Sifting through the weekend reports from ComicCon, I came across a bit of news from the 24 panel there. OK, so first question: 24 presents at ComicCon why? Maybe we can take it as an admission that the show has become so implausible it should best be treated as science fiction. That, at least, is [...]

Lewis (left) works at home. Bravo Photo: Isabella Vosmikova We had CNNFN, we have CNBC, coming up this fall we’ll have the Fox Business Channel or the Ha Ha I Own Dow Jones Channel or whatever it ends up being called. But I increasingly have the feeling that Bravo has become America’s dominant business channel [...]

SPOILER ALERT: Don’t read this post until you’ve watched Big Love. With a butterscotch sundae and a Seven-Up. HBO photo: Lacey Terrell So despite the HBO promos last week declaring that this would be the Big Love everyone was going to talk about, I didn’t see that coming. (I had my money on Lois whacking [...]

I’m starting to think that Flight of the Conchords has defined a category: the story-proof comedy. Last night’s episode by rights should not have been any good. There was a weak premise. (Bret and Jemaine get discriminated against for being New Zealanders by a fruit vendor–by the way, did I miss it or was there [...]

Tomorrow show host Tom Snyder died this weekend at age 71. Snyder’s heyday was before my time–at least, before my staying-up-past-midnight time–so I’m not going to pretend to have extensive, fond memories of the man who pioneered the late-late night talk slot before David Letterman. But the few times I did catch Snyder’s show was [...]

HBO photo: John P. Johnson With two episodes remaining in the season, I’m going to try to observe a moratorium on the overall question of whether John from Cincinnati is good or bad. Masterpiece or disaster, genius or folly, I’m into it too deep now; it’s either building toward something at the end of the [...]

If you didn’t already know that Mad Men was created by a producer of The Sopranos, you might be able to guess it by now. Like The Sopranos, it has a gift for making its world seem utterly hellish and utterly seductive at the same time. The casual sexism and racism and the highly cultivated [...]

Lost producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse held their panel at ComicCon in San Diego yesterday. I hear from TIME’s Rebecca Winters Keegan, who’s on-site, that after the TV critics forced Harold Perrineau’s return from Steve McPherson on pain of torture at press tour, there was little in the way of actual news from the [...]

So the big question about The Simpsons Movie has been: Is it a funny, successful movie in its own right or just an extra-long Simpsons episode? I’ve finally seen it, and I can report: Yes and yes. To be more specific: the movie works because it’s just like a classic Simpsons episode, in ways that [...]

Parker as pot dealer Nancy Botwin in Weeds. Monty Brinton/Showtime In this week’s TIME, with LA correspondent and Laura Linney doppelganger Rebecca Winters Keegan, I take a look at the bumper crop of lead actress roles on cable for the likes of Glenn Close, Holly Hunter, Mary Louise Parker (above), et al. Now I know [...]

To follow up the recently broached topic of what happens when TV shows become films, I’m catching a screening of The Simpsons movie several entire hours before it opens in theaters. Ah, the perks of working in the MSM! It’s almost as good as being the 97th caller at Hot 97. Meanwhile, over at IMDB, [...]

The CW / Timothy White Test Pilot is a semiregular feature this summer sharing my first impressions of the pilots for next fall’s shows. These aren’t reviews, since these pilots may be rewritten, recast and reshot before airing, and end up much better or worse. But, premature opinions are why God invented the Internet, so [...]

It may be time to declare LDG a good idea while it lasted. After a thought-provoking run in the wake of the mind-blowing May finale, last week’s post generated a whopping four comments as of present count. Is it me? Is it you? Ah, let’s just blame society. It may just be that, without new [...]

We don’t often cover the restaurant business at Tuned In, but we don’t often witness the opening of restaurants from Top Chef winners. Perilla, the eatery run by season 1 winner Harold Dieterle, gets the Frank Bruni review treatment in today’s New York Times. Bruni awards Perilla one star out of four, which if you’re [...]

In my review of Saving Grace, I challenged Tuned In reader and Oklahoma City resident Keith to rate how well the show portrays his hometown. He came through: Did they get Oklahoma City right? Not for me. Other than a very limited number of exterior shots such as the memorial site, the show is filmed [...]

SPOILER ALERT: Don’t read this post until you’ve watched last night’s Big Love. And beware of strange women bearing videotapes. HBO photo: Lacey Terrell In-laws can be exasperating: if they’re not cutting off the electricity and physically threatening you, they’re getting hammered on Stoli and trying to feel you up in the kitchen. In last [...]

Close, left, with Byrne. Larry Riley / FX Reviewing Saving Grace yesterday, I wrote that I liked Holly Hunter’s performance better than the show. Tonight FX unveils its own big-actress showcase with Glenn Close in the legal thriller Damages, and as they said in the 7-Up commercials, it’s the same thing, only different: this time, [...]

I knew we were in trouble when we saw the Viking. CNN’s buildup to the CNN/YouTube Democratic debate has been schizo: they want to present it as a revolution in politics, by empowering the Web 2.0 Nation, and they want to present it as entertainment, by showing off the goofy videos. (Which, to be fair, [...]

With the nation’s newspaper TV critics meeting in L.A. to cover the summer TV press tour, Variety just ran a story about how, thanks to the bleeding newspaper biz, several of them will not be meeting there anymore — nor will anyone else from their papers. As newspapers cut budgets left and right, one of [...]