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HBO Goes to Hell

Last summer at the TV critics’ tour, there was a minor brouhaha when a reporter charged that many of the TV journalists left a conference room before the presentation by Roger Ailes of Fox News–the implication being that liberal TV critics were staging a walkout against the conservative Ailes. Conservatives who were offended at the [...]

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It's Not TV Press Tour, It's HBO Press Tour

Today is HBO day at the cable press tour. It would be impolite to say so, since today also featured presentations by AMC, GSN, Sundance and sundry other abbreviations and nouns. But charmed as we were to see the world’s greatest cat at the GSN luncheon–to promote the network’s airing of the Cat-Minster cat competition, [...]

I Saw the Light

Alice Walton’s failed attempt last year to buy The Gross Clinic, Thomas Eakins’ 1875 canvas of an operation being performed by a Philadelphia surgeon, Dr. Samuel Gross, led me recently to pick up Portrait, the brisk new biography of Eakins by William S. McFeeley, and to take a new look at Max Schmitt in a [...]

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A Good Dealer Doesn't Use His Own Product

Television is the most influential and widely enjoyed entertainment medium in the world. Except, apparently, among the people who make and work in television. If you cover TV for any length of time, you learn that people in the TV biz watch, or at least say they watch, incredibly little TV. Especially their direct competition. [...]

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Dead Tree Alert: Think You Know Jack?

I would have posted this earlier, but the dirty little secret is that even some of us who work at TIME have a hard time remembering it now comes out on Fridays. (Run to the newsstands, people! Run like the wind!) In the print issue, my Culture Complex column looks at the new season of [...]