Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 473 days ago

The Morning After: New York Marathon

By James Poniewozik

Not a lot to say about last night’s How I Met Your Mother, which again offered relatively little on the promised larger-storylines-development for this season. Still, I enjoy the show’s little love letters to New York City like “Subway Wars”; the fact that they so blatantly look like they’re shot on a set in California [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 473 days ago

Campaign Ad Watch: Manchin Pops a Cap in Cap-and-Trade

By James Poniewozik

It is October 2010, and the Democratic governor of West Virginia, running for Senate, is demonstrating his bona fides to the citizens of his state with a campaign commercial in which he shoots a Senate bill. And this guy thinks he had it tough:    

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 473 days ago

AMC Previews Walking Dead at NY Comic-Con

By James Poniewozik

    The zombie girls sitting next to me were pissed off. In pallid makeup with artful angry gashes on their cheeks, they like the rest of us had stood in line for an hour or more to get into the IGN Theater at the Javits Center to see 6 1/2 minutes of AMC’s The [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 474 days ago

The Morning After: The Simpsons Get Banksy-fied

By James Poniewozik

The Simpsons may not get people talking the next morning as regularly as it used to, but it showed that it still can, thanks to an opening couch gag by British graffiti artist Banksy, which grimly satirized the means by which pop culture gets (literally, physically) made and merchandized: It’s a long gag, but it [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 474 days ago

Mad Men Watch: Behavioral Modification

By James Poniewozik

    SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, sneak off into the woods with a friend and watch last night’s Mad Men. Sincerity, as the joke goes, is everything. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made. Last night’s Mad Men, “Blowing Smoke,” found Don Draper throwing a Hail Mary pass. trying to [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 474 days ago

Rubicon Watch: Let Me Take You on a Sea Cruise

By James Poniewozik

    SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, check into a motel and watch last night’s Rubicon. After ten deliberate, talk-heavy episodes, last week Rubicon gave us a taste of the kind of action and violence we expect from other terrorism-and-espionage shows. Now, in the penultimate episode of its season, Rubicon showed that it [...]

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Tuned In+TV Recap Boardwalk Empire: Season 1, Episode 4 | 474 days ago

Boardwalk Empire Watch: The Master’s Tools

By James Poniewozik
HBO

SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, curl up next to a nice bookcase and watch last night’s Boardwalk Empire. Fans of The Wire had to be waiting for Boardwalk Empire, with its sprawling storylines, to finally spotlight Michael K. Williams, who stood out in HBO’s earlier series as principled bandit and robber of drug [...]

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Tuned In+477 days ago

Dead Tree Alert: School's In

By James Poniewozik

    In my TIME print-edition column this week (not yet available online), I take a look at pop culture and the public school crisis. Besides Davis Guggenheim’s excellent documentary Waiting for “Superman,” the column covers two Friday reality shows that take very different approaches to public school ills: NBC’s School Pride, which debuts in [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 477 days ago

The Office Watch: Razor Sharp

By James Poniewozik

Spoilers for last night’s The Office coming up: So last night, my laptop seized up and died on me as I was watching, appropriately enough, the death-themed Community on DVR. (I am having the machine vaporized and sealed in a lava lamp.) It was a fairly strong episode—see especially the Abed subplot playing out entirely [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 477 days ago

New Walking Dead Trailer: Wake Up, All You Zombies

By James Poniewozik

I’ve seen the first two episodes of AMC’s new zombie thriller, The Walking Dead, but the network has placed an October 18 embargo on any “information,” so I’ve already said too much. (Tell you what! I’ll blink once for “Loved it” and twice for “Hated it.” There—did you see it?) In the meantime, here’s a [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 478 days ago

The Morning After: Great Scot

By James Poniewozik

    Regular Tuned Inlander rousseau writes: James, can you do The Morning After for today? I missed Modern Family because I was watching the stunning, goosebumps-down-your-flesh film version of the recent New York Macbeth with the great Patrick Stewart on PBS last night. They turned the Scottish kingdom into a very fitting modern fascist [...]

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Tuned In+News Media | 478 days ago

Was Lou Dobbs' High Horse Groomed By an Undocumented Worker?

By James Poniewozik

    Lou Dobbs, the former CNN host who turned up this week as a client on The Good Wife, is in a real-life legal controversy. After he made a name for years with his crusade against illegal immigration, a year-long investigation by The Nation charges that Dobbs himself employed undocumented workers to maintain his [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 478 days ago

Modern Family Watch: I Felt the Earth Move

By James Poniewozik

    Quick spoilers for last night’s Modern Family coming up: One of the toughest things about keeping house is keeping the house. As in keeping it together, making sure it does not physically disintegrate. Home ownership puts a strain on relationships because (1) it is a strain and (2) every little failing and glitch [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 479 days ago

Jon Stewart Talks Sanity, Sukkot with Terry Gross

By James Poniewozik

Earlier this week, Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air interviewed Jon Stewart on stage at New York’s 92nd Street Y to discuss his upcoming Rally to Restore Sanity, Glenn Beck and other media and politics matters. And while the talk was recorded before the Rick Sanchez “Jon Stewart and the Jews Control the Media” flap, [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 479 days ago

The Morning After: Running for Its Life

By James Poniewozik

This is the sad time of the fall when a TV critic has to decide that, good or bad, certain new shows have dim enough chances that there’s not time to follow them. Fortunately[?] this year the new fall crop is weak enough that that isn’t such a heartbreaker in most cases. But I’m glad—and [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 479 days ago

Glee Watch: Cheesus Is Just Alright With Me

By James Poniewozik

Spoilers for last night’s Glee coming up: There’s been a lot of talk lately among critics, including ones I respect and admire, about how terrible Glee is. And I can totally understand it. Glee is not consistent; at times it is not even coherent. It can be an awful show or a great one, often [...]

+Uncategorized | 479 days ago

Caprica Lives: Harnessing Immortality, Fighting For Survival

By Steven James Snyder

A rather thorough, spoiler-filled breakdown of Caprica below: When you’re the prequel to a show called Battlestar Galactica, when you’re given the kind of major league promotions that accompany a Star Wars sequel, it’s hard to satisfy expectations. And that’s what has cursed Caprica since its first episode aired last winter. The ratings failed to [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 480 days ago

The Morning After: Finished With That

By James Poniewozik

I’d mentioned earlier that I was probably going to step back from writing up How I Met Your Mother every week, Hell or high water, unless I had a lot to say about a particular episode. “Unfinished” is probably a good place to start that practice, as it combined Glee’s weakness for literally restating its [...]