Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 603 days ago

The Morning After: Burn Notice Relights and Reloads

By James Poniewozik

If this week marked the return of the broadcast-network summer reality season, it’s also the launch of the basic-cable summer drama season. One of the past summers’ highlights, USA’s Burn Notice, returned last night. I’m behind on it–the show usually has DVR-and-catch-up status for me–but I know it has fans here, so let us know [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+603 days ago

Dead Tree Alert: The Soul of Twit

By James Poniewozik

This week’s column in the print TIME looks at Twitter as a literary art form. No, seriously. With the emergence of satirical accounts like @BPGlobalPR, which has mercilessly flogged BP over the Gulf oil spill, the fake-Twitter account has come into its own as Twitter’s indigenous genre of fiction. What is Twitter lit good for? [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Remembrance | 604 days ago

Rue McClanahan, 1934-2010

By James Poniewozik

Actress Rue McClanahan died this morning, reportedly of a stroke, at age 76. McClanahan had a wide and varied career on stage, in film and on television, but she’s most widely remembered for playing the vivacious and bodaciously lusty senior Blanche Devereaux in the sitcom The Golden Girls. With just the right blend of sass, [...]

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Tuned In+News Media | 604 days ago

The Bids on Newsweek, and the Future of Media Ownership

By James Poniewozik

The initial bids came in yesterday in the first round of the Washington Post company’s sale of Newsweek. I’ve held off saying much of anything about the magazine’s sale, because (1) I don’t want it to seem like Schadenfreude (as a working-today-but-tomorrow-who-knows journalist, I feel none) and (2) the last matter on which anyone is [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 604 days ago

Conan Live: O'Brien Toasts His Fans, But They're Buying the Drinks

By James Poniewozik

Halfway into the opening monologue of his stage show at Radio City Music Hall last night, Conan O’Brien stopped to address a woman in the front row, getting to her seat late with a drink from the bar. “That drink better have been worth it,” he mock-scolded, then asked her for a sip. “You can’t [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 605 days ago

Justified Watch: My Daddy Can Whup Your Daddy

By James Poniewozik

Quick spoilers for last night’s Justified coming up after the jump: A big ongoing issue in TV today is serial vs. episodic drama: that is, dramas that tell stories that unfold over an entire season or season as opposed to ones that tell stories wrapped up in a single episode. An extreme example of the [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 605 days ago

The Morning After: Back to Reality

By James Poniewozik

It’s after Memorial Day weekend, and that means it’s time for summer reality programming on the broadcast networks. Last night, NBC debuted Losing It with Jillian, a truly repellent spinoff of The Biggest Loser that alternated between weight-loss coach Jillian Michaels verbally abusing an overweight family and mawkish moments of “triumph.” It was like watching [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 605 days ago

Glee Watch: What the Funk Was That?

By James Poniewozik

Spoilers for last night’s Glee coming up: Last night, we learned that New Directions were in a funk because they had been intimidated by Vocal Adrenaline. And Rachel was in a funk over her breakup. And Quinn was in a funk over her pregnancy. And Will was in a funk over the glee club’s prospects. [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 606 days ago

Would You Watch Parks & Rec If It Were Friends, America?

By James Poniewozik

Over at Maclean’s, Jaime Weinman (a great, vastly knowledgeable critic you should be reading regularly) has an insightful post wrestling with the question of why Parks and Recreation has a vastly improved second season, but it didn’t result in improved ratings. He posits that the problem was it didn’t retool in any visible way (recasting, [...]

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Tuned In+Advertising | 606 days ago

Lost Audience Not Record Setting, But Watched Ads Really Hard

By James Poniewozik

When I wrote my print TIME feature on the end of Lost, one section I had to drop for space had to do with how much money ABC was asking for ads in the finale—reportedly $900,000 a pop—even though Lost was not close to the highest-rated program on TV. That fact points to something that [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 606 days ago

Test Pilot: $#*! My Dad Says

By James Poniewozik

Test Pilot is a semiregular feature sharing my first impressions of the pilots for next fall’s shows. These aren’t reviews, since these pilots can be rewritten, recast and retooled before airing, and the shows that eventually get on the air can prove much better or worse. But, premature opinions are why God invented the Internet, [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 606 days ago

Survivor's Rulebook Leaks Out

By James Poniewozik

Over the weekend, Survivor officially turned ten years old, having given us a decade of assorted and sundry competition reality shows (as well as the inspiration for Lost). Yesterday, on Survivor’s tenth birthday, the website Reality Blurred delivered quite a present: a leaked copy of the nine-page rule book given contestants on the show. Among [...]