#eric gould

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Elric Illustration Eric Gould

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"Like all good period pieces, it’s made a fascinating collision of old world technology with the new as they morph and twist each other into the thing we know today as modern medicine."

Eric Gould reviews 'The Knick.'

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"Those looking in on Friday night during Bill Maher’s annual summer hiatus will probably be wondering what’s happening when the best HBO can cook up is Chris Lilley’s latest import of brat-hood, Jonah From Tonga." Eric Gould reviews the HBO series.

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Eric Gould reviews a new PBS four-part series hosted by Boston architect Stephen Chung called "Cool Spaces! The Best New Architecture", rolling out along PBS stations nationwide beginning in April.

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'The Poisoner's Handbook,' based on Deborah Blum’s 2010 bestselling book, "The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York," is a new PBSAmerican Experience documentary that follows Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler from 1918, as they became among the first to develop forensic chemistry into a reliable courtroom standard.

Eric Gould reviews the new documentary at TVWW. PBS' American Experience airs 'The Poisoner’s Handbook' tonight at 8 p.m. ET (Check local listings.)

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When a Spring Bunny Gets Dolled Up, It's Never a Bad Hare Day

Spring is almost here, and new life is on the way. Fertility signs abound, with marshmallow chicks and pastel eggs stocking the shelves. And, of course, there are chocolate bunnies. But the warm weather also brings out some lagomorphs that aren't all about innocence and rebirth. One is a particularly adept provocateur -- a con man, illusionist, escape artist.

A master of disguise, he's gotten out of tight spots costumed as a barber and a circus clown. Ever resourceful, he's not above coming out as a farmer's daughter, a nurse or a ballerina.

It was Dana Carvey's Garth Algar, Wayne Campbell's sidekick in 1992's Wayne's World, who once pondered the appeal of Bugs Bunny in drag...

Garth asks Wayne, "Did you ever find Bugs Bunny attractive when he put on a dress and played a girl bunny?"

Then, after the awkward pause that follows, he quickly backpedals.

"Neither did I. I was just asking."

But who among us hasn't wondered: Was it us, or did Bugs really blossom as a hillbilly ingenue, square dancing in a midriff blouse, ears pulled back in a pretty bow, a bright stroke of red lipstick underneath batting, mascara eyelashes? You could almost overlook the buck teeth.

Garth's ill-adjusted sexual impulses aside, if you Google "Bugs Bunny in Drag," you'll come up with over 2 million hits -- a number of them dedicated to serious compilations of all the various outfits Bug got gussied up in. (Click HERE for a hare-raising sampler.)

At a Santa Fe gallery, dedicated to the work of one of Bugs' main animators, Chuck Jones, there's even a timeline display of them, mapping out some of the get-ups over the decades.

Here -- hare -- are just a few:

One website even postulates that Bugs, disguised as a female, was the ultimate Libertarian-Anarchist, disarming traditional power simply by dressing as a woman and overpowering targeted victims with unexpected, and distracting, big wet kisses.

- Eric Gould

Read the rest of the column on TV Worth Watching.

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Showtime's 'House of Lies' Still Standing -- And Soaring

House of Lies, Showtime's dark comedy about high-profile, high-risk management consultants, is halfway through its first season -- and it's a bite-sized, half-hour express train, compressing modern life into a plutonium-dense show that's as fast and funny as it is smart.

If you haven't been following, make the effort to catch up, and catch a worthwhile look at the underbelly of corporate culture and what television, as a medium, is capable of achieving...

Each Sunday night at 10 ET on Showtime's House of Lies, a crack, itinerant team of management consultants flies in to different cities, and different companies, to tell them what they're doing wrong and what they need to change. In some cases, it's to profit. In others, merely to survive.

Based on Martin Kihn's 2005 book House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time, this half-hour comedy follows the team led by Don Cheadle's Marty Kaan. Marty is a brilliant, agile and extremely competitive senior executive, who has one eye on fixing the problems in question and the other eye laser-locked on closing the consulting deal -- and the attendant potential billable hours, worth millions to him and his company.

Marty is not nicknamed the "Kaan-man" for nothing. He's quicker than the corporate sharks he's trying to outwit. But even though he's badly behaved, and often ruthless, we soon warm to him as an antihero with a heart. It's hard not to like him when he returns home each night to his cross-dressing 10-year-old son, of whom he is fiercely, almost ferally protective.

That Marty has actual feelings, and isn't all about the money, is fertile territory for a show about sharks in the tank. Marty and his team (collectively known as a pod) know that feelings are as much a part of business as spreadsheets. One of the show's main obsessions, and observations, is where those feelings go, and how we live with them, as the winner-take-all business ethics require some ugly, heartless things.

- Eric Gould

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Bill Moyers is Back, So Let's Get Back to Moyers - Starting with 'Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth'

One of the greatest television miniseries ever made - and made 25 years ago, no less - is a documentary. Actually, a discussion: Two older men in chairs, talking. For six hours.

Be still, beating hearts - it's not the lost footage of My Dinner With Andre. (Even though we love the action figures.)

Hard to believe, and harder to convey, but trust this: The 1987 PBS Bill Moyers interviews with Prof. Joseph Campbell in 1987 are impossible to turn off. Their discussions, ranging from shared mythologies and icons to beliefs in God, gods and the hereafter, carry along at the absorbing pace of the best scripted drama.

Entitled Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, the series is brilliant in its simplicity - and simply brilliant. Call it The Power of Television.

The series is TV Worth Watching any time - but all the more so now, as Moyers resumes broadcasting this Friday, Jan. 13, with a new show, Moyers & Company.

(Check local listings for times, channels and even dates. The program is distributed to local public TV member stations via American Public Television, not by PBS. In many markets, including New York and Philadelphia, it will be shown Sundays, prior to prime time. For Moyers' own website, and for details, visit HERE.)

- Eric Gould