I just watched a screener DVD for one of Nick News’ Linda Ellerbee specials, Kids Pick the President, which airs this Sunday. As a lead-up to an online kids’ vote, which will go live after the special airs, John McCain and Barack Obama took questions from interested kids on issues including immigration, health care and [...]

Karen Tumulty, Michael Grunwald and I will be liveblogging tonight’s debate again at the usual address. Learn it, bookmark it, live it. As you know, tonight’s debate will be a townhall, a format that allows for back-and-forth with voters, intermingling among candidates and questioners, and freewheeling exchanges. Oh, actually: it will allow for none of [...]

Brief spoilers for Heroes coming up after the jump.

I’m coming a couple days late to this, but: while I’d had hope that Entourage was back with its Vince-hits-bottom storyline this season, my faith was shaken with the very-special shrooms-in-the-desert episode Sunday. Like so many episodes in the middle of the last season, it seemed inserted to pad out the season, and really, if [...]

Eric McCandless/FOX SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, put something cold in your cupholder and watch last night’s How I Met Your Mother.

Turning away the disdain of TV critics like so much Sith lightning, The Clone Wars tapped into the cortexes of America’s younglings and delivered big numbers for Cartoon Network on Friday: The Force is with Cartoon Network as Star Wars™: The Clone Wars™ Blasts Off as the Most-Watched Series Premiere in Network History Fresh from [...]

Hephner and Metcalf make it look Easy. / Lewis Jacobs /The CW You might be surprised to hear that the best new network show of the fall season may well be on The CW, shunted onto a throwaway night that the network turned over to an outside production company to fill with programming. Because The [...]

AMC SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, run away to a neighbor’s playhouse and watch last night’s Mad Men.

What will Saturday Night Live do when the election is over? For that matter, what will they do if Sarah Palin and that other guy lose? Saturday, SNL kept the Alaskan gravy train running with yet another skit, this one clocking in at a plus-sized eleven minutes and change. As a comedy bit, this didn’t [...]

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 [...]

So the debate between Sarah Palin and That Other Guy is over. (You can still find our the debate liveblog here, if you missed it.) Both candidates cleared the almost-impossible-to-miss bars set for them, Joe Biden not melting into a puddle of gaffes, Palin not turning into a version of her SNL parody. She was [...]

Quick spoilers for the season premiere of Friday Night Lights after the jump:

I will be liveblogging the VP debate tonight, with TIME political and national correspondents Karen Tumulty and Michael Grunwald. Look for it here. [Update: In response to demand from last debate's commenters, all three of us will be posting in one big thread. So you can watch the trend of discussion as we and your [...]

Only a small and petty man says I told you so. I am a small and petty man. For a while now, I’ve been skeptical about the wisdom of the networks’ decision not to bring back some of their high-profile new shows last year after the strike. Instead, they kept shows like Chuck, Pushing Daisies [...]

The Gender Factor Is Overblown. From the second Sarah Palin was nominated, there’s been breathless talk about how Biden was boxed in: he couldn’t debate her too aggressively, or treat her too gently, because he would look like a sexist pig. I’m not sure whether this line of reasoning is more insulting to Palin or [...]