Tuned In
Tuned In+1390 days ago

Lost Discussion Group: Comic-Conversation

By James Poniewozik

We may be in the summer doldrums, but Comic-Con came along last week to give us a few more nuggets to chew on before LDG takes a well-earned fall vacation. I’ll start with the video screened at the Lost panel, since I haven’t linked it here yet: The most important bit of information is, of [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1390 days ago

Obama/McCain Addendum

By James Poniewozik

Further to that Obama-is-a-celebrity ad, a “prominent Republican strategist” e-mails the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder with a thought that I wish had occurred to me: watch the spot with the sound off, and it’s basically a pro-Obama ad. “Hell, I can’t stand Obama at this point and I find those images uplifting,” he writes. “Yet McCain [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1390 days ago

Project Runway Watch: Take A Picture, It'll Last Longer

By James Poniewozik

Bravo Photo: Barbara Nitke Spoilers for the latest Project Runway coming up after the jump:

Tuned In
Tuned In+Advertising | 1390 days ago

McCain Tries to Britney-fy Obama

By James Poniewozik

I haven’t been spending much time picking apart campaign ads in this election, because I know enough about what I don’t know about that I don’t want to pretend to be factcheck.org. But in his newest ad, John McCain has come into Tuned In’s house, as the kids say, attacking Barack Obama on pop culture. [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+1391 days ago

AMC Spins Off Jackie Kennedy

By James Poniewozik

If you watched the season 2 premiere of Mad Men, you saw televisions in every room tuned to First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy’s tour of the White House. Now you can watch TV just like Betty Draper and Salvatore! AMC is streaming the entire original CBS/NBC News special from Valentine’s Day 1962. Adjust the rabbit ears [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1391 days ago

Commenters: Are You the Problem With Journalism?

By James Poniewozik

2008, it is starting to seem, is the Year of the Commenter. New York Magazine did an entire cover story about The What, an aggressive pseudonymous commenter on Brooklyn real-estate blog Brownstoner. Gawker–basically the Olympics of snarky commenters–did a piece on the backlash against snarky commenters. Nerd World’s Lev Grossman wrote a column asking what [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1391 days ago

Media Trying to Elect McCain By Trying to Elect Obama?

By James Poniewozik

You may think that the recent Gallup/USA Today poll—which was the first in a long stretch of national polls to show McCain with a lead, among likely voters—is right on. You may think it’s bogus. You may think it’s the first to accurately detect a backlash against Obama. You may think it’s an anomalous outlier [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1391 days ago

The Morning After: The (Natural) History Channel

By James Poniewozik

So at this point we’ve all accepted that the History Channel has a rather, shall we say, broad definition of its mission. Basically, if it happened, it’s history. Or if it might happen. Or if it’s happening now. Or, in the case of last night’s debut, Jurassic Fight Club, if it may or may not [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+1392 days ago

How to Talk to Your Child About the End of Hannah Montana

By James Poniewozik

Well, it may not have come to that yet. But Miley Cyrus, after releasing an album under her own name and totally unintentionally distancing herself from her child-star image in Vanity Fair, has now told E! Online that “We’re thinking this [the upcoming third season] is our last season.” Disney begs to differ, noting that [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+1392 days ago

Fox Biz Audience Threatens to Break Five Digits

By James Poniewozik

Remember when Fox Business Network launched? Remember when it was the biggest TV news of all time, including the actual invention of television itself? Remember when News Corp was going to parlay the Fox and Wall Street Journal brands into a business juggernaut that would probably culminate in Rupert Murdoch’s face being printed on every [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+1392 days ago

HBO Not So In Love With TMYLM; Plus, Another True Blood Tease

By James Poniewozik

Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer vamp it up with Ball. / HBO photo: Jamie Trueblood (surname not a typo) Oh, you commenters! Always with your commenty comments! Wilson writes: This isn’t about Mad Men (which was awesome) but James P’s other favorite show, “Tell Me You Love Me.” What happened there? And Tom Shaw drops [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+TV Ratings | 1392 days ago

Mad Men Proves That Advertising Works

By James Poniewozik

What do you get for $25 million? For AMC and Mad Men, about a million pairs of eyeballs. The season 2 premiere of the much-lauded-by-critics, not-as-much-watched-by-people drama drew about 1.9 million viewers. That’s not much by broadcast network standards—or even by TNT network standards—but it’s more than double the show’s average audience of 915,000 viewers. [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1392 days ago

The Morning After: Ain't That a Kick in the Head

By James Poniewozik

ABC So I’m flipping channels last night, and I come across a reality-competition show in which someone’s been rushed to the hospital after drinking too much in a hot tub. Business as usual, right? Something on MTV, or maybe Big Brother? No: I was watching Fine Living Network. Which, though how this slipped under my [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+News Media | 1393 days ago

The Media's Pro- Anti-Obama Bias

By James Poniewozik

The notion that the media is biased in favor of Barack Obama has become an article of faith—at least among those people who have run campaigns against Barack Obama. Now there’s a new study that finds a definite Obama slant in campaign coverage—the other way. A study of the first six weeks of the general-election [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Advertising | 1393 days ago

There Has to Be Advertising for People Who Don't Have a Sense of Humor

By James Poniewozik

As long as we’re on the subject of advertising this morning, there’s an interesting ad review by Seth Stevenson in Slate for a Scion XB spot, which asks whether it takes the Volkswagen “Think Small” strategy—turn a product’s weakness into an asset—too far. The weakness in this case is that the car looks like a [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1393 days ago

Mad Men Watch: A Man Out of Time

By James Poniewozik

Losing his tight grip on the short hairs of the public imagination? / AMC SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, finish your Valentine’s Day shopping and watch the season two premiere of Mad Men. Because Mad Men‘s Matthew Weiner wrote for The Sopranos, the comparisons between the two shows tend to get overdone. But [...]

+Looking Around | 1393 days ago

The Art of Doing Absolutely Nothing

By Richard Lacayo

Untitled, #696-05, Richard Misrach, 2005/FRAENKEL GALLERY, PACE/MacGILL, MARC SELWYN FINE ARTS Criticizing things for a living, it gets strenuous. Even critics need a vacation. So this critic is taking off the next three weeks to vacate. Back on Monday August 18. Meanwhile, if you have some free time of your own, you can check out [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+1393 days ago

TIME at Comic-Con: Lost

By James Poniewozik

From my e-mail inbox to you, the tireless Rebecca Winters Keegan reports on this weekend’s Lost panel at Comic-Con: Noon, Saturday The Lost panel is happening in the 6500-seat Hall H after the Heroes panel. Some attendees stood in line for seven hours to get inside. Season five hasn’t begun taping yet, so it’s not [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+1396 days ago

TV Weekend: These Shows Bite*

By James Poniewozik

Tory Belleci confronts a robo-shark for MythBusters. / Don Feria/Discovery Channel One more item of mine in the print TIME I forgot to mention. Discovery’s Shark Week begins Sunday, and I reviewed the first two installments: MythBusters: Shark Special and Surviving Sharks Discovery, 9 p.m. E.T., July 27 & 28 MythBusters uses its second Shark [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1396 days ago

TIME at Comic-Con: True Blood and Other Suckers

By James Poniewozik

Rebecca Winters Keegan reports on the Comic-Con session for HBO’s upcoming True Blood, as well as vampire movie project Twilight. Vamp/human affairs became a hot topic of discussion at the True Blood panel. “Apparently sex with vampires is really kind of great,” said Ball, the creator of Six Feet Under and writer of American Beauty. [...]