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Idol Watch: Health Scare

Crystal Bowersox—and American Idol—dodged a bullet last night as the singer, who had been hospitalized earlier in the day, showed up to perform on a women’s night that had been rescheduled to accommodate her. Had she not made it back, I’m not sure whether it would have been a bigger blow for her or for [...]

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HBO Picks Up Thrones, Places Bet on Dustin Hoffman

While I was in New Orleans, visiting the set of Treme and seeing the premiere screening of The Pacific, HBO was keeping  busy on its next generation of series. First came news that Dustin Hoffman will star in the pilot of Luck, the horse-racing drama from David Milch and Michael Mann. It’s not guaranteed to [...]

LostWatch: Thieves in the Temple

SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, find the right stone to push at the temple and watch last night’s Lost. I have stuffed James away in a dark hole where Claire is singing a creepy, off-key lullaby to him. So let’s get to “Sundown.” When season six started a month ago, fans who had [...]

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TV Tonight: Parenthood

Tolstoy, were he alive today, might have said this: Happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way; and all quirky-but-loving TV families—well, they vary, but within a defined range. So it should probably not be surprising that you see many of the same conflicts and dynamics on NBC’s new dramedy [...]

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Tuned In Architecture: New Orleans Edition

With some time on my hands before visiting the set of David Simon’s Treme (the reason I’m in New Orleans, along with the premiere screening of HBO’s The Pacific), I took my rental car and explored the city, which I’d been to several times, but not since Katrina. Obviously the effects of Katrina were greatest [...]

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Jay Leno's Long Nightmare Is Over

Jay Leno’s transition from primetime failure to once-and-future host of the Tonight Show lasted about a minute and a half. The cold open of his new Tonight Show had him waking up in a sepia-toned sequence—with Betty White, because the Internet loves her—a la Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. (If you had “finds it [...]

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The Morning After 2: Big Love DIY

I’m on the road for the next couple days and away from my beloved TiVo, so I missed last night’s Big Love and won’t be able to catch up on it. I’ve been detecting some dissatisfaction with the show in the Twitterverse, however, and figured the Big Lovers, or Big-Love-to-Haters, here might like to hash [...]

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Jaypocalypse 2: The Jaysurrection–How Will He Do?

Tonight, The Grover Cleveland of television, Jay Leno, commences his second nonconsecutive term as the host of The Tonight Show. (As I write this I’m about to head off on assignment for a couple days, so I’m not sure if I’ll be able to blog about his first night back or not.) His first week, [...]

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The Morning After: Give Caprica a Chance

If you watched the first episodes of Caprica and decided it wasn’t for you because it didn’t live up to Battlestar Galactica, try this: watch another episode and try to forget that it has anything to do with BSG. When the show debuted, I liked its potential but wasn’t entirely on board: it had a [...]

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The Marriage Ref: Grounds for Divorce

Last night, NBC gave a demonstration of the difference between so-awful-it’s-awesome and so-awful-it’s-amazing awful. First came the closing ceremonies of the Winter Olympics, which, after the usual nods to the next Olympic site, final benediction by Olympic officials and emotional performances, morphed into a bizarre comic parody of Canadiana that was like a hallucinogenic trip [...]