Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 862 days ago

Office / Parks & Rec Watch: Parkour and Recreation

By James Poniewozik

Spoilers for the season premieres of The Office and Parks and Recreation coming up after the (parkour!) jump:

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 862 days ago

Archer's Secret (Agent) Debut

By James Poniewozik

It’s not often that I get a PR pitch from a network asking me not to write about a new show it’s debuting. But last week FX wrote to say that it was sneak-peeking the first episode of its animated spy comedy Archer (starring the voices of H. Jon Benjamin, Aisha Tyler and Jessica Walter), [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 862 days ago

The Morning After: Community Organizing, Fringe Media

By James Poniewozik

I’ll have a post about last night’s The Office and Parks and Recreation up a bit later this morning. I’ve already weighed in on last night’s debut of Community, though, and while I enjoyed Fringe for its Walterliciousness—and the awesome sight of Olivia flying through the windshield—it stayed far enough away from the big reveal [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 862 days ago

Dead Tree Alert II: Modern Family

By James Poniewozik

My other piece in this week’s TIME is a review of ABC’s Modern Family, which is neck-and-neck-and-neck with Community and Bored to Death (about which a little more later) for my favorite new show of the fall. (You notice a trend? As much as people constantly cry the death of the sitcom, this has been [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+862 days ago

Dead Tree Alert I: Socialized Nature!

By James Poniewozik

Think of my Tuned In column in the current issue of TIME as a kind of companion piece to the Glenn Beck cover. It’s about Ken Burns’ new documentary, The National Parks, and the (probably unwitting) provocativeness of Burns’ serving up a twelve-hour love letter to a government program in the year of the tea [...]

+Television | 862 days ago

Top 10 TV Dads

By TIME Staff
Everett

From The Brady Bunch to The Sopranos, TIME picks the 10 most memorable fathers in television history.

Tuned In
Tuned In+Remembrance | 863 days ago

Won't You Guide Me Safely to the Golden Stair?

By James Poniewozik

Folk singer Mary Travers died yesterday from leukemia at age 72. Peter, Paul and Mary should not have been at all my thing: a group of completely earnest folk icons of the ’60s is probably as close to the opposite of my usual taste as is possible. But there was always something entrancing about Travers, [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+863 days ago

Now the Deluge: Office, Parks & Rec and Fringe Return

By James Poniewozik

Besides tonight’s debut of Community, we also have the returns of The Office, Parks and Recreation and Fringe, which Fox has decided to add to my Thursday entertainment burden menu. After the jump, a little rundown of what to expect, and how I plan to handle blogging the heavy schedule of Thursday  shows as the [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 863 days ago

The Morning After: Glee-peat

By James Poniewozik

Because I was out representin’ at the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia  live show last night, I haven’t yet caught up with last night’s Glee (rats!) or The Jay Leno Show (not so much rats!). I’ve already seen Glee’s fourth episode (Fox skipped the third in the mailing to critics), so I hope to have [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+863 days ago

Glenn Beck on the Cover of TIME: Mad or Glad?

By James Poniewozik

TIME’s cover story this week, by politics writer David von Drehle, is about Glenn Beck. (Cover line: MAD MAN.) I suspect one or two of you have an opinion about it.

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 863 days ago

Always Sunny Live: The Gang Puts On a Show

By James Poniewozik

It’s hard to describe The Nightman Cometh to somebody who hasn’t seen It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. When you do attempt to describe it, it’s just as hard to explain why you would want to make a special trip to see it on stage. But here goes: it’s a musical episode of a sitcom in [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 864 days ago

Community: Chevy Chase Is On Fire

By James Poniewozik

I get to the set of NBC’s Community a little bit before sunset, the night they are going to set Chevy Chase on fire. The new comedy—about a misfit study group at a community college—does its location shooting on a real campus in Koreatown. Tonight, they’re shooting some nighttime shots for the second episode (the [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+864 days ago

Corporate Press Release Theater: MTV Adopts Warren the Ape

By James Poniewozik

Greg the Bunny was a weird, highly funny inside-showbiz comedy on Fox in 2002, starring Seth Green, Sarah Silverman and numerous puppets. It was soon canceled, but never managed to completely die, later living on in a series of short movie parodies on the IFC channel. Now MTV is bringing back what may have been [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 864 days ago

The Morning After: Jay II

By James Poniewozik

In case anyone was wondering, I won’t be instituting a Jay Leno Show Watch on this blog any time soon. I watched last night’s show, and it’s pretty clear that we’re watching what is—with a few variations—late night in primetime. I’ll be keeping an eye on it (and its ratings—off a sharp but not unexpected [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 865 days ago

Ken Burns Is Taking Your Questions

By James Poniewozik

PBS doc-maker Ken Burns is the next subject of a TIME 10 Questions interview, and time.com is soliciting questions for him right now. Burns’ next documentary is The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, a twelve-hour, six-part series starting Sept. 27. I’ve been watching it, and while it’s full of staggering nature-porn footage—it’s a sort of [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 865 days ago

Obama to Appear on Everything, Everywhere. Except Fox.

By James Poniewozik

President Obama will be on five-count-them-five political talk shows Sunday, on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and Univision. I picture him hurriedly fishing one interview, running off, being handed a cup of Gatorade and dumping it over his head, dashing into the next studio… Then on Monday he’ll be appearing on Late Show with David Letterman, [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+TV Ratings | 865 days ago

Nearly 18 Million for Jay. Does It Matter?

By James Poniewozik

Last night, the first broadcast of The Jay Leno Show drew a whopping 17.7 million viewers, many of them with their original teeth. As the guy who wrote the story with the “Future of TV” cover line, I should probably just leave it at that and call it a day. But let’s take a look [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 865 days ago

Jay Leno: It's Not the Tonight Show. It's, Um, the Ten-ight Show

By James Poniewozik

The Jay Leno Show, NBC has been telling us all summer, was “comedy at 10,” not simply a second Tonight Show. Instead, what we got was a monologue, a couple taped comedy bits, an interview, a musical act, another interview and Headlines. Somebody refresh my memory: what was The Tonight Show again? Because clearly I [...]