"And to our top story this morning, which is Katie," said Matt Lauer, on Katie Couric’s last day of waking up America for NBC. On behalf of the Today show staff, let Tuned In just say how glad we all are that no one blew up the White House this morning. Boy, would it have [...]

Denis Leary’s firefighter dramedy Rescue Me returns for its third season tonight on FX, and while I recommend that you catch it for all the reasons I’ve written about before–Leary’s acid-dripping, self-destructive performance, the show’s treatment of machismo and self-deception and Irish Catholic guilt–another reason is that it has a kickass credits sequence. Credits sequences [...]

SPOILER ALERT: If you don’t yet know what happens when you don’t press the "Execute" button in the hatch, press the "Back" button on your browser. Jack, Kate and Sawyer captured by the Others. The hatch blown up. Locke and Eko possibly blown to smithereens. Michael and Walt on a boat. Sayid, Sun and Jin [...]

In another sign of the deep, lightning-fast changes sweeping the news media, ABC today took the radical step of naming an old white man as sole anchor of World News Tonight. Charles Gibson–originally floated as a likely successor to Peter Jennings when Jennings died last year–got the job he was passed over for in December, [...]

SPOILER ALERT: This post reveals plot points from last night’s Sopranos, including the one you’re probably wondering about. Nobody changes: this, if anything, is the relentless message of The Sopranos. For six seasons, the characters have conformed to their patterns, their upbringing and their form despite their best efforts: Carmela, never able to break her [...]

The upfronts are over, the stars are jetting back to L.A., and the ad executives are dry-cleaning the spilled Campari off their party suits. The fall schedule annoucements found 5 or 6 networks—depending whom you count—in wildly different situations: NBC flailing, ABC feeling good but filling a lot of holes, Fox and CBS standing mostly [...]

Everyone, if they live long enough, becomes their parents. For Fox, that moment came today, at its upfront at the Armory in Manhattan. It unveiled a schedule that promised stability and consistency, replacing only a few shows. It previewed two traditional sitcoms, one starring Brad Garrett, and boasted a Jerry Bruckheimer procedural. Look in the [...]

At Madison Square Garden this morning, the brand-new CW network unveiled it’s slogan, Free to Be… Around half the actors and producers at The WB and UPN are Free to Be this morning, after their shows were canceled in the merge: Free to Be updating their resumes, getting new head shots, organizing their sock drawers. [...]

SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t watched Lost yet, you have no business within 100 feet of a computer. So we finally saw Walt and learned what happened at the Others’ camp with Michael.  Some of it was obvious (the Others are interested in Walt’s abilities and have been testing him), some less so (turns out [...]

CBS is the Tevye of TV networks: Tradition! Tradition! It’s CBS that gives you 60 Minutes, old-school crime procedurals, old-fashioned sitcoms, shot with three cameras in front of a studio audience, that actually stay on the air from season to season. For every Survivor, there’s an NCIS–uncool, meat-and-potatoes programs that heartland America can recognize, from [...]

Today at the Hilton Theater in New York City, executives of MyNetworkTV announced their exciting, provocative, all-high-definition new fall schedule of shows. Undoubtedly the first thing you want to know about the exciting, provocative, all-high-definition fall schedule of MyNetworkTV is… what the squank is MyNetworkTV? Whose NetworkTV? Did I order a NetworkTV? Answer: probably not, [...]

ANDREW ECCLES / ABC The upfronts are a song and dance routine. At ABC’s presentation at Lincoln Center today, for instance, network execs noted that while ABC is not actually the number one network, they are the number one network in "upscale audiences," however they define the term. (Said Jimmy Kimmel during a mid-upfront monologue: [...]

You would think, with all the buzz surrounding its big marquee dramas, that ABC would not have much work to do in drawing up a new schedule. But ABC’s lineup is a little like a Central American oligarchy: there is a tiny elite, a vast underclass and not much in between. Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy [...]

You’re a once-powerful, now struggling TV network, one of whose many, many problems is a late-night comedy show, still pulling in viewers but widely regarded as mediocre for most of the past decade or two. What’s the solution? More of it! Twice–no, three times as much! To be fair, Saturday Night Live is still capable [...]

You’re a once-powerful, now struggling TV network, one of whose many, many problems is a late-night comedy show, still pulling in viewers but widely regarded as mediocre for most of the past decade or two. What’s the solution? More of it! Twice–no, three times as much! To be fair, Saturday Night Live is still capable [...]

Tuned In will be spending this week at the upfronts — the week, once every year, when the broadcast networks rent out Manhattan venues like Radio City Music Hall and Lincoln Center to unveil their fall schedules to their advertisers. There are musical numbers, skits and plenty of song-and-dance, at least the variety that involves [...]

There have been several insinuations over the years that the voting on American Idol is rigged. If it is, we learned last night that it is not rigged nearly well enough, as America chose to vote leather-lunged rocker Chris Daughtry–long pegged as a favorite to win–off the show. I’m not crying for Daughtry, who (1) [...]

SPOILER ALERT: Stop reading now if you don’t want to learn that last night’s show revealed that Eko is actually the reincarnation of the polar bear killed in the pilot episode. Just kidding. Although it would be cool. But seriously, stop reading. Last night’s episode of Lost was titled "?," which if nothing else is [...]