The team of Joe Biden and Sarah Palin cleaned their runningmates’ clocks last night, according to preliminary results from Nielsen. The debate—fueled by tremendous curiosity about Palin and held on the most watched night of TV of the week—drew an overall 45.0 rating, compared with 31.6 for the McCain-Obama debate Friday. (The rating number is [...]

Apropos of this morning’s Clone Wars post… I received a screener DVD collection of season one of The Smurfs yesterday and promptly hid it. For most people, that would be a natural reaction to traumatic childhood memories of Gargamel. For me, it’s that I don’t want my children to find it, and thereby know of [...]

Take a look at the lawman: Jason O’Mara and Gretchen Mol in Life on Mars. / ABC On time.com today, I’ve got a roundup review of this fall’s bevy of imported/remade series from overseas showing up on American TV. (A shorter version should be in next week’s print TIME.) I also look a little bit [...]

A brief review in the print TIME this week on Cartoon Network’s Clone Wars series, which debuts tonight. The gist: If you judge it against the original trilogy, it’s awful, like this summer’s movie was. If you judge it as intended—basically, as a moving action toy—it’s visually impressive, though the characters are inexcusably wooden (even [...]