In 10 Words or Less
Back for more with comedy's It Girl

Reviewer's Bias*
Loves: Sketch comedy
Likes: Amy Schumer, dark comedy
Dislikes: Gender politics
Hates: The twisted interpersonal relationships between women

The Show
With the show firmly established after the first two seasons, Inside Amy Schumer could have gone a few different directions as it kicked off a third amidst its star's rocketing popularity. It could have kept on the same path, exploring societal issues and female foibles. It could have tried to recapture some of its past successes and build on them with recurring characters. It could have done more parody, an easy path to recognizable comedy. Instead, it did a little bi...Read the entire review

So "South Park" is now 18 years old, and under contract to continue at least through age 20. Not bad for something that started out as a primitive video Christmas card, and then became a cable series which its creators (Trey Parker and Matt Stone) didn't expect to last very long (it was said that they pretty much did the 1999 theatrical movie South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut as a big blow-out since they didn't think the show would last much longer.) With the kids having been in 3rd grade when the show started, they'd be done with college by now in real-time. Trey Parker voices Eric Cartman, the overweight kid who mostly thinks only of himself (thought of as a younger Archie Bunker) an...Read the entire review

Review:
"Kitchen Nightmares" on the BBC was a compelling reality series that saw chef Gordon Ramsay go to various small restaurants across the countryside and somberly assess the difficulties at the restaurant and sometimes sternly have to set the ship straight. The series was a highly engaging one that still stands up well.

"Kitchen Nightmares" came to the US and the result was an entirely different series. The Ramsay of "Kitchen Nightmares" and "The F Word" was replaced by the yelling Ramsay of "Hell's Kitchen". The series became locked into a formula (Ramsay comes to restaurant and sees disaster, owner yells at Ramsay for trying to change anything (help, in other words), Ramsay changes it anyways and owner suddenly is thrilled. Later on, it was discussed in the media that many restaurants featured on the show did not last and some were such a spectacle on the series ("Amy's Baking C...Read the entire review

The Movie:

In the decade and a half since driver Dale Earnhardt Sr. died on the track at the Daytona 500, there is the good chance you can drive through most places that cite NASCAR as a fan favorite sport and see a faded yet still visible number 3, Earnhardt's car number for decades before his death. Much was said about Dale Sr. during and after his life, and I Am Dale Earnhardt is the latest production to try and explore this racing icon.

The film is part of a series of "I Am" documentaries produced by the Spike TV television network, with their film on Chris Farley being a recent notable installment. This Earnhardt version of the film, running about an hour in length, features interviews with Earnhardt's children, including current NASCAR driver Dale Jr., along with current and former drivers who raced wi...Read the entire review

Cops: Wildest Chases:

Cops: Wildest Chases.

OK, there's more to it than that, but not much more, primarily being the fact that the two-and-a-half hours of Cops episodes you're about to watch are just that; two-and-a-half hours of episodes. At least that's how it appears to me, considering pretty much every episode of Cops has a chase of one type or another anyway, and this collection doesn't string together only chases, just some episodes with chases in them.

So there you have it. Cops as you probably know, is a popular, long running reality show featuring footage of beat cops. Launching in 1989 and running an astonishing 25 years on the FOX network, the show was then picked up by Spike TV, who kindly here deposits seven episodes from seasons 26 and 27. Cops introduce themselves with two or three lines of philosophy before cruising off to ...Read the entire review

In 10 Words or Less
The kewpie-doll Chappelle

Reviewer's Bias*
Loves: Sketch comedy
Likes: Amy Schumer, dark comedy
Dislikes: Gender politics
Hates: The twisted interpersonal relationships between women

The Show
It's amazing when you hear people say that women aren't funny. Just off the top of my head, I can come up with a list of hilarious women: Tina Fey, Maria Bamford, Emily Heller, Kate McKinnon, Lauren Lapkus, Jen Kirkman, Amy Poehler, Alison Brie, Michelle Butera, Gillian Jacobs...I could go on for a very long time. Admittedly, there are a ton of really unfunny women out there (take a peek at NickMom sometime if you ever want to watch comedy die in front of your eyes) but there are a ton...Read the entire review

Content:
In this day and age, it's hard to come up with a new concept for a sitcom show, about 99% of the time it's more of the same and once in a while breaks the mold. Does TV Land's original sitcom, The Exes, accomplish that? No, but it stands out in a sea of clichéd shows by it's witty humor and excellent cast.

