Interesting New York Times piece on the continuing lawsuit by Dan Rather against CBS over its resolution of the 2004 controversy over President Bush’s National Guard records, which cost Rather his job. In a nutshell, the network came under conservative fire for a 60 Minutes II report that relied on documents suggesting that Bush had [...]

Anyone who follows the media business (or, ahem, works in it) knows well how hard that sector has it in a general economic downturn. But in an intriguing Boston Globe article imagining what an actual 21st-century Great Depression would look like, Drake Bennett raises an interesting point about the prospects for an entertainment medium that’s [...]

  I wasn’t moved by True Blood when it debuted this fall, but I’ve been quietly keeping up with it after the first five episodes HBO sent out. It’s still not a Sunday night date for me, but I find myself sort of not hating it. I can’t imagine ever being involved in the show [...]

Barack Obama posts what will be the first in a series of Presidential (or for now, President-Elect-ial) weekly addresses on YouTube. The sounds you hear in the background from about :35 to 1:05, while he talks about the economic crisis? Sirens! Because we weren’t quite alarmed enough to begin with.

Before watching Ricky Gervais: Out of England—the Stand-Up Special, I hadn’t really thought of Gervais as a stand-up comedian. After watching it, I still don’t. Which is not to say that the special is not entertaining; it’s uneven but sometimes gaspingly funny. But as he did in The Office, Extras and (to a lesser extent) on [...]

Interesting piece by Brian Stelter about a side effect of the cancellation of My Own Worst Enemy: it also means the end of a high-profile product placement for General Motors, which wasn’t really in the market for yet more bad news.  Is Hank Paulson empowered to bail out Christian Slater action thrillers?

  Not one of my favorite episodes of 30 Rock last night, though like all of them it had its moments. The Night Court closure storyline was over the top of the top but I was willing to suspend disbelief more than usual for Harry and Markie’s sake. (“Court? At night? I’m laughing already!”) Jennifer [...]

In this week’s issue of TIME, a look back at The Shield and very-spoiler-light look ahead to its final two episodes, including some themes I’ve been writing about here:  The show’s themes and Chiklis’ brooding, minotaur-like physicality invite comparison with that Urtext of male antiheroes, The Sopranos. But our relationship with Mackey is more complicated–and [...]

Spoilers for The Office coming up after the jump: 

When I first reviewed Chocolate News I said that the show suffered from some iffy taped segments, but that David Alan Grier’s commentaries showed potential if they could keep the humor more current. (At least I think I wrote that. Until the Internet coughs up the Tuned In blog archives I have to rely on memory, [...]

Spoilers for the season premiere of Top Chef coming up after the jump:

Over the years, people have sometimes complimented me on my articles for Slate (when I was actually writing for Salon), mentioned my work in The New Yorker (for which I don’t work) or told me they read a book of mine (that I did not write). For all these incidents I can thank the insightful James [...]

Oh, this is just too good. In short: after Fox News reported the juicy post-election charge, attributed to anonymous McCain advisers, that Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent and not a country, MSNBC’s David Shuster reported that the source had come forward: McCain adviser Martin Eisenstadt, who claimed responsibility on his [...]

Top Chef, currently Bravo’s best reality show—and I’d say that even if Project Runway were returning—comes back tonight. What excites me: it’s once again set in my city, New York. What doesn’t: they’ve inexplicably replaced fantastic judge Ted Allen with serial self-promoter Toby Young. I’ll suspend judgment on the judge for now, however. The new [...]

As if picking a school and a puppy weren’t enough—oh, yes, and fixing the economy and dealing with two wars—Barack Obama now has to decide whether to let his daughters appear on one of their favorite TV shows, Hannah Montana.  I do not know Barack Obama. I can only guess, as a father, what his [...]

At times this week, the aftermath of Election 2008 has seemed like a bronze-medal round in the Olympics: having lost the gold, the Palin side and the McCain side of the Republican ticket has squared off in the media postmortems, each to assign the other the greater share of blame for the loss. Sarah Palin, [...]

Spoilers for Fringe coming up after the jump: 

There are, if you look at it generously, two successful new network shows in fall 2008. Strangely, they are on at the same time. We’ve talked about Fringe a fair amount here—I still have last night’s on Tivo—but not so much CBS’s The Mentalist. I liked it better than I expected when I first saw [...]