If you watch only one police procedural on TV–and you probably should watch only one police procedural on TV–make it Dexter (Showtime, debuts Sunday), in which Michael C. Hall of Six Feet Under plays a serial killer who channels his impulses into finding and murdering other murderers. Hall is creepily appealing. The show’s meditations on [...]

SPOILER ALERT: There are no spoilers in the following post about Lost, because the new season doesn’t start until next Wednesday. Although who knows? Maybe I’m lying! Maybe there are spoilers! Maybe you should read anyway to find out! You’re so totally going to, aren’t you? Last night I watched the pre-season clips episode of [...]

OK, let’s get it out of the way: No, she isn’t ugly. In Ugly Betty (Thursdays, 8 p.m.), ABC’s charming, peculiar comic telenovela, fashon-magazine assistant Betty Suarez (America Ferrera) is only TV ugly, which is to say, she has dark hair and doesn’t disappear when she turns sideways. But that’s the point: playing a smart, [...]

Last night NBC aired the second episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, in which a fictional broadcast network made the principled decision to air a skit–titled "Crazy Christians"–despite boycott threats from religious groups. In what is either a great irony or a brilliant marketing coup, the network is in the middle of not [...]

Although I realize that every single person who reads this website assiduously reads the print version of TIME magazine, and vice versa–are you listening, Wall Street?–I’m starting an occasional service for those of you who can’t get enough of my tedious yammering valuable insight at Tuned In by pointing you to my articles in the [...]

TiVo owners: we’re discerning, we’re loyal, we’re annoying as crap. Get trapped next to one of us at a party, and we’ll soon be jawing your ears off about how our digital video recorders have changed our lives, freed us from slavery to the network schedules and to the lousy knockoff DVRs foisted on us [...]

My problem with Brothers and Sisters (ABC, Sundays, 10 p.m.) is not that it is not a good show. It’s not a good show, true. This is the family soap that marks the return of Calista Flockhart to TV, as a right-wing radio host who moves back to California to be closer to her liberal [...]

TV’s newest broadcast network, The CW–"We’re just like UPN and The WB, except greener"–debuted last night, with a two-hour installment of America’s Next Top Model. Some thoughts, in no particular order: * Dudes, dial down the green graphics. Seriously. It’s the next morning and I can still see bright orange when I stare at a [...]

There’s been a lot written about the profusion of serial shows this fall, which you could call the Lost or Grey’s Anatomy effect on TV. There’s been another, smaller effect, too: the House effect, in which networks have decided that a central, nasty or irascible character means ratings ka-ching! There are two dramas on the [...]

It’s not every TV show that starts off by asking a significant chunk of the audience to imagine, at 8 o’clock in the evening, that they’ve been instantly killed. But that’s what happens in the first episode of Jericho, debuting on CBS tonight, and it’s just warming up. Shortly after a prodigal son (Skeet Ulrich) [...]

I want to apologize to the makers of Kidnapped (NBC, Wednesdays, 10 p.m.) for not liking their show better. There’s a catchy enough premise: one kidnapping–the teen son of a superwealthy Manhattan family–investigated over the course of a season. There’s an interesting dual-track dynamic: an FBI agent (Delroy Lindo) leads the FBI investigation into the [...]

And verily, Oprah came unto Rachael. And Oprah spake, "Blessed are you, for you are Rachael, and upon this rock I will build my television empire. And neither the gates of the netherworld nor that has-been Martha Stewart shall prevail upon it." Sorry for going all biblical on you, but there was a whiff of [...]

The New York Times takes a look today at the evening-news race two weeks after Katie Couric started and finds that she’s made the ratings race more competitive: Last week, CBS and NBC were neck-and-neck, with CBS winning by only 70,000 viewers. After a long period of NBC dominance, it is for now anyone’s game. [...]

Tonight, CBS premieres Smith, its entry in the one-name-title, high-class-thieves sweepstakes (Hu$tle, Thief, Heist). I’ll keep my review short, as compensation, since CBS, mercilessly, did not do the same with the pilot. Big Big Movie Star Ray Liotta occupies the grim title role as, you guessed it, a family man with a double life, heading [...]

The consensus among TV critics is that this is an unusually strong new season of shows. A good half of the fall’s new shows are potential keepers, with attention-getting premises and cinematic looks. Spurred by challenging hits like Lost and itching for their debuts to get attention, the networks have fallen back on their most [...]

It’s rude to forget a birthday, but I believe Emily Post says it’s forgivable when the birthday is your own. Tuned In came into the world on Sept. 13, 2005, during that heady period of the mid-’00s when we all still believed that Martha Stewart was a celebrity. Back then, the blog was supposed to [...]

To start off, I would like to apologize on behalf of my race for stealing the chicken. On the first edition of Survivor: Apartheid Island, the only sign of interracial conflict was a minor one, but it reflected poorly on the white man. Jonathan, one of the members of the Caucasian–and when’s the last time [...]

How will the Vieira era be different from the Couric era? Meredith has only been on the Today show for one morning, but so far, the answer is: steamier. We should remember–and a bio reel prepared by Today took pains to remind us–that she’s a serious newswoman, having 60 Minutes on her resume alongside The [...]

School’s in by now in most of the country, and starting Sunday night, it’s back in for HBO’s The Wire. When it debuted in 2002, it was described, for lack of a better term, as a cop show. And it was, as far as that went: the first season described a single investigation into a [...]