Tuned In
Tuned In+News Media | 353 days ago

Keith Olbermann's Current Event: New Show, New Job at Al Gore's Channel

By James Poniewozik

Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann announced this morning that, as of late spring, he will launch a new primetime show and become Chief News Officer at Current TV. [Pause to allow readers to find Current TV in their digital-cable/satellite channel guides.] On a conference call with Current founders former Vice President Al Gore and Joel [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+353 days ago

TV Tonight: Traffic Light

By James Poniewozik

In Showtime’s comedy Episodes, a pair of British sitcom producers have lunch with Matt LeBlanc, who’s considering starring in a remake of their comedy about a headmaster at a boys’ school. LeBlanc notes that it sounds like The History Boys, and the more the couple try to explain the differences, the more it does in [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 353 days ago

HIMYM Watch: Long-Distance Relationship

By James Poniewozik

Spoilers for last night’s How I Met Your Mother following: The moment that “Oh Honey” indicated it would focus on Zoey, I actually exclaimed aloud, “I do not give a crap* about Zoey!” (*Quotation bowdlerized for MSM-website standards.) So you probably have a sense of where I stand on the Zoey-Ted relationship. It’s not that [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Music | 353 days ago

Musical Comedy: Every Comic in World (Almost) in New Pornographers Video

By James Poniewozik

I try to make a point of not using this blog to simply post random videos from bands that I like. But I feel I can make an exception when the video (for The New Pornographers’ “Moves”) includes Paul Rudd, Bill Hader, Donald Glover, much of the Daily Show cast, Julie Klausner as Neko Case [...]

+Review Movies | 354 days ago

The Roommate: Single White Female, the College Years

By Mary Pols
Jaimie Trueblood / Screen Gems

Leighton Meester and Minka Kelly deserve better than this by-the-numbers girl-meets-girl psycho thriller

Tuned In
Tuned In+Advertising | 354 days ago

Groupon: We Meant to Do That

By James Poniewozik

So as I wrote this morning, Groupon seems to have alienated much of the football-watching world with its commercial last night, which began as a seemingly earnest plea about the plight of Tibet and ended with Timothy Hutton describing the awesome deal he and others got at a Tibetan restaurant thanks to the online-coupon site. [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 354 days ago

TV Tonight: The Chicago Code

By James Poniewozik

Ideally, TV critics should judge new shows without regard to whether they run on cable or broadcast TV. In practice, our insider-y knowledge of the differences and the tensions between the two creeps in. Arguably, some cable shows get a pass for recurrent themes—the brooding antihero, &c.—that are every bit as much as overused as [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+News Media | 354 days ago

Arianna Online: Is the AOL-HuffPo Deal Good News for News?

By James Poniewozik

You’ll have to excuse anyone, like me, who works for Time Warner for having flashbacks this morning, as word spreads of AOL buying The Huffington Post for $315 million. (Here’s HuffPo’s statement.) A high-profile deal between a media content company and AOL, with starry-eyed leaders on both sides promising synergies that will make “1 plus [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 354 days ago

Glee Watch: The Walking Dead

By James Poniewozik

Spoilers for the post–Super Bowl Glee up next: If you had never watched Glee before, yet lived in American society with full possession of your senses and faculties, what would you probably know about it? That it’s set in a high school. That kids sing popular tunes of the day. That there’s this cheerleading coach [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Advertising | 354 days ago

The Morning After: Super Bowl Ads, the Light and the Dark Side

By James Poniewozik

Thanks for my kindly masters, this was the first year in several that I did not work through the Super Bowl and into overtime reviewing every single ad for time.com—I divvied up the game with colleagues Steven James Snyder, Feifei Sun and Josh Sanburn. I had the second quarter, which included personal fave from Volkswagen [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 354 days ago

Big Love Watch: Dream Girl

By James Poniewozik

“We’re going to be a church that values women and their relationship with Heavenly Father.” —Barb Henrickson “I am not Roman Grant.” —Bill Henrickson An early knock against Big Love was that a drama about polygamy that did not condemn the practice across the board amounted to a male fantasy. It was an oversimplification, the [...]

+Uncategorized | 357 days ago

The Night Shift: Howard Stern Revives the Late Night Wars, Guns For Leno

By Steven James Snyder

Now that Conan O’Brien is back on television, one might be forgiven for thinking the late night wars were behind us. But in recent weeks, Howard Stern has made a return to the talk show circuit, and has come out swinging, reviving the vitriolic Letterman-Leno-Conan dustup. And he’s held no punches about what he thinks [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 357 days ago

The Morning After: Burying Your Grudges

By James Poniewozik

As I noted earlier this morning, I wrote my farewell column for Friday Night Lights on the show’s theme of community and interdependence: the way it shows how sustaining (and sometimes infuriating) a small town’s network of relationships and reliance can be. If I had two or three times the space, I might have written [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 357 days ago

Community Watch: Character Alignment

By James Poniewozik

Spoilers for last night’s Community coming up: You knew that “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons” was going to be a special episode of Community, because it was structurally different (as many of its best episodes are), because it had a stripped-down (and thus budget-saving) setting and because, well, most of the episode involved a single game [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+357 days ago

Dead Tree Alert: Friday Night Lights, America's Team

By James Poniewozik

My column in the print edition of TIME this week celebrates Friday Night Lights, which airs its series finale on DirecTV next week. (The column went to press before NBC announced that it will begin airing the last season April 15—though a DVD of the full season will be available ten days earlier.) I wanted [...]

+Review Movies | 358 days ago

"James Cameron's" Sanctum: All Wet

By Richard Corliss
Jasin Boland / Universal Pictures / AP

While the film tantalizes viewers with the Avatar auteur’s name, James Cameron wisely had little to do with this underground misadventure

+Review Movies | 358 days ago

The Other Woman: Natalie Portman's Best Performance

By Richard Corliss
Barry Wetcher / Incentive Film Productions

As a homewrecking second wife struggling to win over her new stepson, Natalie Portman may have found her most intimate, sympathetic role yet

Tuned In
Tuned In+News Media | 358 days ago

The War on the Media in Egypt

By James Poniewozik

Yesterday we had word of CNN’s Anderson Cooper and his camera crew getting attacked and beaten by pro-Mubarak demonstrators in Egypt. Today, it seems increasingly clear that attacks on the media by Mubarak-supporting crowds, and harassment by the government itself, has quickly become widespread, if not systematic. Some of the troubling incidents: * TIME reported [...]