The series opens up with us meeting Holly (Played by Kristen Johnston), a divorce attorney who is showing one of her more recent clients, Stuart (played by David Alan Basche), a needy do-gooder, to a shared apartment for him to start his life anew. Dumped by their wives, Holly took pity on these guys and sublets an extra apartment that she owns across the hall from her own. It's here that we meet the other bachelors, we have ladies man Phil (played by Donald Faison, Scrubs), who in every single episode can found playing a game of "Bang and Boot" with a different...Read the entire review

For many years, it didn't seem like original programming was much of a priority for Comedy Central. Aside from the occasional phenomenon, like "South Park", "Chappelle's Show", or "The Colbert Report", the "comedy" in their name was more about stand-up than narrative TV, with "Comedy Central Presents" being one of their major pop culture contributions (that, and playing Office Space ad nauseum until it was a mainstream success). Recently, though, the network has been upping its game with multiple creator-driven, low-budget sitcoms and sketch comedy shows: "Key & Peele", "Workaholics", "Nathan For You", and "Inside Amy Schumer", among others, have all become surprise hits. One of their latest efforts is "Broad City", a sitcom from Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer (...Read the entire review

In 10 Words or Less
Nick Kroll's sketch revolution will be televised

Reviewer's Bias*
Loves: Nick Kroll, sketch comedy
Likes: Chelsea Peretti
Dislikes: Fabrice Fabrice
Hates: Reality TV

The Show
In reviewing Nick Kroll's 2011 stand-up special, I summed up the show by writing "If this special was an hour of Kroll on stage with a mic telling jokes, I would be hailing it as a new classic of stand-up comedy, but his character sketches kill the momentum and are honestly not too funny, especially when they follow Kroll's far funnier jokes."

Well, apparently, if you take those sketches and put them in their own show, they get a lot better, which is exactly what Comedy Central's Kroll Show de...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Jeff Dunham has been doing standup comedy for a few years now, and his act is predominantly known as one where he serves as a straight man to the puppets he uses to crack jokes. For his ventriloquist skills have helped propel his act to international acclaim. I'm not entirely sure if this has lost him respect in popular circles, perhaps earning him a passive derision similar to Carrot Top, but not many comics can say they did a tour which took them to Australia, Singapore, Israel and England to name a few, and All Over The Map is a film that shows this.

The feature is less a documentary on the tour, and more of a highlight film of Dunham telling jokes onstage and occasionally doing some things in the countries his visits, like getting interviewed by a humorless woman that Dunham labels the ‘Nancy Grace of Iceland.' Not even any shots of Dunham going through airpo...Read the entire review

The Show:

Comedy Central is just killin' it these days. In the past two years, the network has debuted some of the funniest sketch and situation comedy programs of their nearly twenty-five year existence, including Broad City, Kroll Show, Inside Amy Schumer, and Key & Peele. One of the funniest and strangest of these shows is Drunk History, from...Read the entire review

In 10 Words or Less
Travel back in time, risk a DUI

Reviewer's Bias*
Loves: Ridiculous stuff, comedy, the majority of the series' recreators
Likes: Derek Waters, the majority of the narrators
Dislikes: History
Hates: Drunks

The Show
Once again, the Internet has delivered unto us something wonderful. Starting life as a web series, Derek Waters and Jeremy Konner's Drunk History builds on a brilliantly simple concept: people who are drunk love to tell stories and they usually have trouble doing so. So, if you focus that idea, and have those drunks only tell historical stories, and then recreate those stories, using the actual inebriated ramblings as the dialogue, you get an ingenious littl...Read the entire review

The Show:

The Comedy Central sketch show Key & Peele is heading into its triumphant fourth season, and so (much more quickly than they did with seasons 1 & 2) the cable network has put out another spotless-looking Blu-ray for the show's excellent 13-episode third season. Though the package is a little lighter on bonus features than previous releases, the main episodes are among the finest that the series has offered so far.

As the title suggests, the show is headlined by two top-notch improv and sketch comedians named Keegan-Michael Key (the lanky, bald one) and Jordan Peele (the bespectacled, slightly stocky one), who both worked on later seas...Read the entire review

When South Park debuted on Comedy Central in 1999, I fell in love. The humor was rude, crude, and the animation was hysterically simple. Never in my wildest dreams did I think this program - which looked innocent on the surface - would assault my funny bone with gags involving anal probes, homosexual dogs, interspecies breeding, and a magical piece of Christmas poo… and just like that, Beavis and Butthead, the long standing kings of crass (and I mean that in the best possible way) had been dethroned. As shocking as the show was, I doubted it would withstand the test of time, but I didn't feel the slightest hint of degradation until the 12th season. However, from that point forward, South Park and I were involved in what you'd call an ‘on again, off again' relationship. Some episodes were brilliant, yes, but more and more, that became the exception and not the rule. I'd snicker here or chuckle...Read the entire review

The Special:

