David Bianculli
David Bianculli is a guest host and TV critic on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross. A contributor to the show since its inception, he has been a TV critic since 1975.
From 1993 to 2007, Bianculli was a TV critic for the New York Daily News.
Bianculli has written four books: The Platinum Age Of Television: From I Love Lucy to The Walking Dead, How TV Became Terrific (2016); Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of 'The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (Simon & Schuster/Touchstone, 2009); Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously (1992); and Dictionary of Teleliteracy (1996).
A professor of TV and film at Rowan University, Bianculli is also the founder and editor of the website, TVWorthWatching.com.
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Hulu's Emmy Award-winning series about a restaurant in Chicago returns for Season 4, with a cast of emotionally real characters and a set of writers determined to defy expectations.
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Mariska Hargitay has only the vaguest memories of her mother, Jayne Mansfield, the sex-symbol movie star who died in the 1967 crash. Now, Hargitay examines her family history in a new documentary. -
On Jun 7, CNN is presenting a live telecast of George Clooney starring on Broadway as the pioneering CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow. TV critic David Bianculli calls it the TV event of the season.
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Jesse Armstrong's new HBO film is set in a Utah retreat where four rich techno-wizards scheme while playing poker. Mountainhead is an unpredictable drama about powerful men vying for control.
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Before his death in 2023, Reubens filmed an HBO documentary in which he explained why he refused to be seen or interviewed as himself for the whole time Pee-Wee Herman was starring in TV and films.
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In 1971, the year after The Beatles broke up, Lennon and Ono moved from London to New York, where they lived in a small Greenwich Village apartment for 18 months. A new film documents that period.
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Ian had her first hit record as a teenager in the 1960s and went on to win two Grammys. A new documentary tells her life story through a combination of vintage footage and newly recorded interviews.
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Back in March, a group of comic luminaries — from John Mulaney to Nikki Glaser — gathered at the Kennedy Center to celebrate O'Brien for receiving the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.
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Tina Fey co-created and stars in a Netflix series about three middle-aged couples who meet for four short vacations each year. It's a mature, laid-back show, evoking more smiles than belly laughs.
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By examining the value of libraries in the distant and recent past, this PBS film makes a compelling case for the importance of the American public library system today.
