I’m not ashamed to admit my affinity for The Amazing Race, now in its sixth season. This show does fall victim to the trappings of all “reality” television shows—dysfunctional couples, breast implants—but the pace and international backdrops, I like to tell myself, make it better than the others. Imagine my surprise the other night when ...

With the second season of Six Feet Under out now on DVD, I recently gave in to Netflix and spent many consecutive evenings relaxing with the dysfunctional Fisher family, the proprietors of a Los Angeles funeral home. Brenda, the wild, aimless girlfriend of wild, aimless Nate Fisher, may be half-Jewish, but her cultural legacy is ...

“I wanna bless their socks off,” says Ann Marie Doverspike, the persistently perky born-again California mom who moved in with the Eglys, “Jews with horses” in rural Maryland, on Fox’s Trading Spouses last night. I gave up on reality TV three Survivors ago, but when the teaser announced, “Faith will be tested,” I made sure ...

In the strange pseudo-reality of television, there are certain givens. Lessons are learned, cases are closed, Jews are from New York. When in Los Angeles, they are fish out of water, decrying the poor quality of bagels and the lack of intellectual stimulation.
Recently, however, the Fox network has begun to shed light on a little ...

The Blues Brothers were on cable the other night, and I tuned in just as Jake and Elwood take the stage at a roadhouse that features “both kinds” of music—”country and western.” Impersonating a band called the Good Ole Boys, they get pelted with beer bottles for a syncopated opening number before subduing the unruly ...

The fourth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David’s HBO comedy series, is over, but people are still talking about its second-to-last episode, “The Survivor,” which upends traditional views of everything from adultery to the afterlife. The episode’s centerpiece is a dinner party celebrating the renewal of Larry and Cheryl’s wedding vows. Colby Donaldson, one ...