Heroes: obvs. Less obvs: My HBO backlog. Over the course of my vacation and upfronts week, I received what feels like the next five years’ worth of future HBO programming: 5 episodes of Big Love, the perplxing-looking John from Cincinnati, Flight of the Conchords and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Exciting, but daunting, like [...]

WARNING: Sopranos discussion dead ahead. HBO It all comes back to the pool. The pool, where Tony first saw the family of ducks nesting at the beginning of the series, precipitating his panic attacks and trips to therapy, and where A.J. made the suicide attempt that he was, fortunately, too inept to carry out. “Maybe [...]

Code Monkey meets WOW. My Culture Complex column in the print TIME this week asks the musical question: why aren’t there more pop songs about white-collar workers? We have office sitcoms, office novels and office movies, but where are the office pop songs? Rock music has never lacked for zillionaires to romanticize farmhands and factory [...]

WARNING: Office spoilers. So: it’s a date. Pam and Jim are together, Jam has been achieved, order has been restored to the universe. A good if not great season-ender, and if the conclusion didn’t have the holy-crap factor of The Kiss last year, Pam’s closeup reaction to Jim’s return during her interview was–like everything Jenna [...]

Last year’s Fox upfront was memorable. Not in a good way. Held at the Armory in New York, it ran two and a half hours, and the jury-rigged air-conditioning couldn’t begin to cool the sweltering cave-like room. It was a grisly, bloody-Antietam of a show, and many of the advertising executives–the people these galas are [...]

To get into the CW upfront at Madison Square Garden, you walk through the “trend bar,” where waiters stand around with heaping trays of mini muffins and giant, CW-green-and-white posters announce the trends that the hip CW advertiser should be aware of. Not surprisingly, they are pretty much entirely about social technology and the environment. [...]

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers about Lost. Not necessarily the spoiler you’re thinking of. Which I guess may be a spoiler in itself. Sorry. ABC / MARIO PEREZ Damn you, Lost. Damn you for making me cry. Damn you for making me cry about Charlie. Damn you for making me cry about Charlie, and [...]

Spoilers about last night’s American Idol elimination follow. Whoa! I didn’t predict Melinda’s being voted off American Idol, but that won’t stop me from offering a few theories: 1. Repeat after me: It is not a singing contest. I’ve said it before, but I’ll repeat it–”You get on Idol by singing; you win Idol by [...]

I have seen the funniest video of the upfronts, and it was not created by any network. It was made by stewmurray47 at YouTube. Called Caruso Endless One-Liners, it mashes together (with CBS’s blessing) a string of corny Horatio Caine lines from CSI: Miami, with David Caruso putting on his trademark shades after almost every [...]

Hugh Jackman guest stars in (and produces) Viva Laughlin. 2007 Upfront Photo: Robert Voets/CBS The most important bit of news from CBS’s schedule-announcement press breakfast this morning may have been a spoiler about Lost. Or not. You tell me. One of CBS’s new dramas, Cane, costars Nestor Carbonell (Richard from Lost). Now I’m not saying [...]

American Idol reviews are live this morning. My guess for tonight: Jordin goes home, leaving a Melinda-vs.-Blake showdown that will be a more interesting stylistic contrast, but soured by the fact that the judges and producers, through their song choices, seemed to do everything to ensure that result short of cutting Jordin’s microphone cord. Feel [...]

The cast of Ugly Betty does a song and dance for advertisers. / ABC NBC, which is tanking in the ratings, had a screen at its upfront with trying-too-hard-to-impress demographic statistics. ABC, which has a few top ten shows, has Jimmy Kimmel’s Upfront Fun Facts, “Percentage of people pretending to text people on your Blackberries [...]

Spoilers! Spoilers! Spoilers! Go away! Spoilers! HBO Um, yeah, so that was a rather big Sopranos for me to miss, wasn’t it? There’s been a lot of comment that this final set of Sopranos episodes have been “making Tony unlikeable.” The fact is, David Chase has never liked Tony a bit, in the way that [...]

See them online here. Don’t thank me. Seriously, don’t.

So easy, even a caveman could program it! / GALE ADLER–ABC Twelve, count them twelve, new shows are coming from ABC next season, including seven dramas, four comedies and one reality show from Oprah Winfrey. You’d think they’d throw in a jelly donut there and make it a baker’s dozen, but times are tight. Part [...]

8 p.m.: How I Met Your Mother. OK, actually, I would be watching this, if I hadn’t already seen the finale. Now that FNL’s been reviewed, this is the bubble show I’m sending out the most positive waves for, and a few setups from past episodes (hint: pasta sauce) pay off in this finale. 9 [...]

I’m in the cheap seats of Radio City Music Hall, where I’ve found a wireless network. So we’re going to go cowboy-style and do an impromptu liveblog, until it wraps up or the John Henry that is my aging Time loaner laptop wears its little battery heart out. The Shins are playing over the sound [...]

Wait ’til next year: FNL comes back. / NBC Photo: Bill Records NBC just zapped us their fall schedule. In: five new dramas and one new sitcom. Out: Studio 60 (not too surprisingly); pretty much everything that debuted midseason (Andy Barker, Raines, Black Donnellys); Law & Order: Criminal Intent (actually, it’s being shipped off to [...]

In this week’s print Time, I sneak-peek Shrek the Third and look at how that movie franchise–with plenty of help in the book, TV and theater businesses–has made fairy-tale parodies bigger than the original fairy tales themselves: All this has been a welcome change from generations of hokey fairy tales with stultifying lessons: Be nice [...]