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The Morning After: Just a Flesh Wound

IFC last night aired the second episode of Almost the Truth: The Lawyer’s Cut, its six-hour documentary on Monty Python. As a longtime Python fan—and one who usually has little patience for showbiz documentaries—I found the doc’s personal stories and cultural context fascinating, but I wonder if the whole haul is a little much for [...]

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HIMYM Watch: True Patriot Love

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

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Fedora, Cigarettes Not Included

You would think that a series set in 1963 would be a series with limited potential for product tie-ins, but you would be wrong. Introducing the Brooks Brothers exclusive Limited Edition Mad Men Suit. Well, I now know who I’m going as for Halloween!

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Dept. of Bad Ideas: Government News

New York Times media columnist David Carr has an intriguing piece today about a wonky but potentially influential Columbia Journalism School report on how to how to save newspapers—or, more specifically, the newsgathering that those papers do—as it becomes more apparent that their advertising-based business model is threatened. A big component of the authors’ solution: [...]

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Mad Men Watch: Dirty Laundry

SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, spray on your Aqua Net and watch last night’s Mad Men.

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The Morning After: Cement Shoes

As I mentioned yesterday, my visit to the Monty Python reunion means I have a greater Thursday-TV backlog than usual. (I did catch the weak, overly wacky “Mafia” episode of The Office, which doesn’t require much comment.) So use this space to discuss any of last night’s shows. In the meantime, I’m thinking of taking [...]

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Monty Python Reunites in NYC: How Amazingly Unlikely

You don’t know how adorable it can be for a 10-year-old girl to impersonate a Spanish Inquisitor until you’ve seen it in person. Last night, as the five surviving members of Monty Python reunited on stage at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York City, they were temporarily upstaged by Talia, a girl they invited onstage [...]

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Balloon Boy on Larry King: "We Did It for the Show"

For a few horrifying hours yesterday, TV news and its audience thought they might be witnessing the death of a child in real time. Instead, it turned out we were literally distracted by a shiny object. The silvery experimental balloon hurtling through the air over Colorado did not, it turned out, hold six-year-old Falcon Heene; [...]

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Dead Tree Alert: Family of Guys

In this week’s print TIME magazine, I review the cartoon empire of Seth MacFarlane, who dominates Fox’s Animation Domination with three animated sitcoms on Sunday nights. (And in his spare time, besides appearing in FlashForward, is going to do a variety special for Fox and Microsoft.) Regular readers will not be surprised that I am [...]

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"Balloon Boy," Family Had TV Connection

As I write this, we don’t know if the story of the Mylar balloon that went sailing over Colorado, attracting wall-to-wall TV news coverage, was tragic or not. We don’t know if it was real or a hoax, if six-year-old Falcon Heene was ever in the balloon. But it is undoubtedly a strange story. And, [...]

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TV Tonight: 30 Love? Or 30 Like?

As Jamie Weinman at MacLean’s has noted, there seems to be a little bit of a critical backlash out there against 30 Rock, which returns tonight on NBC. Having seen the first two episodes of the season, I both get the pushback and don’t get it. On the one hand, they show off the show’s [...]

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Modern Family Watch: Mother's Day

With last night’s episode, Modern Family cemented its claim as strongest new comedy of the fall. A few thoughts: * I hadn’t really realized, before last night, that we hadn’t seen any meaty scenes with Claire and Mitchell interacting as brother and sister. With the arrival of Mom (Shelley Long) providing the excuse, this episode [...]

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And Now for Something: Python Online, On Satellite

First a little programming note: I’m going to be at the Ziegfeld Theater tonight,where the five surviving members of Monty Python will be honored for their 40th anniversary, after a screening for the theatrical cut of the new Python documentary, Almost the Truth: The Lawyer’s Cut. (The full, six-hour version begins airing on IFC Sunday [...]

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The Morning After: It Keeps Me Hanging On

Spoilers for last night’s Glee coming up after the jump:

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Wrestler, MTV Fixture Captain Lou Albano Dies

Professional wrestler and sometime actor Captain Lou Albano died this morning at age 76. I never followed his career inside the ring, but like any kid who watched too much MTV in the ’80s, I was plenty familiar with his work as the father figure in Cyndi Lauper’s videos. Beyond those claims to fame, Albano’s [...]

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Our Thursday Problem

The emerging consensus in Tuned Inland is that Thursday is becoming a problem. A high-class problem, yes: too much good (or at least potentially good) TV. I don’t even watch Grey’s Anatomy, yet at this point, I find myself finishing my time-shifted Thursday-night programming somewhere around the following Monday—especially since Mrs. Tuned In and I [...]

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The Morning After: Long Arm of the Law

It took me most of last season to really get into Sons of Anarchy, but this fall’s season 2 of the biker-gang drama has really found, as it were, a higher gear. So I apologize again that other work is keeping from doing a longer write-up again. (On a related note: I got a review [...]

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What's Obama's Fox News Strategy?

Lately the Obama Administration has—in TIME and other outlets—been actively going on the attack against Fox News. The Administration, and Obama himself, have had run-ins with Fox before, but this time the message is different: they’re characterizing the cable channel as not just a conservative outlet, but as a political organization, devoted to undermining the [...]