Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 445 days ago

Conan Returns: Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before

By James Poniewozik

So I don’t know if you’ve heard about it, but Conan O’Brien lost a job last January. No, I’m serious! But I understand if you’ve been busy, so the first episode of O’Brien’s new TBS talk show, Conan, helpfully filled you in. The opening video—very funny, and very much in the spirit of one he [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+TV Recap Boardwalk Empire: Season 1, Episode 8 | 446 days ago

Boardwalk Empire Watch: Conventional Wisdom

By James Poniewozik
HBO

Spoilers for last night’s Boardwalk Empire coming up: One of the pleasures of Boardwalk Empire has been how thoroughly and freely it has mixed historical and fictional people and events, without seeming bound to history or constrained by it. The writers have seen fit to change elements where necessary—making Nucky Johnson into Nucky Thompson, for [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+446 days ago

Celeb Marathon Update: Don't Mess With Fringe Division

By James Poniewozik

Al Roker is wearing his New York City Marathon medal on the Today show this morning, and I don’t blame him. I wore mine home on the subway yesterday, and there’s nothing like getting rounds of congratulations from strangers for your running bling. I’m considering making it a regular part of my wardrobe. I finished [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 446 days ago

Walking Dead Watch: Live Together, Undie Alone

By James Poniewozik

Quick spoilers for last night’s The Walking Dead coming up: A series like The Walking Dead has different constituencies to try to please. There are the fans who have read the original comics, and the viewers who haven’t. There are the people who are watching the show because they’re drawn to sophisticated, dark storytelling like [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 446 days ago

It's C-Day: Will Team Coco Come Home? Will the Beard Stay?

By James Poniewozik

Ten months after the Jaypocalypse, a beard, a stage tour and much drama later, Conan debuts on TBS. For all the hype around the show, and the news around how the show came to be, what we’re actually going to see on air has remained a fairly tightly held secret. I don’t have answers. But [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 449 days ago

Louis on Louie

By James Poniewozik

My Paley Center Q&A Wednesday night with Louis C.K. went great. Which is to say, he was great—all I really did was lob some questions, stepped back and let him go, while I tried not to touch my head too often. (I never know what to do with my hands at these sorts of things.) [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+449 days ago

My Weekend: Al Roker, My Running Buddy

By James Poniewozik

As I’ve mentioned here before, I’ll be running the New York Marathon this Sunday (televised, not that you’ll be able to see me, on NBC). If you ever have the chance and inclination to do it, it’s a great experience. It’s honestly touching how thousands of New Yorkers throng almost the entire course to cheer [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+News Media | 449 days ago

BREAKING: Keith Olbermann Proved Liberal

By James Poniewozik

This just in: MSNBC host Keith Olbermann supports Democrats. According to a report in Politico this morning, Olbermann made the maximum legal donations to three Democratic candidates last month, one of them immediately after he appeared on Olbermann’s show. This is potentially a problem for Olbermann, because it looks as though he violated an NBC [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 449 days ago

Community Watch: The Secret Garden

By James Poniewozik

Brief spoilers for last night’s Community coming up: A good episode of Community is all a matter of how you see things. Literally. On one level, an episode like “Aerodynamics of Gender” can seem fantastical, what with Abed’s Robo-Bitch-vision and Jeff and Troy gamboling in a magical trampoline garden. But really what you’re seeing is [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 449 days ago

Letterman Defeats Leno! Stewart Defeats Both!

By James Poniewozik

Conan O’Brien‘s new talk show debuts on TBS next Monday, which is sure to raise memories of the whole ugly scene last January when NBC threw over O’Brien at 11:35 p.m. for Jay Leno. (As will the timely publication the same day of Bill Carter’s Jaypocalypse dirt-disher, The War for Late Night.) But whatever you [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 450 days ago

Modern Family Watch: House Hunter

By James Poniewozik

Earlier this week, I did an interview with a reporter who’s doing a story on how the recession (or crappy recovery, or whatever the proper term is) is or isn’t affecting TV. I’m always a little skeptical of the idea that news events strongly drive viewing trends; I tend to think people watch shows they [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+450 days ago

Dead Tree Alert: Sarah Palin's Alaska

By James Poniewozik

The midterms are over, which means that department stores are taking down their Halloween pumpkins and putting up their Election 2012 decorations. And in that spirit I give you, online in advance of its appearance in the print TIME magazine, my early review of the TLC reality show Sarah Palin’s Alaska. (With a spiffy picture [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 450 days ago

Terriers Watch: By Hooker By Crook

By James Poniewozik

Brief spoilers for last night’s Terriers after the jump: Last week’s Terriers post convinced me there’s enough interest in the show that I should return to it on the blog. And this was a good week to do it, because “Pimp Daddy” was a strong explanation of two questions that Terriers explores. The first is [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 450 days ago

The Morning After: Big Top Teevee

By James Poniewozik

PBS’s six-part documentary Circus debuted last night, and the tent-raiser episode, so to speak, started off by taking a broad look at the culture of an ancient, itinerant entertainment profession. And while the obvious calling card of the show is the spectacular visuals of, well, spectacle (see clip above), I was as interested or more [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+News Media | 451 days ago

TV Roundup: Dino Trouble, Fox Tsunami, Mini Conan

By James Poniewozik

* Let me make clear that, for all I know, Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi/time-travel/dinosaur show Terra Nova for Fox may be the greatest thing ever created for television, if it comes to exist. But it continues to make the kind of news you don’t want an upcoming show to make. First it was announced before a [...]

+Movies | 451 days ago

Top 10 Movies That Shouldn't Have Made It to Broadway

By TIME Staff
Everett

There are few examples of movies making a successful transition to the Great White Way. TIME looks at Broadway shows that should never have been.

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 451 days ago

The Morning After: An Irish Lullaby

By James Poniewozik

The combination of a defective DVD screener and a night spent watching election coverage has put me an episode behind on Sons of Anarchy. But rather than make you wait, I thought this might be a good place to pause, four episodes from the end of season 3, and poll the Anarchites of Tuned Inland [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+News Media | 451 days ago

Midterm Media Do the Wave

By James Poniewozik

Video: MSNBC wasted little time reacting to the reaction at the polls last night. “Wave,” “tidal wave,” “tsunami”—the terms for the midterm results in last night’s TV coverage were limited only by the English language’s number of terms for something really big from an ocean. (The land-based lobby really needs to get its act together [...]