Spoilers for this week’s Office coming up after the jump:

Early in Comedy Central’s A Colbert Christmas, airing Sunday night, flag-waving country singer Toby Keith stops by Colbert’s cabin in the snowy woods. They get to talking about what’s happened to Christmas in our society—you go to the mall and people say “Season’s Greetings,” you can’t put a Nativity scene in front of a courthouse. [...]

  My column in this week’s magazine looks at the media blitz surrounding America’s newest TV family:   After Obama won, there was talk of a “Huxtable effect”–the idea that pop-cultural portrayals of African Americans from The Cosby Show to 24′s David Palmer readied white America for a black President. But maybe there’s an opposite [...]

Very brief spoilers for last night’s Survivor: Gabon coming up after the jump: 

Jericho is back! Not back back, but still, in a way, back! The CW has canceled its Sunday night schedule, outsourced to Media Rights Capital to produce, which means the end of Valentine and Easy Money, the latter of which I will apparently be the only person in America to miss. And it’s replacing the [...]

Two side-by-side stories in today’s Romenesko media news:  1. Thanks to a spellbinding Presidential election and major economic news, 60 Minutes‘ ratings are way up.  2. Despite a spellbinding Presidential election and major economic news, network newscasts‘ ratings are slightly down.  The angle of David Zurawik’s interview with 60 Minutes’ executive producer on the Baltimore [...]

The Heroes panel at a recent Screenwriting Expo was a strange event, reports IGN: creator Tim Kring was scheduled to be on the panel with two of his producer-writers, but they were fired before the panel took place. Naturally, discussion turned to what Kring might change about the show to save it. He made a [...]

It’s getting close to the end of the year, which means it’s time once again to start putting together the year-end critics’ lists. As I mentioned to another TV writer the other day, this year I’m thanking God for returning shows, because I’d have a hard time finding anything in this fall’s debuts to put [...]

Apropos of songs being appropriated for commercials, my colleague Sean Gregory writes about that Toyota ad. One thing, as they say, leads to another.

Brief spoilers for Fringe coming up after the jump. 

* Dancing With the Stars—which I will admit off the bat I do not watch any more than I absolutely have to—has added a little dance competition within the dance competition, this one with little “Ballroom Kids” competing. If only American Idol had thought to do this with their results show, we would have been [...]

The TLC network has done a pretty remarkable job lately of targeting a particular psychographic: parents, largely but not exclusively moms, particularly of young children, who (like myself) are inordinately nosy about the lives and choices of other parents. Sometimes we want to see their tearjerking stories (A Baby Story et al.), sometimes we want [...]

Am I the only one who thinks taking a court-ordered season or so off would actually be a good thing for Project Runway?

Spoilers for this week’s The Shield coming up after the jump: 

Not that you noticed them missing in the first place, but the archives of Tuned In—which vanished from the Internet in the Great Time.com Blogtastrophe of 2008—have been restored. Which is probably as good a time as any to ask if there are any improvements or features you’d like to see added to the blog now [...]

At lunchtime, I went to a panel for the new IFC six-part documentary series, The IFC Media Project. Hosted by Arianna Huffington, it featured Media Project host Gideon Yago (late of MTV News), NYT conservative columnist William Kristol, Legendary NYC writer Pete Hamill, and excommunicated National Review scion Christopher Buckley. It was the sort of [...]

Bill Carter in the New York Times reports that, contrary to the word flying around last week, Lipstick Jungle is not cancelled after all. Though the between-the-lines read of his report is not that encouraging:  [NBC co-chair Ben] Silverman noted that it does not repeat well at all, which makes it a risky long-term investment if [...]

  Spoilers for How I Met Your Mother coming up after the jump:

Here’s a preview of your upcoming few months: all media outlets will put Barack Obama and his family’s faces on anything they reasonably can, because it is a license to print money. (TIME magazine, which just put out an Obama book, being no exception.) The Obama gravy train made a stop at 60 Minutes last [...]