The best TV critic, ever

My buddy Dave Waldon, RIP

How Dracula would have run the war on terrorism
As part of the Herald's coverage of the Miami Book Fair, several critics and reporters were asked to do single-shot Q&As with visiting authors. As a television critic, of course, I regard reading as not merely a waste of time but a threat to everything that makes America great. Nonetheless, a job's a job. So I spoke with Sid Jacobson, co-author (with Ernie Colón) of the graphic novel Vlad The Impaler:

Screen Gems: TV the week of November 8
How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin (9 p.m. Monday, WPBT-PBS 2) -- Forget NATO and nuclear deterrents and all that stuff: This documentary says it was really the Beatles that won the Cold War. Plus, how are you going to pass up a chance to hear a Russian Beatles cover band perform its hit Khrushchev Era Rock? Starz Inside: Sex and the Cinema (10 p.m. Tuesday, Starz) -- Any documentary that somehow manages to find common ground in No

I think ABC's got a hit on its hands
Here's a photo from Thursday's rally in Washington to protest the Democratic health care bill. (Pointed out to me by my TV buddy Kate O'Hare, I should add.)

How much do we love hungry lizards? LOTS.
ABC's Tuesday debut of V pulled in 13.9 million viewers. That's not just the highest-rated series premiere of this season, but of the past five seasons. Last show to grab that big an audience for its first episode: ABC's Lost, in 2004. The chances for a two-episode crossover in which the V lizards visit the island and one or more of them have sex with Sawyer, I suspect, just doubled.

Did Rod Serling write 'V'?
In my review of ABC's V the other day, I noted that the original 1980s miniseries on which it's based was inspired by the 1935 Sinclair Lewis novel It Can't Happen Here, which depicts a fascist takeover of the United States. But several readers have noted another possible influence: a 1962 episode of The Twilight Zone called To Serve Man. In it, a newly arrived super race of space aliens offers a lot of help to humans, and even skeptics are won over when they discover that one of the visitors' favorite books has the title