Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1361 days ago

Catching Up…

By James Poniewozik

…or, Brief Posts on Shows I TiVoed and Watched So Late That You No Longer Care What I Think About Them, If You Ever Did to Begin With: * Gossip Girl. I had a similar experience with this show as I did with Reaper, though I never fell out of love with it as completely. [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+1361 days ago

Double Dead Tree Alert: or, Why Magazine Writers Hate Newspaper Writers

By James Poniewozik

Crab fishing is a bitter fight for scarce resources. And so is TV criticism. / Cameron Glendenning / Discovery Channel In the magazine business, we have a thing called “lead time.” It means that many of the pieces you read in a print magazine like Time—especially anything not having to do with breaking news—gets written [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1361 days ago

The Morning After: Wrapping Up

By James Poniewozik

L-Lo suits up for prime time. / KAREN NEAL/ABC It’s May, and that means time to let a bunch of season finales accumulate unwatched on my TiVo. To the pile last night we added the two-hour finale of Grey’s Anatomy and the Lohan-ized episode of Ugly Betty. I once enjoyed Ugly Betty a lot, but [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+1362 days ago

Lost Discussion Group: Exit Strategy

By James Poniewozik

Happy Not-Lost Day! With one week until the two-hour finale, this seems like a good time to kick around your speculations about what the last episode of season 4 will bring. Take it in whatever direction you want, but here’s a kickoff question. How the Oceanic Six get off the Island is obviously a big [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Movies | 1362 days ago

SATC Spoils Itself

By James Poniewozik

So yesterday I saw the new Sex and the City movie. I was hesitant to blog much about it, partly because I didn’t want to pre-empt my review in the print Time, partly because I was still figuring out how much information I could blab without spoiling the movie. New Line has been particularly sensitive [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1362 days ago

American Idol: David Wins!

By James Poniewozik

Yeah, I know, it’s a lame joke, but if professional comic Mike Myers can use it, so can I. Spoilers about which David is the 2008 American Idol coming up… after the break!

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1363 days ago

HRC Endorses HBO's Recount

By James Poniewozik

In my last Time Tuned In column I wrote about the upcoming HBO movie Recount, about the disputed Florida vote in 2000, and its potential to stir up passions in the Democratic primary, where certain campaigns are charging disenfranchisement in Florida: Even if the primary is settled by the time Recount airs (or by the [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+1363 days ago

Reaping Rewards

By James Poniewozik

SPOILER ALERT: Brief spoilers about the Reaper season finale follow. With so many shows disrupted and marred by the aftereffects of the writers’ strike, it’s good to see one series that actually considerably improved at the end of this season. I had pretty much given up on Reaper by the time the strike hit, but [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+1363 days ago

Does Anyone Like Their Cable Company?

By James Poniewozik

This morning, Time Warner made official that it would be spinning off Time Warner Cable as a separate company. I don’t pretend to know whether the step is a positive or a negative for either company. But I do know one benefit for me: Now when I complain about how much I hate my cable [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1363 days ago

The Morning After: Win-Win?

By James Poniewozik

David Cook gestures hypnotically to the Idol crowd. / Michael Becker / Fox My final American Idol reviews of 2008 (dear God in Heaven, I actually wrote 157 of them) are up at time.com. And now we sit and wait to find out which David won. Is it possible that both of them did?

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1364 days ago

TV Poll: American Oddsmaker

By James Poniewozik

Your challenges are simple: Who wins American Idol tonight? What song would you pick for David Archuleta to sing? Which for David Cook? I’m going with Cook, on the theory that he will be able to successfully emo-ify whatever big sploogey anthem is this year’s Idol coronation song, and thus outshine Archuleta’s pure but straightforward [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1364 days ago

Wish I'd Thought Of That: HDTV Vs. McCain

By James Poniewozik

Over at Slate, Timothy Noah wonders: will appearing in high-definition on TV be unkind to John McCain? Last year, when McCain’s candidacy appeared to be in serious trouble, you heard a lot about how awful he looked. He’d gotten old, his face was scarred from melanoma surgery; no wonder his presidential run was headed south. [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1364 days ago

The Morning After: Gossip Amongst Yourselves

By James Poniewozik

If I had watched the finale yet, I’d have a more appropriate caption here. / Giovanni Rufino/ THE CW Between season-finale triage—I wanted to get How I Met Your Mother out of the way first—and a morning deadline, I haven’t yet watched the Gossip Girl finale. Those of you who have and are dying to [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1364 days ago

HIMYM Watch: Crash

By James Poniewozik

Kids: always wear your seat belt! / Eric McCandless/CBS SPOILER ALERT: Before you break the date-time continuum by reading this post, watch last night’s How I Met Your Mother.

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1365 days ago

Trailerama: 90210, Dollhouse

By James Poniewozik

Courtesy of the YouTubes, The CW offers a preview of what the new 90210 will look like. Or at least the title sequence! And the automotive product placements! Meanwhile I had been waiting to post Fox’s trailer of Dollhouse, but they were disappearing as soon as they appeared. (There may be legitimate reasons that Fox [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+1365 days ago

Dead Electron Alert: Summer Preview

By James Poniewozik

Eleswhere at time.com, I and other Time critics were enlisted to blurb four things in our respective fields that we’re curious about / looking forward to this summer. Readers love this, because it allows them to plan their summer entertainment calendars! Advertisers love it, because it means they get critics to write quasi-positive things about [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+1365 days ago

Upfront Rundown: The Big Trends

By James Poniewozik

The 2008-09 upfronts are ancient history, except for the actual selling the ads part. Here’s a rundown of some of the major trends we saw last week. * How Do We Pay For This Stuff? There was a sharp, networks-wide acknowledgement of the fact that fewer people are watching live, primetime TV; consensus that this [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1365 days ago

The Morning After: Basestar Galactica

By James Poniewozik

BSG jumps away for two weeks with a cliffhanger ending. / SCI FI Channel Photo: Carole Segal SPOILER ALERT: Discussion of Battlestar Galactica coming up after the, er, jump:

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1368 days ago

Upfronts Roundup: You Have the Floor

By James Poniewozik

Now that upfronts are over, I’m on deadline for a couple different print pieces and must retreat into my cobwebbed, candlelit study to compose. But in the meantime I thought I’d post an open thread for your reactions to the week’s announcements. Also, feel free to ask any questions about any news I may have [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+1368 days ago

Lost Business: Spoiler-Free Zone

By James Poniewozik

According to Lostpedia there are—as will inevitably happen—season-finale spoilers floating around out there. I almost don’t want to post about this at all, because Tuned Inlanders are reliably great about avoiding spoilers and nobody (as far as I know) has posted anything like that here. That said, since we’ve got to weeks to wait and [...]