Shahs of Sunset, Bravo’s latest Hobbesian experiment on the lives of the nouveau riche, is a fascinating piece of television—in spite of itself

Like religion, TV shows must understand how to tell stories over time if they hope to endure. The Simpsons gets it. Downton Abbey doesn’t.

A visit to a Hasidic family in Brooklyn—where nobody knows who she is—magically transforms Oprah back into the person she once was

The upper-crust Edwardians of Downton Abbey, now back on PBS, are as bound by tradition as the shtetl Jews of Fiddler on the Roof

The invented Seinfeld winter holiday Festivus, like the late Christopher Hitchens, demands a religion-like dogma  around nonbelief

Sarah Silverman seemed poised to usher in a new generation of secure, sexual, and powerful female comics. Instead, she went for empty shocks and cheap laughs.

Patti Stanger, host of the Bravo reality show Millionaire Matchmaker, is the iconic antidote to the bloated expectations and self-delusion of our times

The hit Israeli television organized-crime drama Ha-Borer takes an Orthodox mobster’s view of the Jewish state’s moral landscape

The Jewish hero of the FX sitcom The League offers an engaging blend of Woody Allen’s neurosis and Larry David’s intransigence

Video games are the medium of revenge, and for Israeli boys killing Hitler in Wolfenstein, that meant addressing some deep traumas

A show about intermarriage, Mad About You never once mentioned religion. It’s a monument to the comedic dangers of ethnic cleansing.

Rescue Me, ending a seven-year run on FX, was the best artistic engagement with Sept. 11, and with the wounds New York sustained that day