quarterlife Part 1Add to My Profile | More Videos Marshall Herskovitz (producer, thirtysomething, My So-Called Life, etc.) wrote an op-ed in the L.A. Times last week decrying the consolidation of TV networks and TV-production studios, and its effects on the quality of TV. Those effects, he says: TV creators have fewer choices who to sell [...]

This is Robo-James. In the absence of my inferior carbon-based colleague, this automatically generated post exists to provide humans a space in which to discuss programming transmitted the previous evening on your video-display device.

Photo by genewolf. In solidarity with my fellow scribes in the screenwriters’ guild, I am staging a job action effective Monday. I can no longer ignore the role that my employer, Time Warner, plays in the exploitation of creative labor and, hence, to prove to them that they are nothing without content providers, I am [...]

Because you’re not at all sick of me going on and on about the writers’ strike, you can catch me doing so further with time.com Josh Tyrangiel, in this week’s time.com entertainment podcast. At least I’m pretty sure I talked about the strike. I can’t really bring myself to listen to it.

NBC Tina Fey is probably doing just fine without our pity. But you gotta feel a little sorry for her, anyway. Even as the strike is about to shut down 30 Rock, her show is on a legendary tear: first the Emmy, then a string of great second season episodes leading to Alec Baldwin’s instant-Emmy [...]

Lost show runner Damon Lindelof–who knows a thing or two about shows that people watch on the Internet–pleads the WGA’s case with Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry. My column in this week’s print TIME is, shockingly, about the screenwriters’ strike. It’s largely a greatest-hits of subjects I’ve blogged about here, with the emphasis on how [...]

Not a fantastic Office last night, but you know what? Thanks to the strike it’s the next to last one we’ll get for God knows how long, so for the moment I’m inclined to be grateful anyway. Michael’s going Survivorman in what appeared to be Pennsylvania’s only sequoia redwood forest was amusing enough, but this [...]

It may defy union solidarity to say it, but thank God we have South Park for at least one more week. “Guitar Queer-o” wasn’t the work of animation brilliance that “Make Love Not Warcraft” was, but it was pretty brilliant in its own right. Like that earlier episode, it showed Parker and Stone’s gift for [...]

“everything happens for a reason,” Rosie O’Donnell philosophizes in her all-lowercase r blog, announcing that her potential talk-show deal with MSNBC has fallen through. The reason in this case, reports the LA Times, was money–she wanted network money, they offered basic-cable money. Someone, apparently, neglected to tell her that when you put “MS” in front [...]

Better reset that clock. Amy Sussman/Getty Images for Fox Let’s take care of the morning’s strike news in a hail of bullets: * The strike is already claiming its first schedule victims. Fox has postponed season 7 of 24 (disaster or silver lining?) so that it can be aired in its entirety whenever the strike [...]

Actually, the only part of Tuned In that is even a little bit country is the part that watches American Idol, and Nashville before it got cancelled. (Well, my iPod includes a couple Dixie Chicks albums, but mostly because I’m one of those East Coast communists who hates America.) But surely there’s a Tuned Inlander [...]

Someone evidently informed Oprah Winfrey that there was a medium that she did not yet own a major piece of. And you know what happens when someone tells Oprah that. And so it came to pass that Oprah set up her own YouTube channel. What’s on it? Front and center, of course, there’s Oprah delivering [...]

OK, this is not exactly a post about TV. Well, it’s about the subject of a TV commercial. Give me a break. If this strike goes on for a few months, you’re going to see me doing posts about the commercials for Swiffer mops. So I finally saw a spot for Beowulf, which opens November [...]

Since the writers’ strike started looming, one of the most frequent questions among Tuned Inlanders has been what would happen to South Park, which–unlike most animated shows–is finished at the last minute and thus doesn’t bank episodes in advance. My most frequent answer had been, “Um, good question.” As it turns out, we get our [...]

Jack Rowand/The CW If Reaper is turning out basically to be just a procedural with damned souls, it’s at least a pretty charming procedural with damned souls. Last night’s “Love, Bullets and Blacktop” episode didn’t venture into especially new territory, but it did capture the show’s laid-back appeal, from the lengthy bachelorette-party opening sequence to [...]

SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, grab a plate of waffles and watch last night’s Heroes. NBC Photo: Chris Haston Got a deadline monopolizing my time and verbiage today, so I’ll give you the digest version of Heroes Watch, then let you run with it. A definite improvement for me, perhaps mainly because it [...]

It’s no The Price Is Right, but the New York Times reports this morning that MSNBC has been talking to Rosie O’Donnell about hosting a 9 p.m. talk show. The strategy: follow where Keith Olbermann’s success has led the third-place news channel and establish a nighttime platform of left-leaning–sorry, “passionate”–talk. It could just work. If [...]

Cliff Lipson/CBS The problem with the idea behind A Second Look At… is that if the second look proves to be pretty much exactly like the first, the results aren’t so interesting. Thus with The Big Bang Theory, which last night turned out to be as stereotyped and predictable as the first time around. The [...]