Last night the winners of the 2010 Television Critics Association Awards were handed out a a presentation at the Beverly Hilton. Dax Shepard of NBC's "Parenthood" did a very capable job in his first capacity as host of an awards show. Highlights of the night included: a spectacular speech by Tom Hanks, accepting the Outstanding Achievement in Miniseries award for HBO's "The Pacific"; the entire audience singing Happy Birthday to "Modern Family" star Rico Rodriguez; and the characters of kids show "Yo Gabba Gabba" coming out to accept the award for Outstanding Achievement in Youth Programming. It was a great and intimate evening, perhaps because the proceedings were not on TV - kind of a paradox to have an awards show for TV programs picked by TV critics not broadcast on TV. more ›

What'd you think of HBO's "The Pacific"? We thought it was shot in adequate "epic-style" but the soundtrack makes us think of just about anything on the History Channel. Also, we didn't feel an immediate engagement with the characters that we felt with "Band of Brothers", or more recently, "Generation Kill". Perhaps by the 2nd or 3rd chapter we'll have that connection but this just seems a little off for the time being. more ›

This weekend is all about HBO's new mini-series, "The Pacific" (see the promo above), which is also being renamed by some as "Band of Brothers - Part Deux". What made "Band of Brothers" so compelling was that we followed the same group of guys, Easy Company, throughout Europe, which made the storyline somewhat easier to follow. It was also incredibly interesting because these were true stories about real people, many of whom are still alive. more ›