Television scheduling is a largely dubious, confounding and, in this day and age, increasingly irrelevant process. So what I'm about to offer isn't the first rumination on the disconnects between audiences and programmers, between mass markets and niche markets, and it definitely won't be the last. But this one is...

I've been a fan of Adult Swim since Cartoon Network launched the platform in 2001 (believe it or not, it really is that old), and have witnessed the programming block go through lots of changes -- first adding high-profile off-network acquisitions like Futurama and Family Guy, and making a notable...

It's taken half a season of growth, but IFC's Comedy Bang! Bang! has become essential viewing for fans of the craft of comedy. Maybe not as essential as, say, Louie, which Patton Oswalt notes is the truest representation of a working comedian's lifestyle ever caught on film. But...

Quite a few critiques of The Newsroom have shown up in this space, both before and after Sunday's premiere. If one were to believe the critical establishment, Aaron Sorkin's latest is overly earnest and a bare rehash of much of his previous work, and...

The title sequence for films and television series has been a hot topic of discussion of late, thanks largely to this short documentary from PBS's Off Book that explores how they're made, and websites like Art of the Title that celebrate the craft.

At least since...

I'm not going to give you a number, but I'm pretty sure I fall just outside the older end of Workaholics' target demographic. So I shouldn't be surprised that most recent comedy series aimed at the dorm room set -- Adult Swim's Loiter Squad and Workaholics' schedule-mate Tosh.0 (a show...

On its best days, How I Met Your Mother comments on the very idea of memory, letting its characters' distortions and misremembrances float far outside the bonds of reality. It's perhaps the series' central comedic trope (and certainly its most effective): give the audience all sides of a story in...

Hammocked between the wildly popular new season of Game of Thrones and Lena Dunham's Girls, which has inspired some interesting discussion of how television portrays the experience of young women (among other things), Veep, HBO's new comedy starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus as supremely ineffectual U.S. Vice President Selina Meyer, seems to...

Midway through last year's Talking Funny, a round table discussion among some of the world's most famous stand-up comics, Ricky Gervais claims, "In comedy... I think, you have to be the underdog. There's no place for being above the audience." He asserts that he plays a character on stage, ironically...