Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 442 days ago

The Morning After: To Catch a Thief

By James Poniewozik

There are a lot of things to love about Community, but as I wrote back when the second season debuted, for me it boils down to the sense that everyone involved simply has such a fantastic time at their jobs. Individual episodes have their ups and downs, but there’s an amazing level of craft to [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 442 days ago

30 Rock Watch: Brooklyn in the House! (of Representatives)

By James Poniewozik

Spoilers for last night’s 30 Rock coming up: Disclosure here: I am bound to be favorably disposed to an episode as devoted to my borough as “Brooklyn Without Limits,” and last night’s episode included a spoof of Brooklyn artisanal-hipster culture as specific as anything this side of Bored to Death. But provincialism aside, this is [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+News Media | 442 days ago

Stewart on Maddow on Stewart on the News

By James Poniewozik

Last night, Rachel Maddow devoted her MSNBC program to an interview with Jon Stewart about the message of his Rally to Restore Sanity, and its critique of the news media, especially—this being a cable news show—cable news. (See the whole thing here.) I don’t want to oversimplify the interview, which got into some interesting points [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 442 days ago

New Beast on the Block

By James Poniewozik

Tina Brown is back in the magazine business! After some fits and starts in the deal, Brown’s (and Barry Diller’s) The Daily Beast website and the new ownership of Newsweek have worked out a deal by which the two entities will combine, with Brown as the editor in chief of both. TIME being the Coke [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 443 days ago

TV Tonight: Message in a Bottle

By James Poniewozik

Very mild spoilers for tonight’s Community follow: Do you know what a bottle episode is? You will by the time tonight’s Community episode, “Cooperative Calligraphy,” is done. The term describes an episode of a series done in a limited setting—say, the classic trapped-in-a-freezer scenario—to save money. (Example: Breaking Bad’s superlative “The Fly,” which Alan Sepinwall [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 443 days ago

You Can Never Win: AMC Cancels Rubicon

By James Poniewozik

And thus Truxton Spangler gets to walk away. AMC announced today that it will not renew espionage thriller Rubicon, thus breaking its undefeated streak of shows renewed after their first season (Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead). The statement, in its entirety: ‘Rubicon’ gave us an opportunity to tell a rich and compelling story, [...]

+TV Networks | 443 days ago

The Night Shift: Now A Serious Word or Two From Russell Crowe (Video)

By Steven James Snyder

Wednesday night’s Late Show With David Letterman started predictably enough: A couple jokes about Conan, about George W. Bush’s new book, about the cruise ship stranded out at sea. Then Russell Crowe came on to talk about his new (and pretty good) movie The Next Three Days. In the past, Crowe’s been a provocative headline [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+News Media | 443 days ago

Tucker Carlson Generously Proves Jon Stewart Right

By James Poniewozik

Conservative journalist and sometime TV pundit Tucker Carlson is not Keith Olbermann; he just plays him on the Internet. This past summer, Carlson’s website, The Daily Caller, purchased the URL keitholbermann.com and used the domain to host (generally unfavorable) Daily Caller articles about the liberal MSNBC host. Last week, after Keith Olbermann’s suspension from MSNBC [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 443 days ago

Why Do Republicans Hate Cable?

By James Poniewozik

In the grand tradition of button-pushing pseudoscience, someone has done a study determining which TV programs are most popular among Republicans and Democrats. See here for the list, but the overall skew of the study seems to be that the shows with the higher proportion of GOP fans are high-rated mass hits; those with proportionally [...]

+Movies | 443 days ago

Top 10 Train Movies

By Josh Sanburn
Everett

Trains—both deluxe and down-market—have served as prime cinematic locales. TIME takes a look at the best locomotive-heavy films.

Tuned In
Tuned In+444 days ago

A Second Look At: Detroit 1-8-7

By James Poniewozik

The night Detroit 1-8-7 premiered on ABC, I had a Twittter window open on my laptop, specifically following tweets about the show, which seemed to be running heavily from Michigan natives. There had been a lot of advance concern about how the cop series would portray Detroit, whether it would exploit the city’s rough image [...]

+Music | 444 days ago

Top 10 Ridiculous Country Songs

By Kayla Webley
country_songs_tout

TIME takes a look at country music’s most absurd tunes—many of which, oddly, involve alcohol.

Tuned In
Tuned In+News Media | 444 days ago

The Morning After: Olbermann Is Sorry, But Not for That

By James Poniewozik

Keith Olbermann returned to the air after what turned out to be a brief “indeterminate” suspension from MSNBC for violating its policy by making unapproved donations to three political candidates. He had three apologies to his viewers, but not for the donations. Olbermann was sorry, he said, for (1) all the drama; (2) being unaware [...]

+Uncategorized | 444 days ago

The Night Shift: Conan Ups the Antics, Literally Pulls Out All The Stops (Video)

By Steven James Snyder

Okay, so let’s get this out of the way at the top: I’m a big Conan O’Brien fan, and I’m thrilled the red haired one has returned. But was I the only one who thought the opening night show was a little…meh? The cold open video, repurposing Conan as Sonny from The Godfather was hilarious. [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 444 days ago

Glee Watch: Bully Pulpit

By James Poniewozik

Spoilers for last night’s Glee coming up: One of the many tightropes that Glee walks is that it makes a dramatic argument against stereotyping while employing many characters who are in some ways stereotypes themselves. This is not necessarily a criticism. At best, it can be a way of further complicating the show’s stories about [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+TV Ratings | 445 days ago

Conan Night One Beats Networks, By Stealing Their Young

By James Poniewozik

The ratings are in for the first night of Conan on TBS, and Conan O’Brien has plenty to be happy about. The big headline everywhere will probably be “Conan Beats Jay”—and yeah, I could not resist a variation on that here—but that’s probably not a big deal in the long run. Yes, Conan got 4.2 [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 445 days ago

Raising Caine

By James Poniewozik

If you are a fan of Steve Coogan, or Rob Brydon, or Michael Caine, or just things that are very funny, you need to watch this video now. It’s from the BBC series The Trip, in which Coogan and Brydon travel the north of England reviewing restaurants. Here, they argue over who has the better [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 445 days ago

How I Met Your Mother Watch: A Night at the Museum

By James Poniewozik

Spoilers for How I Met Your Mother coming up: I’ve taken a break from the HIMYM Watch here, until the show started producing some episodes I had much to say about, which is to say episodes that began treating the characters again like real people with ongoing challenges and goals. But when I talk about [...]