New episodes of Friday Night Lights and Battlestar Galactica tonight, but it may be a while before I blog about them, if at all. Tonight is movie night with Tuned In Jr. Jr., and I cannot violate the sanctity of movie night. I also don’t want to violate the sanctity of not-staying-up-past-midnight-blogging-on-a-Friday-night. In the meantime, [...]

You could spend hours analyzing what this year’s Super Bowl ads say about the state of the American economy. But this story pretty much says it all. The new name among this year’s Super Sunday advertisers? Cash4Gold.  The spot’s celebrity pitchmen: MC Hammer and noted personal-finance counselor Ed McMahon.

In the comments under my Dollhouse post from yesterday, there’s an interesting (well, to me) discussion about one of the things that make TV reviewing different from film or book criticism: trying to assess the future of a series from a couple episodes, or maybe even just one.  As I wrote there, one trick to [...]

We’re two days away from the big game. As I’ve made abundantly clear, I’m not a big sports fan, but I’ve been hearing this one’s looking like a potential blowout, which is not great news for NBC. It’s also the big game for American consumer marketing, and as we all know, that competition has been [...]

In the new print TIME, my Tuned In column looks at the now-former governor of Illinois’ media tour this week:  It is somehow perfect that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich would begin his media self-justification-and-jury-pool-influence tour at the same time that American Idol has returned to TV. Like the bad auditioners who spring anew from city and [...]

Why don’t more people watch the evening news anymore? One commonly blamed culprit is schedules. People are busy at 6:30! Gotta work late! Soccer practice! Put the news on later, when people are home, the thinking goes, and they’ll have time to tune in.  Except that then, they want to watch American Idol. Last night, [...]

I’m preparing for my annual Super Bowl Ad review extravaganza this Sunday night (in which I TiVo the game, watch and review every ad on the spot, and fast-forward through the entire game itself; the reviews usually post, with video, early Monday morning). As part of that, the good folks at DreamWorks and Pepsi sent [...]

When I screened the pilot of Joss Whedon’s upcoming sci-fi series about humans with erasable memories, the subsequent post got picked up and eagerly pored over within the Whedonverse. So I feel a kind of obligation to my public, and to my traffic reports, to note that Fox has sent me a second episode.  I’m [...]

Here we go again. The New York Times is reporting that ABC has considered the idea of moving Jimmy Kimmel into Nightline’s 11:35 p.m. slot to compete against Conan O’Brien, when Conan assumes Tonight from Jay Leno (and Jay Leno assumes 1/3 of primetime from the NBC entertainment division).  So far, the scuttlebutt—knocked down by [...]

I watched the first three episodes of Damages last month; now that we’re into the thick of midseason TV and FX has aired the fourth, I am officially behind. I’ll get to it eventually, but am throwing the thread open for anyone who wants to dissect it.  Also last night saw the post-Lost return of [...]

  SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, fill it with lead, encase it in concrete and bury it until you watch last night’s Lost.   

Word is just out that Domino magazine is going out of business. That sucks. Domino was an unabashedly consumerist magazine (it was the home-design sister to shop-centric Lucky magazine), but it never felt like a glorified catalog; it had taste and an aesthetic and tight but well-thought-out features. (My favorite, well, is still around, for [...]

I had forgotten that the new cable movie channel from Paramount, MGM and Lionsgate was coming, but it still is, and it reportedly now has a name: Epix. But the New York Times reports that it’s having a hard time finding a cable distributor.  How could that possibly be? Could it have anything to do [...]

…it’s another episode of Lost, the last of three screened for critics in advance. It’s good—maybe my favorite of the three.  If you don’t want to encounter the merest hint of a spoiler as to what might happen tonight, read no further.  If you do want a little tidbit to exercise your minds with while [...]

It is snowing up and down the eastern half of the country this morning; as I type I can hear the precipitation—having changed over to rain in Brooklyn—adding a creme-brulee-like crust of ice to the overnight snowfall. Despite that, I brought the Tuned In Jrs. to school this morning; there was no snow day declared [...]

So Friday Night Lights finished the second week of its NBC run as part of season 3′s DirecTV cost-sharing agreement. How’s it doing?  On the one hand… it’s fallen to fourth place in the ratings.  On the other hand… Ben Silverman says it’s turning a profit in an hour that used to lose money, and [...]