My Brooklyn will be on the PBS World series America ReFramed this week – starting tonight, January 14, at 8:00 pm. Check your local listings here.My Brooklyn is a documentary about the transformation of Downtown Brooklyn’s Fulton Mall from a successful African-American and Caribbean shopping district into a luxury residential neighborhood. It sheds new light on the debate around gentrification by exposing the corporate and government actors driving seemingly natural neighborhood change.

In the New York City area, it’s on WLIW World (Cablevision 132, Time Warner 164, Verizon Fios 473) tonight, Jan. 14th, at 8pm, and repeats at midnight. It’s also on tomorrow, Jan. 15th, at 8am and 2pm.

If you are not in New York, go to this link and enter your zip code at the top of the page; It should be showing on or around January 14, and tends to repeat a few times over the course of this week.

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It’s not uncommon for an established, beloved and critically-acclaimed TV show to take a sudden plunge into generic, hackneyed, unwatchable dirge, never to recover. In fact, this is such a common occurrence on TV that there’s a term for it. However, from such depths or from a place of mediocrity, to one of sudden and undeniable brilliance, that is uncharted territory, until now.

Boardwalk Empire is a series that’s been met with major ambivalence from both TV critics and the viewing public. With its veritable dream team of HBO production mercenaries, spendthrift budget and ostentatious Marty Scorsese-directed premier, Boardwalk Empire needed to quickly make a splash in order to win over the public. It’s a condition being grappled with right now by NBC and Whitney Cummings due to their network’s overzealous support of her new sitcom, Whitney. Americans like an underdog story, and in the generation of the 99 and the 1 percent, a non-underdog has perhaps more to prove to a potential audience than ever before. As the first season of Boardwalk Empire played out, critics were mainly lukewarm on it’s efforts and while ratings were mainly high, the show’s viewership seemed as if they were waiting it out to see if something big was going to take place.

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