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). He is at work on a fifth.
Bianculli is professor of Television Studies at Rowan University in New Jersey.
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CBS' new drama series centers on a small legal firm in Silicon Valley that was created to do battle with the billionaire tech-company behemoths. Cupertino is funny, clever and amazingly current.
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John Steinbeck's 1952 epic was first adapted to film in 1955 by director Elia Kazan. Now, Kazan's granddaughter Zoe has directed a new Netflix miniseries, starring Florence Pugh. -
Second City TV was a low-budget sketch comedy show that came out of Canada in the mid-1970s and aired until 1984. Netflix's new six-season collection is an (almost) complete treasure trove of SCTV.
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The new Hulu series stars Emmy Rossum as an FBI agent on the trail of a serial killer. It was inspired by Black Widow, but Furious totally transforms the 1987 film. -
A 10-part HBO Max spin-off to The Big Bang Theory expands on that long-running sitcom by following a quartet of its characters. Every episode offers a new multiverse — and surprising cameos. -
Based on Marissa Stapley's 2021 crime novel, Lucky is an aggressively entertaining series about a con woman who absconds with millions of dollars — then must evade the mob and the law. -
Critic David Bianculli says The Bear concludes its run with a beautiful final episode. And we listen back to a 2025 interview with Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who plays an abrasive and ornery cook/maître d'.
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Netflix's new Little House series features the same characters and setting as the original, but its reliance on hand-held cameras, in extreme close-up, calls too much attention to itself. -
The Scottish-born comic became a U.S. citizen in 2008. He showcases his goofy sense of humor, and his appetite for the unpredictable, in a new five-part documentary series for CNN. -
David Bianculli offers an appreciation, then we listen back to a '06 interview with Burrows, who died June 19. He directed over 1,000 sitcom episodes, co-created Cheers and chose the cast for Friends.
