Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 567 days ago

FNL Watch: A Question of Choice

By James Poniewozik

Spoilers for Friday Night Lights coming up: This is a good place to talk about choice. Not choice as in “a woman’s right to choose,” though the subject of this episode of Friday Night Lights was abortion, but choice as in a storyteller’s ability to choose how best to make believable decisions in a narrative, [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+News Media | 568 days ago

So You Want to Work in the Mainstream Media

By James Poniewozik

Use social media! But don’t get too social. Engage your audience! But don’t piss anyone off. Be authentic! But conceal any beliefs regarding anything important you cover. Know your subject! But draw no informed conclusions from anything you learn. Don’t take sides! But be sure to cater to the most easily outraged subsets of your [...]

+Books | 568 days ago

Top 10 Books You Were Forced to Read in School

By TIME Staff
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TIME rounds up the classic texts that have monopolized school reading lists for decades.

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 568 days ago

Top Chef Watch: Hotel Reservations

By James Poniewozik

Belated thoughts on Wednesday’s Top Chef DC coming up: The “Room Service” elimination challenge combined two (to my memory) new situations on Top Chef, one a good idea and one not so great. I don’t recall a challenge involving preparing a hotel meal before (thought there may have been an early one I’ve forgotten), and [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 568 days ago

Olivia Munn Hits the Road: Pretty? Funny? Or Pretty Funny?

By James Poniewozik

Caught in the crossfire over whether The Daily Show has a problem with women or not has been Olivia Munn, the show’s newest correspondent, who has been cited by some as an example not of the show’s inclusiveness but of sexism. To wit: she was hired, the implication goes, not because she’s funny but because [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 568 days ago

The Morning After: Not in Cleveland

By James Poniewozik

It was reality TV’s most painful breakup ever, as LeBron James told the city of Cleveland: it’s not you, it’s my desire for a championship ring. In a dramatic, drawn-out special that would have done ABC proud—it seemed as if James should have been interviewed by Chris Harrison, not Jim Gray—the free agent announced his [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+569 days ago

TV Tonight: LeBronarama

By James Poniewozik

You shall have to go elsewhere for your LeBron James analysis; my awareness of pro baskbetball ended right around the time of one of Michael Jordan’s retirements. But this is a TV blog, and so it it my duty to inform you that ESPN will be carrying James’ decision—whether to spare the human race or [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 569 days ago

The Morning After: …But I Know What I Like

By James Poniewozik

First of all, yes, I know these “Morning After” posts are increasingly coming after noon. I have a lot of things going on. Thus, I have decreed that the morning now lasts until 3:30 p.m. At which time, Cocktail Hour immediately begins. There is no longer an afternoon. Now for last night’s TV. I was [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+News Media | 569 days ago

CNN, Twitter and Why Hiding Journalists' Opinions Is (Still) a Bad Idea

By James Poniewozik

It takes 20 years to build a job, 140 characters to end it. On Tuesday, CNN senior editor for Middle Eastern Affairs Octavia Nasr posted this comment on Twitter: “Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah.. One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot. #Lebanon.” By yesterday, with CNN under fire [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 569 days ago

Emmy Nominations: A Big Day for Glee, Lost, Coco—and a Few Surprises

By James Poniewozik

Joel McHale and Sofia Vergara revealed the nominations for the 2010 primetime Emmy Awards this morning. And while TV critics’ complaining about award nominations is as tired a ritual as sweeps stuntcasting, this time out the list was… well, surprisingly defensible. On the comedy side, it was a big year for new series Modern Family [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 570 days ago

Test Pilot: Undercovers

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 | 570 days ago

The Daily Show Women's Problem With "The Daily Show's Woman Problem"

By James Poniewozik

The women of The Daily Show‘s staff yesterday took the unusual step of issuing an open letter in response to a lengthy Jezebel blog post from last month that charged the show had a “problem” with women—specifically, with hiring too few women writers and on-camera talent. To rehash quickly, blogger Irin Carmon talked to female [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 570 days ago

The Morning After: Descent of Man

By James Poniewozik

My initial interest in ABC’s summer series Downfall fell when I learned that it was not a spinoff of the online Hitler parody videos. Last night, I finally checked in on the game show, whereupon my interest fell even further. As did the contestants, the prizes and pretty much everything on the show.

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 571 days ago

Freaks and Geeks: Most Influential Show I Wouldn't Have Thought Would Be Influential

By James Poniewozik

This also falls under While I Was Out, but I thought it deserved a post of its own: IFC is airing (actually, started airing Friday) reruns of Freaks and Geeks and, this fall, will also air Judd Apatow’s follow-up college comedy, Undeclared. (Apatow produced Freaks, which was created by Paul Feig.) I utterly loved both [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 571 days ago

Party Down's Last Bash, and Other Things That Happened While I Was Out

By James Poniewozik

So yeah, I’m back. Though fair warning: over my vacation, my niece in Michigan taught me how to make marshmallows from scratch, so it’s pretty much a matter of time until I bag the whole TV-criticism day-job thing and make my fortune in the lucrative and trendy small-batch-marshmallow business. But until then, a quick rehash [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 571 days ago

Fairytale, Ending: Last Night's Awkward Bachelor Reunion

By James Poniewozik

Last night on a very special edition of The Bachelorette, the current reigning Bachelor, Jake Pavelka, and the object of his rose-bestowal, Vienna Girardi, returned to explain to Chris Harrison the very public tabloid breakup of their made-on-TV relationship. The charge, as Vienna brought it: that a month after they declared their love in the [...]

+Movies | 571 days ago

Top 10 Soccer Movies

By Glen Levy
Everett

Take note of these 10 films to see you through until the next World Cup tournament begins in 2014.

+572 days ago

Three Cheers for Anthony Bourdain

By Steven James Snyder

During long holiday weekends like this, I invariably find myself scanning through my DVR archive, catching up on all the shows I’ve taped and then forgotten about. There are four programs I basically record en masse: Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares (the British version), It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (still catching up with early episodes), Cash Cab [...]