NBC has announced the roster of this year’s Celebrity Apprentice, which debuts March 1. There are ’90s legends including Andrew Dice Clay, Tom Green and Dennis Rodman. There’s a Kardashian (but not the famous one!). And there are Joan and Melissa Rivers, who actually, by the standards of Donald Trump’s show, are absolute A-listers. (Incidentally, [...]

I very rarely make accurate ratings predictions, so I have to make a big deal of them when I do. And with news that The Mentalist scored nearly 20 million viewers the other night, I can’t help noting that I kinda-sorta pegged it for a hit last fall:  The Mentalist is, in the end, a [...]

We are in one of those weird periods for LDG, because I have seen the first two episodes of season 5 (both of which air Jan. 21). So I have to be extremely careful about posing leading discussion questions, or writing anything else that may inadvertently spoil something for someone, if for no other reason [...]

Brief and only mildly spoilery remarks on the season premiere of Damages after the jump:

Let it never be said that no media organizations are expanding their overseas coverage. A conservative website has hired Real America resident Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher as a war correspondent. Wurzelbacher will reportedly spend ten days in Israel, asking Israeli “Average Joes” to tell their stories as fighting rages in Gaza.  In other news, [...]

Peevish thoughts that occur to me while going through review screeners, an occasional series:  Can we declare some kind of moratorium on little supertitles in TV series telling us the name and significance of every new character we meet? If we’re watching a scene in which an ad exec is pitching a client—and I pick [...]

As the New York Times reports—and the constant stream of network-news PR emails hitting my inbox attest—TV is going all out to provide coverage of Barack Obama’s inauguration on Jan. 20.  HBO will carry a free inaugural celebration. CNN will be at the Newseum. MSNBC will be on the Mall. And Fox News will be [...]

Barack Obama to Name Dr. Sanjay Gupta Surgeon General: Onion headline or actual news? According to The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz, it’s fact, and as long as the CNN doc can accustom himself to making White House money rather than cable-news money, he’s expected to accept.  The jokes write themselves, and hey, I’m not above [...]

A good thing, since he’s a TV critic for Entertainment Weekly. Since returning from from a stint as movie critic at New York magazine, Tucker has contributed to ew.com, but now he’s doing a daily blog for the site. The premise: Tucker watches TV every night. Then he writes about what he watched. Simplicity itself.  [...]

I’m writing about the season premiere (or season re-premiere, or second-half-of-the-season premiere, or whatever) of Battlestar Galactica. The problem I’m having is that I cannot write anything about the show without spoiling or otherwise ruining something major. The first return episode is pretty much packed with highly explosive spoilerage, and that’s after Sci Fi deleted [...]

So what do TV critics watch when they’re on vacation? For my part, largely what my children let me. Tuned In Jr. the Eldest, for instance, is in a game-show phase, which means I’m becoming reacquainted with Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune after a long, long time.  On the TV beat, you tend to focus [...]