Every year, my top 10 TV list is something of a misnomer. The first five, six or seven shows are usually pretty obvious and come to me more or less immediately. Beyond that, you have essentially a fifteen-way tie for eighth place. Below, in alphabetical order, is my next-10 list: shows that could just as [...]

All three cable networks just carried live coverage of the press conference in which Miss USA Tara Conner was spared from losing her crown by pageant honcho Donald Trump, in exchange for agreeing to enter rehab. And I just have to say, thank God they finally ended the war in Iraq so we can afford [...]

Amid all the hubbub in a certain newsmagazine over digital democracy, sousveillance and user-generated-media empires, let us take a moment to remember those who toiled at the old-fashioned, quaint task of making expensive entertainments, under contract to giant corporations, for millions of people to watch passively, while being paid a gigantic pile of money to [...]

We tend to forget because it comes in the middle of Oscar-handicapping season, but the Golden Globes honors TV shows too. I’ll leave it to my movie colleagues to pick over the film nominees (except to say: Bobby? Wha? Are they sure they didn’t mean Best Comedy, Unintentional?). But the TV nods left a critic [...]

On NBC’s Heroes, the character Zach (Thomas Dekker)–the best friend of indestructible cheerleader Claire–was not supposed to  be one of the superpowered characters. It turns out, however, that he has the amazing power to transform himself from a gay teenager to a straight one. According to gay-news website afterelton.com, that’s precisely what happened to the [...]

VINCE BUCCI / GETTYPrince performs during the American Idol Season 5 Finale in Hollywood in May, 2006. CBS’s announcement that Prince will be the musical headliner of the upcoming Super Bowl is a step forward for the show’s musical interest (following on the last two, even older-and-less-relevant choices, The Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney). But [...]

One of the pleasures of the first season of Sleeper Cell, Showtime’s terrorism drama, was that it didn’t rely on as many TV contrivances as shows like 24–superhuman agents, miraculous computer hacks, women chased by cougars. It showed the fight against terrorism, and terrorism itself, as human enterprises with flaws and foibles. Terrorists and Feds [...]

From my sometime nemeses at the Parents Television Council comes word that NBC, like Saul on the road to Damascus, may have had a change of heart in its dealings with the Bible-oriented cartoon VeggieTales. As I wrote earlier, NBC had been editing out overtly religious messages from the cartoon when broadcasting it as part [...]

In my Culture Complex column this week, Matt Lauer puts on his Cronkite costume. What NBC’s declaration of civil war vis-a-vis the fighting in Iraq means (that the momentum is against the White House in its Long War of Semantics) and doesn’t mean (that the media has suddenly decided to brave up and call ‘em [...]

The Big Red Car will, sadly, be toot-toot-chugga-chugging without Greg Page. The 34-year-old lead singer for the Australian kids’-music supergroup The Wiggles (anyone who refers to them as "the children’s Beatles" underestimates The Wiggles’ popularity) announced that he would quit performing with the group because of illness. The disease–orthostatic intolerance–is not life threatening, he said [...]