So the Academy Awards have asked Jon Stewart back to host, despite the fact that his last outing, in 2006, drew fewer viewers than Chris Rock before him and Ellen DeGeneres after. Naturally, people are starting to ask why, including LA Weekly’s Nikki Finke. (To be specific, she asks: “Has the Academy of Motion Picture [...]

From the washingtonpost.com chat with Robert Draper, author of Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush: Baltimore: Does president bush ever comment on people like Keith Olbermann or other liberals who really hate him? Robert Draper: Never! He is not one to pay attention of any kind to his critics. And for that matter, [...]

No sooner did time.com post my All-TIME 100 TV Shows than a package showed up at my office with a brand-new book: I Heart TV: Your Ultimate Companion to 100 Essential Shows, from the editors of TV Guide. Spooky! Well, not so much, since the book was messengered over by TV Guide’s publicist, but still, [...]

Your computer continues to eat your TV. Online gossip guru Perez Hilton–who did a bit this summer on Victoria Beckham’s NBC reality special–premieres What Perez Sez About tonight on VH1. (Or is it just called What Perez Sez? There seems to be some disagreement.) Out of sheer curiosity I (which, as always, means, “at least [...]

It didn’t take long after that cloudless Tuesday on the Eastern seaboard for the Sept. 11 attacks to become video wallpaper–the crashes, the fireballs, the towers collapsing, over and over and over. Six years later, plenty of people are still bothered by how often and how casually TV news replays what are, after all, the [...]

Bernard Shaw and Peter Arnett from Baghdad in 1991. When I finished the All-TIME 100 TV Shows list, I had so much leftover list-making energy that I came up with a sidebar list of 10 influential TV news events. The editors of time.com decided that was one more bell and/or whistle than the package needed. [...]

In today’s installment of That Darn List!, the problem of good shows that turn bad. One problem I dealt with over and over when deciding whether to put long-running series on my top-100 list was what to do with shows that started great and ended embarrassing. Do the sanctimonious years of M*A*S*H outweigh the hilarious [...]

Topic of the morning: Britney Spears’ performance at the VMAs–cringingly unwatchable trainwreck, or brilliant work of meta commentary? Think about it. The Britney we saw on stage was a listless, lifeless, gone-to-seed shell of the dynamic teen sexpot we remembered from stage just a few years ago. She was inert, unenthusiastic and a little fleshy. [...]

…courtesy of his mouthpieces at Best Week Ever. Now if I can only get Seven of Nine pissed off at me, I can die happy.

HBO photo: Claudette Barius It’s a big HBO weekend: besides Tell Me You Love Me and James Gandolfini’s understatedly moving Iraq documentary Alive Day Memories, Curb Your Enthusiasm returns for its sixth season. What I’ve seen so far looks far better than the underwhelming fifth season–if it keeps this up, I may regret sacrificing Curb, [...]

We’re watching you, Poniewozik. NBC In this week’s TIME, of course, an excerpt from my All-TIME 100 TV shows list. Nothing you can’t already see online, but a little something for the print readers who don’t yet have the Intertube hose connected to their computing machines. To keep the discussion of the list alive, I’m [...]

SPOILER ALERT: No reading this post until you’ve done an honest day’s work for it, you bum. AMC So who knew that Mad Men would also turn out to be Carnivale? I’m impressed that, within this already detailed period piece, there turns out to be another period piece (Don/Dick’s childhood in the Depression) that’s just [...]

Alexander, DeKay and Walker’s labor of Love. HBO photo: Doug Hyun Let me say this up front: Mrs. Tuned In and I are doing great. We love each other very much. Everything’s fine, really. I feel compelled to say this because I realize that it’s impossible to write about the realism of HBO’s new drama [...]

BRAVO If a show’s ratings potential can be judged by the number of people who ask me about it, unsolicited, before it comes out, Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style will be the top-rated television show of 2007. “Have you seen it yet?” people ask me. And “Is it any good?” And “Can I borrow the [...]

I told you I had something big planned for you after my summer vacation, and here it is: another freaking list! Some time ago, time.com conscripted me to come up with a list of the top 100 shows in TV history. (We’d already covered movies, music and novels, but let’s be glad they got around [...]

Five decades after the Nixon-Kennedy debates, three decades after an actor and former TV host was elected president and a good decade and a half after Bill Clinton blew sax on the Arsenio Hall show, the perception still persists that anytime a candidate uses TV strategically, it’s a sign that he or she is a [...]

Every year around now, people ask me which fall shows I think are going to be hits and which ones will tank. Every year around now, I tell them that it’s my job to decide whether shows are good and interesting, not whether they’ll make money for some giant corporation. If I were in the [...]

Some critics love to have their blurbs quoted in ads. Some dread it. (When Fox highlighted an especially overheated quote from my review of Dark Angel–“We have seen the Woman of the Future, and she kicks butt”–I wanted to go into hiding for a week.) Either way, they don’t generally show up themselves to do [...]