bold broadcast network shows since Twin Peaks.” Because in between its all-too-rote dialogue, which mines a familiar “bitchy/glib screwball vein,” it actually dares, in its musical numbers, to “slough off the shackles of ‘reality’ and express raw, complicated emotions.” More»

(NEWSER) - Some things are certain: death, taxes, and Cinemax showing women with their shoes on having sex late at night. Soft-core porn is "in our DNA," an exec with the parent company of "Skinemax" tells the LA Times . "We're not running away from it." Neither are its premium-cable competitors, which are hardly relegating racier content to late night. Consider HBO's True Blood and Showtime's explicit Californication. More»