Thanksgiving weekend in the United States is a four-day festival of overindulgence: Giant meals, giant balloons representing pop-culture favorites, giant savings at the big box store on Friday morning. As we did in 2013, The A.V. Club aims to contribute to this tradition of extreme consumption with a guide to some TV…

HBO may have canceled Enlightened just as it was hitting its stride, and nothing ever came of the proposed show about the Fabios of the world, but HBO still wants to be in the Mike White business. The network picked up a pilot for White’s Mamma Dallas in October, and now the series—about a drag queen serving as a…

Year in and year out, when December rolls around, pop culture critics and fanatics find themselves neck-deep in a year-end catch up. It’s the time of year where we engage with the music, movies, TV shows, and books that we’ve missed or put off throughout the year in an effort to make our best-of lists as comprehensive…

Following her turn in The A.V. Club’s favorite TV show of 2013, Laura Dern has turned her attention to another monolithic force that she can tear down from the inside: American football. In a comedic fashion, that is: Variety reports that the Enlightened star and co-creator is developing a yet-untitled big-screen…

Showcasing the same mixture of openhearted forgiveness and basic pragmatism that characterized his much-missed protagonist Amy Jellicoe, Enlightened creator Mike White is working with HBO once again. Sure, HBO hurt White when it canceled Enlightened after two seasons, but White surely knows that forgiving others is…

For 2013’s best-of-TV list, The A.V. Club ’s TV writers got together to discuss the shows that got us talking the most over the past 12 months. Our gold-medal winner for the best TV of 2013 is Enlightened.

HBO doesn’t always deign to present an executive session at the Television Critics’ Association press tour, but every so often, in the summer, CEO Richard Plepler and president of programming Michael Lombardo can be lured out of their great money vault to appear before the unwashed masses, and, inevitably, the…

Great timing, Web Therapy. The party’s in full swing. Everyone’s talking about Carrie’s pink Manolos. Passionate award-watchers are chewing everyone’s ears off about the Emmy nominations for Amy Jellicoe (Enlightened) and Olivia Pope (Scandal). Orange Is The New Black is the buzziest show in a month. James…

“Carded And Discarded” (season 1, episode 7; originally aired 1/10/2000)

In 2000, the Emmys made the choice to differentiate between single-camera and multi-camera series when recognizing the work of cinematographers. It was an approach that gave comedies a chance at being recognized: In the previous decade, no comedy had garnered a nomination in the combined category. However, it was also…

“Kim Kelly Is My Friend” (season 1, episode 4; originally aired 9/5/2000)

Brandon Nowalk: I didn’t like the first season of Game Of Thrones until I watched season two. It felt simplistic, especially compared to the mercenary game of Risk the show has become. Cut off the two subplots in the North and the East, which are mostly disconnected anyway give or take a raven, and the main story is a…

A couple of months ago, Emily Nussbaum, TV critic for the New Yorker, introduced a type she called the “hummingbird.” The hummingbird is a woman who chips away at her goals—usually noble—via the power of positivity, but the flip side of that positivity is that she can be really, really irritating. It’s a type that, at…

Rectify debuts with back-to-back episodes tonight at 9 p.m. on Sundance Channel. Next Monday, it moves to its regular timeslot of 10 p.m.

The A.V. Club recently sat down with Mike White to talk about Enlightened’s second—and, sadly, final—season. The first part, which covers the season’s first half, is here.

The second season of Enlightened seemed to pursue almost opposite fates with critics and viewers. The eight episodes aired to massive critical acclaim in a cozy Sunday-night slot on HBO, telling a story about a divisive woman using her quest for change to become a whistleblower against her own company. However, only a…

According to Buzzfeed’s Kate Aurthur, HBO has canceled the critically beloved but horribly rated Enlightened, opting not to give the show a third season. The network has yet to confirm the cancellation, so if you want to hold out hope until that happens, go right ahead. If any network was going to renew Enlightened,…

Here’s what’s up in the world of TV for Thursday, March 7, 2013. All times are Eastern.

HBO’s Enlightened just ended its second season, which eclipsed season one in quality and will likely end up on many critics’ year-end lists. Todd VanDerWerff eloquently laid out many of the reasons for that show’s qualitative leap this season, so restating them would be redundant. But one of the reasons Enlightened…

So what do you do if you’re the producer of a popular TV show, and you want to introduce something to one of the characters that comes out of nowhere? Let’s be charitable here and say that this has always been in the plans for your character from the start, but you just haven’t had a chance to work it in so far. After…