Just after GM got in trouble for airing a Super Bowl ad about a robot dreams about committing suicide, Volkswagen started running a commercial in which a man threatens to jump off a building–complaining about global warming, alienation from his neighbors and reality TV–until someone drives up and tells him that VW is selling three [...]

SPOILER ALERT: Don’t read this until you’ve watched last night’s Lost. But don’t blame me if you have a mysterious premonition about this post in the meantime. There was a split at the Tuned In household over this episode. I thought it was a good episode… of The Twilight Zone. As an episode of Lost–eh. [...]

In my 24 post this morning I wrote: The PTC has certainly criticized violence in TV before. But I wonder if they’ve savvily realized that–with the Democrats on the rise–they’ll get farther in the current political climate with anti-violence rather than anti-sex campaigns. (The former being liberals’ preferred arena of meddling in pop culture, the [...]

I’ve been working my way through some upcoming episodes of HBO’s Rome, which, even though it’s taken a few critical shots this season, I still find lushly entertaining. (Next week, by the way, we finally get one of those lavish battle scenes that people have whinged that the show is missing–Philippi–and it’s a doozy.) My [...]

Thought-provoking piece by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer about 24 and its use of torture. Some military officials, she reports, including the dean of West Point, are so concerned about the show’s outlandish use of torture that they recently appealed to the producers to change it. And if you’d like to judge your torture and [...]

This is the part of the American Idol season in which the show descends gently into a relative ratings hammock, which sways gently between the Really Bad Singers episodes and the Really Good Singers episodes (the final four or so). But I’ve always had a soft spot for the Hollywood-audition episodes, which introduce a nice [...]

“Wiggling around the Hudson Theatre stage in a party frock with plunging decolletage, [Tina] Fey told the crowd, ‘I hear Aaron Sorkin is in Los Angeles wearing the same dress– but longer, and not funny.’” (Scroll down for the item.) Next week on Studio 60: NBS executives order Matt and Danny to change their show [...]

Because CNN is all down with the Internizzle, American Morning has been having anchor Miles O’Brien stand in the studio in front of a bank of video feeds, streaming in from cnn.com, and narrating the action. Here’s O’Brien at 8:43 this morning, as the studio camera panned across the video wall: Let’s look at the [...]

I know I’m coming to the Grammys a bit late. What can I say? I’m battling to keep up with my sleepless, indefatigable TiVo like John Henry driving steel. My colleague and time.com editor Josh Tyrangiel has already done a yeoman’s job reviewing the performances. (Although I would add that, to get the full effect [...]

My writing-about-stuff-obligations have been encroaching on my watching-stuff obligations lately, so I have a little brush to clear from my TiVo backlog–particularly Battlestar Galactica, on which I feel I owe you a post sometime. I have a date with Topic-of-the-Day Heroes, and a solid commitment to finally get back in touch with Prison Break (or [...]

A couple commenters on this morning’s Heroes-vs.-Lost throwdown make a good point: the shows are built to the tastes of two different breeds of geek–comic-book/adventure fans for Heroes, mythology obsessives for Lost. We’re into Grossmanian territory here, but let’s explore this. I think there’s some overlap between the two; you can’t ignore the comic book [...]

First they came for the Snickers guys. Now Super Bowl ad objectors have taken down another spot from the big game. GM has announced that it will redo a commercial in which an assembly-line robot has a dream in which he commits suicide after dropping a bolt, after protests from a suicide-prevention group. Let me [...]

It’s hard to stop a runaway meme, and the one that’s taken off in TV this year is that Heroes in the new Lost. Or, rather, the new, improved Lost. The argument goes like this: Lost used to be a great, entertaining show, but it got so up its own, um, hatch with plot convolutions [...]

Is it unhip to be blogging about Survivor? Is this, like, so 2000 of me? Fine. I don’t care. You punk kids go play Wii or something. Here’s what I thought: * Now there’s a novel idea–what if you cast a reality show with a bunch of white contestants, and a bunch of black contestants, [...]

When Fox News went on the air over 10 years ago, it sold itself with the brilliant slogan “Fair and Balanced.” As a piece of marketing, it was ruthless and efficient, in four short syllables saying that there was a problem with the rest of TV news and that Fox was the solution. Now, as [...]

In the print edition of TIME, my Culture Complex this week is about the burgeoning and horrifying phenomenon of hipster-parent memoirs. Toddlers in mosh pits! Babies in indie record stores! Gen-X parents clinging to their alternative cred with Veggie Booty-stained fingers! Of course, it’s not a hipster scene without a feud among splinter groups, and [...]