Buried deep in the New York Times business section today, a report about a most curious Sony Pictures Television project: minisodes, or episodes of classic TV shows, cut down to five minutes or less to run on the Web. All the entertainment of your favorite camp classics, freed from the burden of narrative! As Steve [...]

HBO For a show that’s all about money, The Sopranos has never given us that clear a sense of what exactly Tony is (or isn’t) worth. So it jumped out at me when Hesh gave us his estimate of Tony’s assets: a mere $6 mil, give or take. It turns out Tony, like a good [...]

NBC Photo: Chris Haston I meant to work an Office review into my Alec Baldwin rant, but that went on and on and on, and after the umpteenth paragraph I thought I’d better play myself off. Decent, midlevel episode. Great concept (I laughed like a donkey when I saw the obscene watermark; then again, I’m [...]

NBC Photo: Virginia Sherwood I may be the last entertainment/TV blogger in the world not to comment on the Alec Baldwin incident. Technical difficulties are to blame: my technical inability to give a crap. Was Baldwin’s irate voicemail to his daughter inappropriate? Yeah. I dunno. I guess. Families are weird. Divorced celebrity families with tween [...]

I’m not generally in the habit of taking requests at Tuned In. But then again, I’m not generally in the habit of getting requests at Tuned In. Paul Lukasiak (hardest-workin’ poster in the time.com comments sections) asked in the Comments what I thought of last night’s Bill Moyers Journal on PBS, “Buying the War,” about [...]

ABC/ MARIO PEREZ SPOILER ALERT: If you don’t want me to ruin last night’s Lost for you, have your evil father give you $100,000 to give me in a paper bag. Or, just watch the episode before reading further. It’s true what they say: an island vacation can do wonders for your health. If Locke [...]

We at Tuned In headquarters are not made of stone. Watching the two-hour Idol Gives Back special last night with Mrs. Tuned In, we genuinely ached for the AIDS orphans in Kenya, the New Orleans kids–nearly two years after Katrina–living in conditions still stunning and unconscionable in a rich country, the African babies dying of [...]

Last fall, Rosie O’Donnell stormed onto the set of The View like a hurricane making landfall, swelling the ratings and becoming a constant publicity machine for the show after taking over from Meredith Vieira. But storms don’t blow forever, and at the top of this morning’s edition of The View, Hurricane Rosie announced that she’s [...]

It’s Idol Gives Back week on American Idol, and my reviews are posted. The plan to leverage the show’s fan base (and advertisers) for charities in the U.S. and Africa is greatly appreciated. It’s also greatly weird, in the context of a show that is, most weeks, a tough-nosed, cruel-to-be-kind competition. There was a strange [...]

It took a bit longer than predicted, but the Washington Post reports that the Federal Communications Commission will next week recommend that Congress start regulating TV violence (possibly even on cable), as it now does obscenity. And so the fight to solve the apparently widespread problem of young children accidentally watching 24 and The Shield, [...]

NBC Photo: Paul Drinkwater So the good news: Linderman, now the head cheese at Primatech, wants to heal the world. The bad news: to accomplish that, I and a few million of my fellow New Yorkers need to be blown up. “.07 Percent,” the title of the episode, refers to the portion of the human [...]

Just to show I’m a good sport, I thought I’d mention it’s TV Turnoff Week again. The good folks at TV Turnoff Network are inexhaustible, but I’m not, so here’s my case against TV Turnoff Week from last year, served up for you again like the Stamberg-family cranberry relish recipe NPR brings out every Thanksgiving. [...]

HBO Father’s Day came early on The Sopranos last night, and, typically, it was celebrated not with cards and neckties but with fisticuffs and Oedipal showdowns, actual and remembered. There was Tony, recalling his father’s salad days with Uncle Junior and Paulie Walnuts, and his current conflicted feelings toward “Uncle Paulie”; Uncle Junior’s mental-facility protege [...]

NBC Photo: Virginia Sherwood TV criticism is half review, half prediction. On the one hand you’re assessing whether the episode(s) of a new series that you’ve seen are any good; on the other, you’re gauging whether the premise, characters, writing and voice can hold up in the long run. It’s a little like reviewing a [...]

In the current Time, some thoughts on the Web 2.0-ness of the Virginia Tech shooting and its aftermath. Half the length of my usual columns and thus, at least by that standard, twice as good. In the essay I liken Cho’s Quicktime manifesto to a deranged parody of a MySpace page, by which I don’t [...]

…and calculated the precise amount of time that it is appropriate to take up with its exclusive multimedia manifesto from Cho Seung-Hui, the Virginia Tech killer. From a press release just issued: Upon receiving the materials from Cho Seung-Hui, NBC News took careful consideration in determining how the information should be distributed. We did not [...]

It’s not like I have anything much to say. But I figured some of our redoubtable Sanjayaphobes could use a place to comment, gloat, dance amidst the lighted torches and pitchforks whilst swinging Sanjaya’s lifeless head by its long raven tresses, etc. Have at it. Anyway, now we get to look forward to a couple [...]

SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t watched last night’s Lost yet, go and do it now… lest you change the future! ABC/ MARIO PEREZ To those of us who hold Charlie as our least favorite major Lost character, last night’s episode presents a conundrum. On the one hand, seeing him take an arrow in the throat [...]