I was quite young when I first saw Sinbad on TV. He was one of the actors on the college-set Cosby Show spin-off, A Different World, which followed Cosby on Thursday nights. I used to watch those two shows back-to-back religiously, which is the only reason I can imagine would have caused my excitement at that time to check out Sinbad's 1990 HBO stand-up special Brain Damaged. I loved Brain Damaged as a ten-year-old, even though much of it went over my head -- especially bits about black culture with which I was unfamiliar, like hair weaves. Sinbad had such an ingratiating style that it didn't matter that I couldn't relate. His stand-up seemed to take the character work of his former boss, Bill Cosby, a...Read the entire review

In 10 Words or Less
Tosh.0 brings in the legends of the Internet

Reviewer's Bias*
Loves: Funny internet clips
Likes: Daniel Tosh, Tosh.0
Dislikes: Gross-out comedy, viewer videos
Hates: Clip-show bits

The Story So Far...
Comedy Central's biggest hit in recent years, Tosh.0 features wise-ass stand-up comic Daniel Tosh, as he presents a variety of internet videos, offering jokes about them and participating in sketches, sometimes with the star of the original video, most noticeably in the show's flagship segment, Web Redemption, where Tosh offers someone who made a poor impression in a viral video chance to clear the air and come out on top for once. Since 2012, three previous collections o...Read the entire review

The Series:

The fourth season of Comedy Central's series Workaholics continues to follow the exploits of Blake Henderson (Blake Anderson), Adam DeMamp (Adam DeVine) and Anders Homvik (Anders Holm), a trio of roommates who work together in a call center for the TelAmeriCorp corporation. Like a lot of guys in their twenties, they're still prone to drinking too much, smoking a lot of weed and going after girls at inopportune times and like the three seasons before this latest, much of the stories revolve around those misadventures. At work they answer to Alice Murphy (Maribeth Monroe), a stern woman who understandably becomes impatient with their constant slacking and attitude problems. When they're not at work they often hang out with their friend Karl Hevacheck (Kyle Newacheck), a pot dealer who tends to come up with one hair-brained scheme after another.

The thirteen episod...Read the entire review

In 10 Words or Less
Dad is fat (and back on stage)

The Show
Jim Gaffigan has established himself as a good-vibes comic who is neither angry nor mean. He also has a few signature bits that now somewhat define him as a stand-up, most notably his "Hot Pocket" jokes. It's hard for a comic when they achieve such a definitive level of success. You have to make a choice to either embrace your popular jokes and run with them or try to come up with something new and possibly disappoint your paying customers. For someone like Patton Oswalt, it's unlikely his fanb...Read the entire review

In 10 Words or Less
More from sketch comedy's newest sensations

Reviewer's Bias*
Loves: Sketch comedy
Likes: Key & Peele
Dislikes: Race-based comedy, MADtv
Hates: Sketch comedy studio segments

The Story So Far
After earning some fans as part of the cast of FOX' SNL competitor MADtv, Jordan Peele and Keegan Michael Key made their way around the comedy world with scene-stealing parts in TV shows, web series and movies, before Comedy Central decided to finally address their lack of sketch comedy by giving the duo their own series (the first of a new wave of CC sketch shows.) The show has blown up, to the point where the guys recently graced the cover of TimeRead the entire review

The versatile ventriloquist Jeff Dunham takes the leap into animation with "Achmed Saves America." One of Dunham's recurring characters, Achmed in puppet form is a manic skeleton, still very much alive after being blown up in a foiled terrorist act. A bit politically incorrect perhaps, but in Dunham's act it's usually funny. Here he's transformed into an animated character (after a live-action intro where he expresses a deep longing to become a cartoon) and let loose in an hour-long affair. After his latest terrorist misfiring (mocking a "Road Runner" cartoon) he finds himself landing on a "Liberty Freedom Airways" plane headed for America and lands right outside the all-American town of Americaville. A stereotypical American family, the Wilsons, runs into him in their minivan and ...Read the entire review

Review:

"Golden Girls" was wonderful and we thanked Betty White for being a "friend" in the '80's, years of being a foul-mouthed AARP member culminated in "Betty White's Off Their Rockers", a series that basically had a troupe of seniors pulling tricks on unsuspecting citizens - it's not about being funny as much as it is screaming about how wacky it is that seniors say the darndest things. The series is While White does get a few laughs in a supporting role in this series, bring back the old Betty White.

Airing on TV Land (and I couldn't tell you what channel that's on on my cable, although admittedly the young network has had some mild hits, not to mention the core line-up of classic shows), the series was produced by Suzanne Marin ("Frasier") and Sean Hayes, taken from an original idea by famed producer Lynda Obst. The series, which feels very Lifetime, is the definition of com...Read the entire review