SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, watch Cookie Monster Sings “Chocolate Rain” on YouTube, then watch last night’s The Office.

QUBO NBC has signed a deal to bring one of the most awesome preschooler’s cartoons ever, Maisy, to its Qubo kids’ cartoons block in November. For those of you who don’t have Noggin, where it previously aired (or don’t have kids), this British cartoon based on the work of Lucy Cousins is an island of [...]

Why do it? What will he air in that half hour? A few half-baked theories, from a political non-expert: * A massive pretaped ad—along the line of The Man from Hope—to try to close the deal / familiarize himself to last-minute deciders * Allows him the possibility of a Jeremiah Wright-type live speech to address [...]

In the current TIME, my column is about a favorite topic at Tuned In these past couple weeks: Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin character, and its advantages and disadvantages for the real Palin. Obviously, there have been scads of political impressions at SNL over the decades. What distinguishes this one is (1) the fact that Palin [...]

So we’ve pretty much established that nobody’s watching anything this season. New shows are middling at best in the ratings, relaunched shows like Chuck and ABC’s Wednesday have cratered—even hits like House and Grey’s are not doing so hot. OK, part of this is demographic, social and technological. 500 channels, time-shifting, blah blah blah. There [...]

NBC Photo: Dana Edelson Last night, I watched the Weekend Update Thursday edition of Saturday Night Live, immediately after watching The Office (on DVD) and The Daily Show (on Tivo). Woo boy, was that a mistake. I have come to realize the main advantage of putting Saturday Night Live on Saturday night: it does not [...]

Barack Obama has finished a deal to air his half-hour campaign pitch on NBC as well Oct. 29, James Hibberd reports. In the process, he will do what Pushing Daisies could not: knock Knight Rider off the air. Hibberd further wonders whether other networks will air Obama’s spot for free, as news coverage, given public [...]

Reports The Hollywood Reporter, Barack Obama has purchased a half-hour of primetime on CBS on Wednesday, Oct. 29. Obama is close to a deal with NBC as well, it says, and may strike one with Fox, depending on a possible baseball conflict. Smart idea or waste of money? I guess it depends what you do [...]

Kath and Kim seems to be on its way to being the second-worst-reviewed new show next to Knight Rider (you go, Ben Silverman!), so I feel like I should say the one good thing about it that I neglected to mention in my review—they picked an awesome theme song:

There’s not much to add to that. Weep with me, mankind. *That is, “than are watching the television program Pushing Daisies.” Not “than are pushing daisies.” The legions of history’s dead fortunately still vastly outnumber Knight Rider’s anemic 2.2 rating. Also, I suspect there’s considerable overlap between those two groups.

Tonight sees the debuts of the American adaptions of Life on Mars, Eleventh Hour, and Kath and Kim, which are from Britain, Britain and Australia respectively and are surprisingly good, a bunch of hoo-hah and painful, respectively. Busy with a print deadline, so I’ll refer you to my earlier roundup review of this season’s imports [...]

How bad has the financial crisis gotten? Today’s Dr. Phil devotes itself to the economy, with a roster of guests including CNBC’s James Cramer and economist/game-show-host Ben Stein. To be fair, it’s not as if Dr. Phil just discovered personal finance. He, along with daytime-TV fixtures like Suze Orman, have long been giving viewers advice [...]

Brief spoilers for Project Runway coming up after the jump:

The numbers are in for last night’s debate and the winner is… still Joe Biden and Sarah Palin. John McCain and Barack Obama drew over 63 million viewers last night, according to Nielsen, but that was still under the nearly 70 million pairs of eyeballs attracted by their running mates Thursday night. (All three debates [...]

Though Tuned In has upped its politics-and-news content as the election gets closer, I haven’t covered campaign ads much. That’s partly because we have the rest of the political blog world for that, but also because I hardly ever see campaign ads, except online and on cable news. As a TV critic with Tivo and [...]

It’s a double shot of offensive/scatological comedy tonight. On Comedy Central, The Sarah Silverman Program returns for the second half of its second season, with an outstanding episode in which Sarah gets high and discovers that it makes her a genius. At least for as long as the buzz lasts. I don’t have a clip, [...]

Not that surprising, but too bad, anyway: Michael Ausiello reports that FX has cancelled The Riches. I’ll admit the show was uneven and didn’t live up to its potential, but that potential was pretty great, and when the series was on, Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver were fantastic. Its premise, of people trying to flim-flam [...]

Thanks to all the Tuned Inlanders who showed up to represent at the liveblog last night; the whole thing is still posted if anyone’s interested. As I said last night, the debate played like a nonevent from where I was sitting; but as I also said, it’s possible it came across more informative and useful [...]

There’s been a lot of talk in the political press about how the townhall format makes it difficult to launch negative and personal attacks. Therefore, I am expecting negative and personal attacks. Your predictions? Update: Remember to visit the debate liveblog tonight. I’m not doing this for my health!