TV Club Classic announces summer schedule, begins the thawing of SNL Classic reviews
Guess what, everyone? Summer starts June 21! And that means that TV Club Classic’s summer season starts tomorrow! We’ve got a great lineup of shows this summer, and we’re hoping that you want to read about all of them. If you don’t, though, we’ll just take them away from you without giving you proper notice, and then you’ll ask us about them for the rest of eternity on Twitter.
Our lineup this year includes plenty of returning favorites, one of the most popular sitcoms of all time, a TV Club Classic feature that’s lain dormant for years, and a one-season wonder. If you can’t find something to like there, well, just wait until we start covering all 98 episodes of Dave’s World.
Here’s our schedule, day by day, starting with Wednesday’s debuts.
Wednesdays (beginning Wednesday):
You’ve read Todd VanDerWerff’s take on the full fourth season of Arrested Development, but if you’re looking for the kind of episode-by-episode analysis only Noel Murray can bring to the show, well, he’s back at it this week. And as a bonus, he’ll be doing a crosstalk every week with Erik Adams, as they pick apart the good and bad of the new episodes, two episodes per week. This feature will run at 11 a.m. Eastern.
Then, at 1 p.m. Eastern, Todd VanDerWerff continues his march through drama series he likes by taking a look at Paul Feig’s hilarious, achingly tender look at adolescence in the early ‘80s, Freaks & Geeks. Todd will be covering one episode per week, which should take him until the fall. (At which point, he’ll cover the first season of Mad Men, which we have yet to cover here. You heard it here first!)
At 3 p.m. Eastern, we’re resurrecting Donna Bowman’s Sports Night reviews from last summer, which were one of our favorite things about last year’s TV Club Classic season. She’s going to cover the second season, two episodes at a time. We’ll see how Aaron Sorkin deals with cancellation this time around.
Thursdays (beginning Thursday):
Zack Handlen has made it all the way to the fifth season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and in a couple of weeks, he’ll be done with it. This makes us think it’s just the time for him to dive into the second season of Monty Python's Flying Circus, following up the work he did on that show’s first season last summer. As with last year, he’ll be doing one episode per week, and he’ll be back to Trek once that’s finished. (And we promise once Deep Space Nine is done not to force him to do Voyager, though he may have designs on another science fiction series, this one slightly more amusing.) As always, this coverage will run at 11 a.m. Eastern.
David Sims’ Gilmore Girls have been one of our favorite things about Thursdays for a while now, and they’ll continue running at 1 p.m. Eastern. He’s almost to season two! Jess is coming!
Finally, we’ve covered many of the other greatest sitcoms of the ‘90s, so now the time has come for Friends, which we’ll cover in crosstalk format, at the speed of two episodes per week (though only the pilot will be covered this week). Your guides through the good times of mid ‘90s New York City and fashion will be the ever enjoyable Sonia Saraiya and Joe Reid, and you can look for their thoughts every Thursday at 3 p.m. Eastern.
Fridays (beginning Friday):
Okay, so Rowan Kaiser’s Babylon 5 reviews never technically stopped. They’ll continue running at 11 a.m. Eastern, and he’ll be moving on to season three very soon.
Though they’ve inspired small readership numbers, Kyle Ryan’s The Larry Sanders Show reviews have inspired an intense and passionate following nonetheless, and we’re all about rewarding the intense and passionate here, so Kyle’s going to be writing about the show again this summer, picking up with season three, covering two episodes at a time yet again. These reviews will run at 1 p.m. Eastern.
Finally, it’s not TV Club Classic without a one-season wonder, and the arrival of Hannibal had many of us thinking about the prior career of one Bryan Fuller. Since we’ve already covered all of Pushing Daisies, then, it was time to look even further back in his career, which brings us to Les Chappell’s reviews of Wonderfalls, which will run every week at 3 p.m. Eastern. Everybody loves Caroline Dhavernas!
Saturdays (beginning Saturday):
Zack Handlen and Todd VanDerWerff continue with their reviews of The Twilight Zone at 1 p.m. Eastern, and they’ll soon be making their way through the misbegotten fourth season. Wish them luck! (Looking for X-Files? That will be back in the fall.)
Christopher Bahn’s Doctor Who (Classic) reviews have been off the schedule for a few months while he’s been dealing with a new baby, but they’ll be back later in June, ready for more adventures with Tom Baker, William Hartnell, and other Doctors we’re not thinking of right now. They’ll run biweekly at 3 p.m. Eastern.
Sundays (beginning Sunday):
Alasdair Wilkins’ Farscape reviews recently entered the second season, so be sure to check them out every week at 11 a.m. Eastern.
It’s been a long while since we reviewed the early days of Saturday Night Live, but SNL fan and amateur historian Phil Dyess-Nugent seemed a good choice to head back into the program’s earliest era and check out what was up with the very first season. (Weirdly enough, we didn’t cover it back in the day.) Phil’s lengthy diatribes about Chevy Chase will run every week at 1 p.m. Eastern.
Our reviews of classic episodes of The Simpsons have only been off the schedule for a couple of weeks, but you’ve already wondering when they’d return. Wonder no more, as Erik Adams and Kyle Ryan will take you through the sixth season one episode at a time at 3 p.m. Eastern every week.
Mondays (beginning Monday):
We still don’t know what we’ll be covering at 11 a.m. Eastern, but we’ve got some intriguing candidates. We’ll tell you just as soon as we know!
At 1 p.m. Eastern, it seems only appropriate for Oliver Sava to continue his jaunt through the DC Animated Universe. His Batman: The Animated Series reviews end in just a couple of weeks, and we’ll resume his Justice League reviews shortly thereafter.
At 3 p.m. Eastern, Myles McNutt thought our schedule was all well and good, but it was missing some wacky doctor sitcoms. Thus, we’ve decided to return to his reviews of Scrubs, which will resume with the show’s third season, still covering two episodes per week.
Tuesdays (beginning June 4):
Okay, so, technically, you can look for a new review of The Shield today, and you probably should. Brandon Nowalk’s pieces—running every week at 11 a.m. Eastern—are great dissections of what made the show so terrific. If you’ve fallen behind, catch up!
John Teti has been reviewing Six Feet Under for the last couple of summers, and we’re thrilled to have him back, once again reviewing one episode per week at 1 p.m. Eastern. He’ll be working his way through the controversial-at-the-time season three, in which nothing seems to happen until everything happens. This will make sense eventually. We promise.
Finally, Erik Adams has been hoping to check back into The Office, even though he just left. And we couldn’t say no, which is why he’ll be looking back at the American series’ first three seasons—the ones we didn’t cover before TV Club started—beginning next week. This feature will run every week at 3 p.m. Eastern, and it will cover two episodes per week. (We wanted to point to that review we did of the American pilot during coverage of the British series, but Erik was having none of it.)
As always, you can keep an eye on What’s On Tonight for changes to this schedule as they come along, and we’ll be sitting out most major holidays.
If you didn’t see your favorite show listed here, that doesn’t mean it’s not coming someday. Continue to throw out those suggestions in comments! Except for The Wire. We’re not doing that one until 2015. Just because it makes you angry, that’s why.