Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 726 days ago

Dollhouse Watch: Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elves Agin)

By James Poniewozik

Spoilers for the series finale of Dollhouse after the jump:

Tuned In
Tuned In+728 days ago

Why I Am Not Watching the First Four Minutes of Lost

By James Poniewozik

The first four minutes of Lost‘s season premiere have been leaked online, reportedly after a fan won the footage on a USB drive in a contest. James Hibberd at The Hollywood Reporter says ABC has given permission to embed it, and I’m doing so above also linking it here. (The clip comes from uber-Lost guru [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 728 days ago

Lost Discussion Group, Weekend Edition: Anyone Up for Backgammon?

By James Poniewozik

Because you should always endeavor to do exactly what I’m doing, this would be a good time to go back and re-watch Lost’s pilot in preparation for the season debut next Tuesday. You can have plenty of fun looking back and seeing, in retrospect, how much foreshadowing there is in those two hours (say, Locke’s [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 728 days ago

Give Us Our Gay Christian Super Bowl Ads, CBS!

By James Poniewozik

Super Bowl Sunday is a little more a week away, and the most exciting matchup so far is on the advertising field. CBS, which used to observe a proscription against “issue” advertising during the big game, recently dropped its objection, to accept an ad from pro-life evangelical group Focus on the Family, featuring star quarterback [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+728 days ago

Lost Discussion Group: Ghost Stories

By James Poniewozik

I joked yesterday about the fact that death is a temporary state on Lost, but it seems pretty clear that, whatever mythology eventually gets revealed, it will have to have something to do with explaining about why we see (or think we do?) so many dead people walking around on The Island. As with Battlestar [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 728 days ago

About That Late-Night Truce

By James Poniewozik

Never mind:

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 728 days ago

The Morning After: The Spy Who LOLed Me

By James Poniewozik

NBC’s comedies were in reruns last night, but that doesn’t mean there was no new comedy. FX’s Archer aired a new episode last night, and although I won’t discuss the specific episode—because I’m not sure if FX has been airing episodes in the order I received them—I can say that as I watched the five [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+728 days ago

Dead Tree Alert: All the News That's Fit to Mint

By James Poniewozik

My column in this week’s print TIME is about the New York Times’ plan to begin charging (some people, something) to read it on the Web starting next year. Seemingly by design, it doesn’t look like the plan would raise too much money at first. It’s more important symbolically: the country’s most authoritative (and argued-about) [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 729 days ago

Leno Takes His Case to the Oprah Nation

By James Poniewozik

If you are celebrity trying to get past a major public controversy, one time-tested option is to do a dramatic interview on late-night TV. If you are the once and future host of the Tonight Show, however, and the hosts of every other late-night show apparently think you are the biggest jerk in showbiz, that [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+729 days ago

Lost Discussion Group: Who Deserves a Happy Ending?

By James Poniewozik

Last fall, when I sat down to talk with Maureen Ryan and Alan Sepinwall about Lost (and other shows), one thing we discussed was that the show has done an excellent job of making you invested in characters who weren’t central—or weren’t even on the show—when it started. Alan, for instance, said that one of [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 729 days ago

The Morning After: Daddy's Home!

By James Poniewozik

I was too busy watching the State of the Union—and surfing for reviews of the iPad—to catch up on last night’s American Idol, even though it featured television’s favorite guest star, Neil Patrick Harris. How was he? Bonus points to anyone who can evaluate his performance without using a “Legen—wait for it…” construction.

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 729 days ago

The State of Our Disunion

By James Poniewozik

So what did you think of the speech? No, not the State of the Union; other people are all over that. No, not the iPad launch; we’ve already covered that. I’m talking about the Republican response to the State of the Union, which new Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell delivered, in a twist, in front of [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 730 days ago

iPad: So Do You Want Some of This?

By James Poniewozik

Steve Jobs finally unveiled Apple’s long-awaited tablet device, the iPad. Yeah, it’s a dumb name. Get all your jokes out of the way now. (They should call the 8GB version “Light” and the 32GB “Maxi,” the 3G version comes with wings, &c.) The iPad is a lot of things—better-informed people than I can describe it [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 730 days ago

TV Swag for Haiti

By James Poniewozik

Do you want to do something more to help the victims of the Haitian earthquake? Have you always longed to have your own American Idol TV tray? Now you can do both. The Chicago Tribune’s TV critic Maureen Ryan is eBaying TV DVDs and promotional swag items and donating all the proceeds to Partners in [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 730 days ago

Post-Jaypocalyptic Fiction: The History-Rewriting Begins

By James Poniewozik

Last week, with Conan O’Brien getting ready to leave the air, Team Coco dominated the Internet. This week, with Jay Leno preparing for an image-rehab visit to Oprah tomorrow, the race to be “the only one out there sticking up for Jay Leno” is starting to get crowded. Mark Evanier argues that Jay is not [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+730 days ago

Lost Discussion Group: Setting the Scene

By James Poniewozik

Only six more days until The Most Important Day in Human History (the season premiere of Lost), at least until The Other Most Important Day in Human History (the series finale of Lost). To start getting us warmed up for the premiere, I’ll kick things off with an old standby discussion question: What do you [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 730 days ago

The Morning After: Katy Bars the Door

By James Poniewozik

I haven’t been much of a fan of American Idol’s guest-judge expertiment for the first post-Paula audition rounds, but last night Katy Perry had me wondering whether they could just can Kara or Randy and replace them with her. While Avril Lavigne spent the first half of the show contributing little, smirking from underneath her [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+News Media | 731 days ago

Fox: The Most Trusted Name in News

By James Poniewozik

OK, before the representatives of CNN and Media Matters shoot me e-mails, and Keith Olbermann names me The Worst Person in the World: Yes, I wrote the headline, but I didn’t take the poll on which it is based. Public Policy Polling surveyed Americans on which TV news operations they trust most and found that [...]