NBC Photo: Michael Yarish Big round of new-series and returning-shows premieres last night (see below for the Heroes thread). I reviewed some yesterday; now it’s your turn. Did Chuck suck? Should Journeyman… um… returneyman? I don’t have any rhymes for The Big Bang Theory or How I Met Your Mother, but you get the point. [...]

SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t watched last night’s Heroes–hey! Stop drinking that coffee and look at me when I’m talking to you! Paul Drinkwater / NBC The downside to all that closure that Heroes bends over backwards to give you is that, once an arc ends, the show has to tap-dance pretty fast to set [...]

I would be remiss if I did not tell you that TV’s most awesomely weird children’s show (and not-children’s show), Nick Jr.’s Yo Gabba Gabba!, was airing new episodes this week. And that–for those parents who are not ashamed of further obsessing over their kids’ obsessions–the show has a behind-the-scenes production blog. And if I [...]

Monty Brinton/CBS We’ve waited four months for Barney to complete that adjective, and he does, on the season return of How I Met Your Mother. The episode itself is an average one at best–including a dull guest role by Mandy Moore as Ted’s rebound squeeze and a slightly better Enrique Iglesias turn as Robin’s–but there [...]

NBC Photo: Mitch Haddad; Robert Voets/CBS; NBC Photo: David Moir Why did Monday become nerd night on network TV? Maybe it’s because it’s far enough away from Sci Fi Channel’s Friday night programming block; maybe it’s because viewers need a refuge of programming with more testosterone than Monday Night Football yet less estrogen than Dancing [...]

U.S. National Archives and Records Administration / FOX No new-series premieres from last night for you to postmortem (is that a verb?), although we did have the first night of The War. There will be no Ken Burns Watch here at Tuned In, partly because I’m not sure the documentary lends itself well to that, [...]

I was thinking the other day–fielding a pitch from the HD Weather Channel, which I did not know existed–that in writing about TV today, you have to make a lot of judgments about how your audience watches TV. Do they have (or care about HD)? Do they watch on a big screen or a tiny [...]

The last in the series. I’m not sure whether this qualifies as a scoop or not, but I don’t believe I’ve seen Burns say that he plans to make a Vietnam documentary elsewhere (not that I’ve scoured all the clips): What kind of distance in time do you need from an event to feel comfortable [...]

Did you conceive this project before– KB & LN: –before 9/11. KB: And most of the interviews were done–and I’m thinking particularly of Sam Hynes’ interview–before the invasion of Iraq. So that when he says, in the beginning of the film, “There’s no such thing as a good war, only necessary wars and just wars,” [...]

SPOILER ALERT: This post reveals who was voted off last night’s Survivor: China. Also, the Ken Burns posts reveal who won WWII. Monty Brinton/CBS We interrupt Ken Burns Day at Tuned In to prove that we’re not all about lofty matters historical here. Survivor: China debuted last night, and while I can never judge the [...]

It’s interesting from the standpoint of today to see the images of death and gore that made it into the popular media and newsreels at the time. KB: And the sequencing of that, which went from absolute buttoned-down control, where no one knew until after the war the actual casualties and loss and materiel at [...]

Does Ken Burns have anything to say about the attacks by Hispanics for leaving them out of the original version of The War? Does he ever! Didn’t you have to take on faith that the four towns you picked would give you the whole scope of the war? LN: Yes. We naively though that if [...]

I spoke with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick for a good hour and a half, getting far more stuff than I could work into a 660-word column in Time. Burns, in addition to being thoughtful about the process and pitfalls of documentary making, is a saltier speaker than you might expect from a PBS type, [...]

Carrying wounded in Okinawa. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration In my column this week, I sat down with Ken Burns and his co-director/producer, Lynn Novick, and talked about–well, a lot of things, but the focus of this column ended up being on their WWII documentary The War and its parallels to, and implied comments [...]

The front Briefing section of TIME opens with something called The Moment, which is sort of like a blog entry in print—a riff of a few paragraphs about an image or incident from the week’s news. I wrote this week’s, on the class reunion of the O.J. Simpson media industry, and I may as well [...]

The loss of The Rich Inner Life of Penelope Cloud is Lost fans’ gain. TV Guide scoopmeister Michael Ausiello reports that, after the failure of the pilot, Cynthia Watros will be back next season to reprise the role of Libby (presumably in flashbacks): “She’ll be in enough of the show for us to fill in [...]

Good for the Panthers or bad for the Panthers? NBC Photo: Bill Records NBC says all the right things in its announcement that, this fall, it will make downloads of its shows available for free through the NBC Direct service. Viewers today want “more control,” says Vivi Zigler, Executive Vice President of NBC Digital Entertainment. [...]

SPOILER ALERT: This post reveals the winners of the bleach-drinking contest and barefoot broken-glass race on last night’s Kid Nation, as well as which child was exiled to Starving Coyote Mountain. MONTY BRINTON/CBS As you may have guessed, there were no bleach-drinking or broken-glass competitions on last night’s Kid Nation premiere, although who knows what [...]

I thought I’d try something this fall premiere season and, instead of just reviewing shows here, put up open threads for your postmortems on the previous night’s debuts. Why should I have to do all the work here? Last night: Back to You and Gossip Girl, which I reviewed earlier, and Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, [...]