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Dead Tree Alert: What's Right With Reality TV

In the print edition of TIME this week, I’m marking the 10th anniversary of Survivor (I’ll have a couple thoughts on the season premiere later) with a critical essay on what a decade—or a generation, going back to The Real World—of reality TV has done for us, and to us: “In 1992, reality TV was [...]

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The Chuck Crisis of '10: A National Dialogue

This has been one of those weeks that I’ve been glad I don’t blog regularly about Chuck. It’s nothing against the show; I like it fine, though I don’t lurve it the way some folks do, and I don’t have a deep enough interest to sustain a weekly analysis. I haven’t enjoyed this season quite [...]

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Modern Family Watch: The Talented Mr. Bixby

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

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Jay Leno Slips Out the Back Door

The Jay Leno Show ended last night with an absolute minimum of fanfare—fittingly and deliberately, since NBC’s hope is to pretend that it, and Conan O’Brien’s Tonight Show, never happened. Come March 1, the idea is, we’ll all stretch and yawn, memories of Olympic figure skating ice-dancing in our heads, and watch Leno on the [...]

Top 10 MTV Moments

Top 10 MTV Moments

For everyone who remembers when MTV used to play music videos, the news that the cable channel had removed the phrase “Music Television” from its logo only made its long metamorphosis into a reality-tv channel official. TIME takes a look at some of the best moments in MTV history.

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New Top Chef Masters: New Dishes and Leftovers

Bravo announced a premiere date (April 7) and the new contestants for season 2 of Top Chef Masters. Among the 22 contestants, will be several chefs getting do-overs after having appeared in season 1, including Wylie Dufresne, the molecular gastronomist whose molecules came unglued in a tough challenge, despite having come in as a well-known [...]

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Idol Watch: Give 'Em Ellen

Ellen DeGeneres kicked off her American Idol career last night with the Hollywood round of the auditions. Was she an entertaining hire? Absolutely. Unsurprisingly, for someone who’s been on camera for decades, she was immediately confident and able to mix it up with the contestants and, to a lesser extent, the other judges. While she [...]

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Lostwatch: Zombie Island

SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, take a quick taxi ride and watch last night’s Lost.

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NBC: There Was Never a Conan O'Brien

Tonight, there will likely not be a dry eye in the house, as America says goodbye to Jay Leno. Again. This time for three whole weeks. After The Jay Leno Show ends tonight, Jay will head back to the Tonight show beginning March 1. And what can you do in the meantime, while Tonight is [...]

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HIMYM Watch: It's Wabbit Season! It's Duck Season!

Spoilers for last night’s How I Met Your Mother coming up after the jump:

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Undercover Boss: Biggest Thing Since Dolly?

Somewhere in the CBS press release about Undercover Boss’s boffo debut ratings was the claim that this was the biggest debut for any new TV series since the Dolly show in 1987. If you’re like me, you’re thinking, Wow! And also: What the hell was the Dolly show? I was not watching a lot of [...]

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Undercover Boss Is Phony and Manipulative. But Don't Hold That Against It.

Along with last night’s mammoth Super Bowl ratings came the news that 38.6 million people watched the debut of CBS’s new reality show Undercover Boss, in which executives work incognito within their own companies. Did those people see an entertaining, emotional work that celebrated American workers? Or a manipulative, cheesy piece of big-network p.r. for [...]

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Super Bowl Beats Everything on TV, Ever

Last night’s Super Bowl was the most watched program. Period. Of the night, the week, the year, the Christian era, you name it—at 106.5 million viewers, it broke the record held for 27 years by the finale of M*A*S*H. (Which means that that many people, give or take a few million bathroom breaks, watched that [...]

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Stupid PR Tricks: Toyota Dealers Recall Ads, to Punish ABC

Toyota has been making a show of contrition for the acceleration problem that led to a massive recall of several of its models, buying a humbled Super Bowl ad and apologizing publicly. But one group of its dealers is working hard to blow any positive credit the company may have earned, pulling its ads from [...]

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Big Love Watch: DIY Edition

Super Bowl ad duty kept me up late last night without time for Big Love (which, by the way, just got a fifth-season pickup!), and some more pressing duties mean I won’t be able to review “Sins of the Father” soon. So feel free to post your thoughts here, and if I catch up in [...]

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Best and Worst Super Bowl Ads 2010: The Good, the Bad and the (Misogynistically) Ugly

My quickie reviews of last night’s Super Bowl ads (all of them, with a few exceptions, 68 in total) are up at time.com. I grade them not as an advertising professional but simply as a guy who watches TV and buys stuff, though I try to take the effectiveness of the message into consideration. My [...]

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TV Weekend: Join Together With the Band

This Sunday is That Sunday: as usual, I’ll be watching the game for the ads, and time.com will post my complete (or as near as I can get it) postgame review of all the commercials sometime overnight Sunday. There will also be a football game! And a halftime show, with The Who, whom CBS fans [...]

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Stewart on O'Reilly, Unedited: Worth the 42 Minutes

FoxNews.com has posted the entire unedited interview of Jon Stewart by Bill O’Reilly on its website, and if you’re the least bit interested in media criticism, or Fox News criticism in particular, or discussions of politics and febrile American culture, or just tough but respectful debate, you really need to watch it. (By the way, [...]