Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1323 days ago

Vacation Robo-Post: Who's in Your Five?

By James Poniewozik

While I was getting ready for vacation at the end of last week, the LA Times’ Gold Derby published a list of the 10 Emmy finalists in the drama and comedy category, including the episodes submitted for each show: TOP 10 COMEDY SERIES FINALISTS “Curb Your Enthusiasm” (“The Bat Mitzvah”) “Entourage” (“The Day F***ers”) “Family [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1323 days ago

The Morning After, Robo-Edition

By James Poniewozik

This is Robo-James. The Morning After is an automatically generated thread in which all humans may discuss recent television transmissions in the absence of Flesh-James.

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1326 days ago

Programming Note

By James Poniewozik

Photograph by jmorgan. See you later, suckers It is with a heavy heart that I announce that I will be away on vacation next week. Robo-James (second from left) will preside over a severe, emotionless interregnum at Tuned In until I return on July 7. So be sure to check in during the week! No, [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+1326 days ago

Corporate Press Release Theater: Real Housewives On Verge of Outnumbering CSIs

By James Poniewozik

This one came over the transom while I was writing yesterday. Bravo is “heading South”—in creative ambition as well as geographically!—with a third edition of The Real Housewives of Name of Your City That Has Dumb Rich People Here: Expanding on the success of the original hit series, “The Real Housewives of Orange County,” and [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1326 days ago

Strike Watch: Maybe, Maybe Not

By James Poniewozik

As the SAG contract expiration approaches on Monday, the New York Times looks at the reasons there might be a strike—and why, because of the threat of a strike, there will be a de facto “strike” for many movies anyway: Labor unrest continues to dominate the landscape in Hollywood, and the possibility of a strike [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1326 days ago

The Morning After: Doc-umentary

By James Poniewozik

ABC I’ve been busy lately finishing up a couple pieces that will run while I’m away on vacation (yes, those are Robo-James’ servo motors you hear warming up in the background), each of which involve many many hours of TV screening. So I haven’t had time to watch much more of ABC’s docu-series Hopkins—about the [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+News Media | 1327 days ago

More With Less

By James Poniewozik

It’s not as if cuts in newsrooms are exactly surprising news anymore. But one of the latest in a long line of newspaper downsizings has a life-imitates-art angle for Tuned In’s fans of The Wire: The Baltimore Sun is expected to cut 20 percent of its newsroom staff. Watch your back, Gus Haynes.

Tuned In
Tuned In+1327 days ago

From Deadwood to Damages for Olyphant

By James Poniewozik

The “Hire a Deadwood Vet” public-service campaign continues to bear fruit, as Timothy Olyphant, Deadwood’s Sheriff Bullock, joins the cast of Damages for next year’s season 2. Sez FX: Olyphant’s character will become tangled in the life of Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne) as she deals with both her recent personal loss and the escalating conflict [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+1327 days ago

Lost Discussion Group: Locke Box

By James Poniewozik

Bend it like Bentham. / ABC So Locke is dead. Or “dead.” Or… do we need to coin an adjective for the sort of dead-but-possibly-not, well-maybe-actually-dead-but-nonetheless-having-a-big-part-in-the-story state of being that is becoming common on Lost? Dëd, maybe? In any case, we can all agree that the producers will not be foolish enough to deny Terry [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1327 days ago

The Morning After: I Love the Present

By James Poniewozik

The warning of U.S. Retro Secretary Anson Williams was a few years off, but it has finally come true: we have run out of past. Last night, VH1 aired I Love the New Millennium, one of its trademark specials wallowing in nostalgia for, um, a few years ago. Remember Jayson Blair? Remember McGriddles? Remember William [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+1328 days ago

TV Tonight: Be My Baby, Temporarily

By James Poniewozik

Borrowers’ temporary families. / NBC According to The Media and Society, you are Very Concerned about the Suddenly Pressing Topic of Teen Pregnancy. Perhaps you are concerned because of this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or even this. Whatever the cause, it would take a very dull TV executive not to connect all these [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+1328 days ago

Whom Should Meet the Press Meet?

By James Poniewozik

I just realized that it is Wednesday morning and I haven’t mentioned the fact that NBC named Tom Brokaw as interim host of Meet the Press through the election. The explanation requires a confession: though I write about the media and follow politics more than is probably healthy, I’m not really a fan of the [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1328 days ago

The Morning After: ABC Becomes the Violence Channel

By James Poniewozik

Ow! My… ah, you get the point. / ABC The broadcast-industry project of turning Idiocracy into a documentary continued apace last night, as ABC debuted two very different twists on the concept of dressing up people in funny costumes and making them fall into crap. And both, in their own ways, were examples of how [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+1329 days ago

TV Tonight: Rescue Me (A Little)

By James Poniewozik

Garrity (Steve Pasquale) tries to stick to a fast in an upcoming minisode. / FX Remember Rescue Me? FX must be a little worried that by the time Denis Leary’s fireman ensemble returns next year, you’ll have plain forgotten it. To that end, the channel debuts the first of a summer series of roughly five-minute [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+1329 days ago

A Second Look At: Swingtown

By James Poniewozik

Swingtown’s plot gets, er, twistier. / Eric McCandless/CBS When CBS’s Swingtown started a few weeks ago, it was one of a handful of summer debuts I was actually looking forward to. Three weeks into its run, I think it’s a very good show. It’s also a bad show. And I’m not sure which side of [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1329 days ago

EW's List-o-mania

By James Poniewozik

#1 with a bullet. / FOX You might think that the editors of Entertainment Weekly had already devised and published every pop culture special-list issue possible. But you would be wrong. In the current issue, Time’s sister publication unveils what they call the “New Classics”—a label that bravely manages to evoke New Coke and Classic [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1329 days ago

Kinsey Has a Beard?

By James Poniewozik

I didn’t get around to mentioning it earlier, but if you haven’t seen it yet, Alex Witchel has a lengthy cover story in the New York Times magazine on Mad Men and its writer-creator, Matthew Weiner. There are some mild spoilers—notably, one related to what year and time it is when season 2 debuts—but the [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1330 days ago

Strike Watch: More Reason to Worry

By James Poniewozik

In case you missed it before the weekend, my L.A. colleague Rebecca Winters Keegan has a report on the possibility of an actors’ strike in Hollywood this summer, and the reasons for the dispute. One striking arresting detail—a phone war between the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which has a tentative deal with [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1330 days ago

The Morning After: YR JONAS REVUS PLZ KTHXBAI

By James Poniewozik

Camp Rock, the Jonas Brothers’ movie / tween excitation vehicle, grabbed 8.9 million viewers on Disney Channel Friday and another 3.6 million on ABC Saturday night. That’s not quite the 17.2 million High School Musical 2 got, but it was better than anything anyone else put on TV all weekend—and considering it was essentially the [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+News Media | 1330 days ago

Fired for Reporting the News About a Reporter

By James Poniewozik

I knew that Tim Russert died before you probably did. So did not only (obviously) NBC News, but its competitor news channels, who agreed to withhold the news until Russert’s family had been notified and NBC reported it. (NBC didn’t, to my knowledge, ask Time or Tuned In to hold back, but by the time [...]