Television

Netflix's women-in-prison series, based on a memoir by Piper Kerman, returns Friday. Fresh Air listens back to interviews with Kerman and series creator Jenji Kohan.

CBS announced Thursday that the spot held by David Letterman for 21 years will go to Stephen Colbert.

Critic David Bianculli remembers watching the original news coverage of Kennedy's assassination — four days of unprecedented television — when he was 10 years old. He recalls how from that point on, TV, not radio, was the dominant medium for breaking news.

The British musical private-eye drama, which first aired in 1986, starred Michael Gambon as a novelist hospitalized with a horrible skin condition who tries to write a Hollywood screenplay in his mind. David Bianculli explains why the miniseries is "TV's most polished, audacious masterpiece."

High-profile changes in returning shows --Two and a Half Men and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation — offer the most excitement in broadcast TV this fall. Critic David Bianculli says the new shows mostly disappoint, though you may be intrigued by Sarah Michelle Gellar in CW's Ringer.

David Bianculli laments the silence that greeted the golden anniversaries of classic shows such as My Three Sons and The Andy Griffith Show -- and wonders why TV doesn't have an equivalent to Turner Classic Movies.

David Lynch's mysterious, groundbreaking serial drama premiered on April 8, 1990. Twenty years later, critic John Powers looks back at the cult series, which he says "smuggled avant-garde into prime time."

The Emmy-darling AMC TV series devotes an almost fetishistic attention to style. But is there any substance beyond the surfaces? Critic-at-large John Powers goes looking — and comes back with one especially well-rounded answer.

TV historian David Bianculli worries that the death of analog television isn't politically neutral: It threatens to leave the neediest viewers in the Dark Ages.

Rock critic Ken Tucker looks back on American Idol's most recent season, when Adam Lambert and Kris Allen vied for the top spot. He says the wrong aspiring idol won.