Tuned In

Strike Watch: More Reason to Worry

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

The Morning After: YR JONAS REVUS PLZ KTHXBAI

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

Fired for Reporting the News About a Reporter

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 [...]

Tuned In

George Carlin, 1937-2008

Though he wasn’t mainly known as a TV personality per se, he is forever known for Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV (a routine which, ironically, was itself cited in a Supreme Court ruling on what you could and couldn’t say on broadcast TV). Putting his civil and linguistic libertarianism at the center [...]