What’s good, bad and happening, from pop culture to high culture | Page 4

South Park Watch: The Tao of Poo

Spoilers for the midseason finale of South Park below: So I just cried at the ending of a South Park episode that involved, among other things, a piece of poop pooping on another piece of poop. One more item off the bucket list! “You’re Getting Old” was one of those episodes that managed to combine [...]

+Uncategorized | 233 days ago

The Walking Dead Comes Lumbering Back

By James Poniewozik

Normally, I’m loath to publish “first look” photos and videos on this blog, because it’s not much more than free buzz-building for a TV network. On the other hand, it’s been a bit of a contentious week here, what with all the Washington scandal and arguments over politics and history. So, to lighten the mood, [...]

+News Media | 233 days ago

Is the Weiner Story Any of Our Business?

By James Poniewozik

With a political sex scandal all over the headlines, at some point the time comes for the argument—well worth having—about whether it should be in the headlines at all. In Salon, Glenn Greenwald makes the impassioned argument that the Anthony Weiner case is none of our business, and that it’s a sad comment on journalists’ [...]

+Uncategorized | 233 days ago

Explain It To Me: The Voice

By James Poniewozik

One reality of being a TV critic is that you have to be a generalist; you may know a lot about a lot of TV shows, but you will never know as much about any particular TV show as its biggest fans do. There’s simply so much TV that—unlike, say, a movie critic, who can [...]

+Uncategorized | 234 days ago

NBC Keeps Olympics, Will Air Them (Sort of?) Live

By James Poniewozik

NBC, which has had every Olympics the last two decades save 1994, has kept the games through 2020, despite competition from Fox and ESPN. Unlike its rival bidders, NBC had not promised to air the games live (and has in past years insisted on saving events for primetime on tape-delay). But after winning the bid [...]

+Music | 234 days ago

The Morning After: Finding Bobby Fischer

By James Poniewozik

There are many different roles chess has played in popular culture: source of excitement, metaphor for conflict, cause of (or at least form of expression for) madness (e.g., Nabokov’s The Defense). Last night’s HBO documentary, Bobby Fischer Against the World, involved all of those, and was both an empathetic biography and fascinating history of a [...]

+News Media | 235 days ago

News in Briefs: Weiner Admits Lies, Underwear Tweeting in Wild Press Conference

By James Poniewozik

In the most shocking political press conference since the last time a some dude was forced to hold a press conference admitting a sexual transgression, New York Rep. Anthony Weiner took to a podium this afternoon to vindicate every joke made about his surname for the last week. It was all true, a tearful Weiner [...]

+Q&A | 235 days ago

'What the Hell Would Spielberg Do Here?': J.J. Abrams Talks Super 8

By Richard Corliss

Filmmaker J.J. Abrams tells TIME’s Richard Corliss all about his teen years, working with Steven Spielberg, and making ‘Super 8,’ the most eagerly awaited film of the summer

+Tuned In | 235 days ago

Couric Gets a Talk Show: Is She the Right Woman for the Right (Day)time?

By James Poniewozik

That thing that people kept saying would happen has happened: Katie Couric, formerly of NBC’s Today Show and CBS’s evening news, will host a syndicated talk show for ABC starting in fall 2012. Having left the morning and washed out of the evening, it’s now up to Couric (and her former producer Jeff Zucker, will [...]

+Uncategorized | 235 days ago

Palin Fans Try to Rewrite History (or at Least Wikipedia) on Paul Revere

By James Poniewozik

This weekend, Tuned In Jr., who is studying Boston and the American Revolution in school, mentioned that he was getting a “locked” error message while trying to load a Wikipedia page on Paul Revere. I know! As a father and a journalist, I should know better than to let my son use Wikipedia as a [...]

+Uncategorized | 235 days ago

New TV Critics' Awards Spread the Love in Inaugural Nominations

By James Poniewozik

The Broadcast Television Critics Association has announced the nominees for its first Critics Choice Television Awards, to be aired June 20 on Reelz, which you may know from the Kennedys miniseries or from various movie reruns. True to its name the group recognized a number of, well, critical favorites like Community, Fringe, Louie and Parks [...]

+Uncategorized | 236 days ago

Game of Thrones Watch: The Quality of Mercy

By James Poniewozik

SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, invite your father’s bannermen over and watch last night’s Game of Thrones. “The Pointy End” is the first episode of Game of Thrones (and the only one this season) written by George R. R. Martin, author of the A Song of Ice and Fire source novels. In that [...]

+Review Movies | 238 days ago

Submarine: From Teen Angst to Pure Delight

By Richard Corliss

Richard Ayoade’s feature debut lives inside a boy’s roiling soul while finding the human comedy in his desperation. From either aspect, it’s a cagey delight

+Movies | 238 days ago

Top 10 Superhero Movies

By TIME Staff

The past two decades have seen the rise of the big-budget superhero movie. TIME picks the best that the genre has to offer.

+Uncategorized | 238 days ago

Checking in on Treme: Present at the Re-Creation

By James Poniewozik

General second-season spoilers for Treme below: I haven’t been blogging about Treme much this second season, partly because I’m cutting back on weekly reviews at Tuned In, but partly because the show offers both too much and too little to talk about. On the one hand, the show still takes its time, and—with exceptions like [...]

+Remembrance | 238 days ago

James Arness, 1923–2011

By James Poniewozik

James Arness, who for 20 years personified the upright Western lawman as Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke, has died of natural causes at age 88. I’ll be honest: Gunsmoke was before my time as a TV viewer, and is enough outside my taste as a critic that I never watched it much as an adult. But [...]

+Review Movies | 238 days ago