At the beginning of the last boys’ night before the final-12 round of American Idol, the male contingent of the singing contest lined up on stage as if they were getting ready to die. Such a nervous-eyed, beaten-cur group of semifinalists I have not seen on Idol. You can talk about this season’s guys’ singing [...]

Who’s the TV critic you’d vote least likely to ever appear on an ESPN network? Me! Who’s going to be on ESPN2′s First Take today around 11:30 a.m. (ET)? Me! Not talking sports though, not exactly. The show’s having me on to judge a greatest-sitcoms-of-all-time battle, bracket-style. (Brackets are the tournament groupings they use in [...]

First, let’s give credit to American Idol‘s producers, shall we? After a season rife with timing errors and overrun issues, they took the challenge of fitting eight performances in an hour—you could see Ryan Seacrest tensing up over it—and actually came in nearly exactly on time, with only a few toll-free numbers running into the [...]

SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, pop an organic TV dinner in the microwave and watch last night’s episode of Lost.