8-O I’m not very good with emoticons. Does that symbol above appear to convey, “Eyes wide open in stunned perplexity”? Because that’s what I was going for. That’s the image that would best convey my response to the disturbing, unfunny, bizarre-but-not-in-an-entertaining-way spectacle that was Rosie Live.  Much as with Knight Rider, another NBC attempt to [...]

My native state, Michigan, has a number of grand traditions: deer hunting season, year-round Christmas in Frankenmuth, Mackinac Island fudge and auto-industry bailouts. But the grandest of all is the tradition of the Detroit Lions losing. Yesterday, the Lions did not disappoint. I was fortunately too busy in the kitchen to watch, but did catch a [...]

In an earlier comments thread, anon76 writes:  I’ll second P-Luk on the awesomeness of Colbert’s special. Will we be getting a current thread to discuss it? JP might have blown his nutmeg by posting on Friday, before the rest of us had a chance to see it. Works for me. Between print deadline work and [...]

NBC has announced its first midseason schedule, for January. As part of the Great TV Resurrection of 2009, you will finally be able to watch Friday Night Lights without putting a thing on your roof. (I got the sense there are not a lot of DirecTV subscribers in the Tuned In audience.) The Panthers return [...]

Spoilers for the series finale of The Shield coming up after the jump:

A New York Times feature today looks at tomorrow’s Rosie O’Donnell variety special on NBC, widely considered to be a sort of test pilot for a possible variety series. As the piece notes, the Return of the Variety Show has been bruited about in network TV for a little while now—Fox is at work for [...]

  It has become a refrain of certain commenters here—cough! Chaddogg! cough!—that Tuned In is not showing sufficient love to Chuck this season. Triage, my friends, triage. I’m liking Chuck better this season than I did the first, but (1) I tend to watch them in chunks, either on DVD long before they air, or [...]

After the end of the year, Alan Colmes will not provide a spirited defense of liberalism to Sean Hannity on Hannity & Colmes. Unlike for the past 12 years, the reason will now be that Colmes is not on the show.  Fox News has announced that the often-outshouted left half of the cable debate show [...]

Tim Kring, creator of Heroes, caused a bit of a stir last week when he blamed Heroes’ ratings problems on DVR, DVD and online viewing—which, he said, left the show’s live ratings dependent on “saps and dips__ts” who didn’t know how to use technology.  Kring has now apologized, in an open letter to fans (from [...]

The Tuned In house is hosting Thanksgiving this year, for 18 people, so like many of you I’m combining work this week with back-of-my-mind menu planning and logistical calculations. And yet as much as people like to commiserate about the burden of Thanksgiving, I love it. I love cooking, but more to the point I [...]

  Once upon a time there was a plan to shoot season 7 of 24 in Africa. In between then and now, the idea was scotched, for reasons I’m not completely clear on. What we have been left with is 24: Redemption, a two-hour movie / season 7 prequel that airs Sunday on Fox. In [...]