+Uncategorized | 358 days ago

The Night Shift: Aasif Mandvi's Searing Satire — Why All the Cable News Fear Over This Particular Revolution?

By Steven James Snyder

Even before the protests in Egypt turned violent, the top names in cable news started speculating: What will happen to Egypt if U.S.-backed Hosni Mubarek is removed from power? What are the implications of America losing its biggest Arab ally? What does the turmoil mean for U.S. foreign policy, for Israel, for oil supplies? On [...]

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Tuned In+358 days ago

TV Tonight: Community Rolls the Dice with D&D Episode

By James Poniewozik

Throughout its second season, Community has weekly redefined what its half-hour comedy can look like: there was a Christmas stop-motion episode, an Apollo 13 parody, a study-group mystery involving a stolen pencil and an honest-to-God zombie episode. Tonight, the show plays—literally—with its structure again by constructing an entire episode around a game of Dungeons & [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 358 days ago

The Morning After: Ill Wind Blows Weather Channel Good

By James Poniewozik

And here I thought it was only major national news when we got snow here in New York City! It may have taken a massive, thousand-plus-mile blizzard to do it, but the Midwest has wrestled back the crown of winter primacy from the East Coast, and the result—as a massive snowstorm buried Chicago and other [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 358 days ago

The Dream of the '90s Is Alive: Beavis and Butt-Head Returning to MTV

By James Poniewozik

Kids, you’re probably too young to remember it, but there was a time when it was considered somewhat outrageous to say that something “sucked” on TV and when mocking a channel’s content on that channel itself was unusual, rather than the default mode of 90% of cable. That time was the ’90s, and the prime [...]

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Tuned In+358 days ago

Viacom Makes Hulu Deal; Snooki, Betty White More Elite Than Colbert

By James Poniewozik

Viacom, owner of MTV, Comedy Central and other valuable properties on the Monopoly board of cable TV, has finally cut a deal with Hulu to make its shows available on the online video service. But, for most of its shows, it’ll cost you. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report will now be online free [...]

+Q&A | 359 days ago

Kevin Smith: Why He's Going Rogue with Red State

By Mary Pols
Mark Mainz / Getty

The director talks to TIME about his new movie, thumbing his nose at the Hollywood studio system and why he’s serious about leaving film

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Tuned In+News Media | 359 days ago

Hands-On With Murdoch's iPad Newspaper, The Daily

By James Poniewozik

For those of you for whom the ability to play large-format Scrabble games is not reason enough to own an iPad, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp today unveiled The Daily, its new, ambitious, multimedia iPad newspaper. You can see a demo of the product above and read writeups of the announcement at The New York Times—an [...]

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Tuned In+News Media | 359 days ago

Anderson Cooper and Crew Attacked in Egypt

By James Poniewozik

When an international news story like the uprising in Egypt breaks, American anchors will often appears on the scene in what appear to be carefully controlled circumstances. But as Anderson Cooper‘s CNN crew showed, there is no magical bubble of American-media invulnerability at the scene of a revolution. According to Cooper, a pro-Mubarak crowd set [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 359 days ago

The Kennedys Finds a Home, for Reelz

By James Poniewozik

The Kennedys, the much-troubled miniseries about the much-troubled political clan, has finally found a channel to air it: ReelzChannel, a movie channel available in around 60 million cable homes. The eight-hour saga, from 24 co-creator Joel Surnow, was originally sold to History Channel but the network announced recently that it was going to pass on [...]

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Tuned In+News Media | 360 days ago

The Morning After: Window on the World

By James Poniewozik

I’m still largely out of commission today, but the news never takes a day off. So I thought I’d throw this post open for your thoughts on the TV news coverage of the astonishing events in Egypt—in particular, on Al Jazeera English, which most of us (me included) can only see streaming online. While the [...]