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Tuned In+1298 days ago

Dead Tree Alert: Mad Men '62

By James Poniewozik

FRANK OCKENFELS / AMC Mad Men‘s second season debuts Sunday, and my review is in the print TIME this week. It begins: “Nostalgia. It’s delicate. But potent.” It’s November 1960, and ad writer Don Draper (Jon Hamm), in the first-season finale of Mad Men, is pitching a room of Kodak executives on a campaign for [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1298 days ago

Anchors Away, pt. 3: Obama vs. Obama

By James Poniewozik

Barack Obama’s interview with Brian Williams was bumped back into the last half of the NBC Nightly News last night… by Barack Obama. In a move the Obama campaign probably preferred—given that Williams again asked him the question of the week on whether he believed the surge in Iraq had worked—NBC gave the leadoff spot [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1298 days ago

TIME at Comic-Con: Fringe

By James Poniewozik

TIME’s Rebecca Winters Keegan e-mails this dispatch from J.J. Abrams’ screening of the full pilot of Fringe (see my writeup of an earlier critics’ screening) at Comic-Con: The J.J. Abrams love is ardent at Comic-Con this year, where back-to-back screenings of his new fall show for FOX, Fringe, kicked off preview night in the San [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1299 days ago

Obama's Berlin Speech: A Star, and Stripes

By James Poniewozik

The flags were the first thing that jumped out: American flags, all over the crowd thronging in front of Berlin’s Victory Column. If the Obama campaign handed them out, it was a good idea; if Berliners brought them on their own, it was good for him. This was what you wanted to see if you [...]

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Tuned In+1299 days ago

Lost Discussion Group: Any Others Questions?

By James Poniewozik

A bit of housekeeping: I’ll probably wind down LDG, like last year, by the end of the summer–maybe even a bit sooner because (unlike last year) the season 4 finale didn’t set up any game-changer that made for a season’s worth of speculation. Hopefully, ComicCon—which my L.A. colleague Rebecca Winters Keegan will be reporting from [...]

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Tuned In+1299 days ago

Anchors Away, pt. 2: Stuck in the Middle

By James Poniewozik

ABC’s Charles Gibson got stuck with the hammock slot in the Obama-tour sweepstakes, interviewing the candidate between Katie Couric’s first sitdown Wednesday and Brian Williams’ Q&A, scheduled to run after Obama’s much-touted Hoffnungundanderngespiele in Berlin today. Maybe for that reason—or just because hurricanes trump everything—ABC led with Dolly last night. Gibson’s interview itself wasn’t especially [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1299 days ago

Norm Coleman Offensive to Bowlers

By James Poniewozik

In my most recent column, I cited Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman, who’s running against former SNL satirist Al Franken, as one of the prime examples of Campaign 2008′s campaign tactic: humorlessness as a political strategy. Coleman and his surrogates have steadily been using Franken’s history of edgy/offensive jokes (including one positing Andy Rooney as a [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1299 days ago

The Morning After: What You Want, Natalie?

By James Poniewozik

Bravo Photo: Barbara Nitke Spoilers for last night’s Project Runway coming up after the jump:

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Tuned In+1299 days ago

Corporate Press Release Theater: Robot Chicken to Use the Force Again

By James Poniewozik

Following on yesterday’s DVD release of Robot Chicken’s Star Wars parody extravaganza, Seth Green and company are planning a sequel: Adult Swim’s Robot Chicken travels back to a galaxy far, far away to create a second, all-new Star Wars-themed special. Premiering November 16 at 11:30 p.m. (ET/PT), Robot Chicken: Star Wars Episode II combines the [...]

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Tuned In+1300 days ago

Heidi, Spencer to Invade Iraq

By James Poniewozik

…and while I’m on the subject of American media stars touring war zones, I would be remiss if I didn’t share this even more important news: The Hills star (and McCain supporter) Heidi Montag, and her squeeze Spencer Pratt are planning to visit Iraq, with some assistance from McCain’s daughter. (Via Politico.) Heidi evidently plans [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1300 days ago

McCain, Obama, Gaffes and the Narrative

By James Poniewozik

In my post on Katie Couric’s interview of Obama, I made one point about the pros and cons of heavy media coverage: “Imagine if Obama had talked about the ‘Iraq-Pakistan border’ while he was in Iraq.” That McCain line is the subject of a Howard Kurtz story in the Washington Post about how the mainstream [...]

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Tuned In+News Media | 1300 days ago

Anchors Away, pt. 1: Katie's First

By James Poniewozik

When Barack Obama absconded to the Middle East and Europe, taking America’s entire broadcast network-news industry with him, one question was whether he would get an unbalanced amount of coverage compared with John McCain, or an unbalanced amount of scrutiny. As Katie Couric got the first crack at an overseas interview last night on CBS, [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1300 days ago

TCA Wrapup Roundup: Welcome to the Dollhouse

By James Poniewozik

America’s TV critics are picking the cocktail spears from their clothing, heading for LAX and embarking for their home cities, having concluded one of the weirder TV critics’ press tours in a while. Weird because there was relatively little new TV to preview in it. Largely because of the writer’s strike, but partly because it’s [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1300 days ago

Estelle Getty, 1923-2008

By James Poniewozik

Estelle Getty, the Golden Girls’ machine-gun-mouthed Sophia, died this morning. I can’t pretend to ever have been an enormous fan of The Golden Girls, but you had to admire the dynamism with which she took over the show: she was a pint-sized tornado of kvetchy sarcasm. (You might have been surprised to find that she [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1301 days ago

Corporate Press Release Theater: Access Hollywood's Obama Bounce

By James Poniewozik

There’s been much talk, particularly with Barack Obama’s overseas roadtrip, about whether the media are paying an unfair amount of attention to the Democratic candidate compared with John McCain. (An argument the McCain campaign is aggressively pushing.) It’s a worthwhile question, but it’s also worth noting that there are motivations other than bias involved: namely, [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1301 days ago

Jay, Jimmy, Conan and the Late-Night Shuffle

By James Poniewozik

NBC’s challenge: keep the new guy from becoming the bad guy. / NBC I’ve been linking to NBC’s various press-tour announcements about its late-night changes next year, but they add up to an interesting enough big-picture of NBC’s various gambles that they deserve their own post: * First, where is Jay Leno going, when and [...]

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Tuned In+News Media | 1301 days ago

And Now for the McNews

By James Poniewozik

At least one chain of local TV stations has found a solution for the nobody-wants-to-pay-for-journalism-anymore conundrum: product placements on the local news. The Meredith Corporation has struck a deal that has placed cups of McDonald’s iced coffee on the anchor desks at its Las Vegas affiliate; McDeals are in place at several other affiliates as [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1301 days ago

TCA Roundup: NBC Day

By James Poniewozik

* On the final day of sessions, America’s TV critics finally run out of TV networks, and Tim Goodman jumps for joy. * Tim Kring says that Heroes will only benefit from returning to the air after viewers have spent a long time watching “a lot of stuff on TV that wasn’t of the quality [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1302 days ago

FCC's Arbitrary, Capricious Jackson Ruling Ruled Capricious, Arbitrary

By James Poniewozik

It was four and a half years ago that Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” in the Super Bowl halftime show introduced an innocent nation to horrors of the female breast, inspired a frenzy of election-year mania over broadcast decency, and led media observers to wonder if a newly aggressive FCC would reverse the trend toward more [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 1302 days ago

I Think This Is What Pain Feels Like! Dr. Horrible Takes a Bow

By James Poniewozik

SPOILER ALERT: Before you read the rest of this post, stop time with your freeze ray and watch the final installment of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.