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TV Weekend: Teen Wolf

Say what you will about what MTV: it is a channel that has always known what it is, even if “what it is” changes every three years or so. In its early years, there was a distinct idea of what an MTV video looked like. There was, with Beavis and Butt-Head and Daria and experiments [...]

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The Daily Show on Weiner: Bigger, Longer and… Oh, This Is Too Easy

The Daily Show is not live TV, so when Jon Stewart responded Wednesday to Anthony Weiner’s inability to identify “with certitude” whether a certain Twitter photo was of his own crotch, Stewart noted that the show had not had time to generate a full segment. The show made up for it last night, with an [...]

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Welcome to the Emmys, Jane Lynch! Please Leave Sue Sylvester at Home

The good news first. Well, at least it’s potentially good news. Jane Lynch is the host of the next primetime Emmy awards! Yes, I liked Neil Patrick Harris too, but apparently he can’t host everything all the time and he was good enough to endorse Lynch on Twitter and he has a point. Lynch is [...]

Super 8: Just as Great as You Hoped It Would Be

Francois Duhamel / Paramount Pictures

Something — some thing — is terrifying the good folks of Lillian, Ohio, but what is it? A gas-station attendant, his face blanched with fear, sees it and screams; all we see is his body being jerked out of the frame. A telephone lineman on his crane hears it as a clattering clank of metal, [...]

A Failing Grade to X-Men: First Class

Murray Close / 20th Century Fox

The prequel has all the makings of a smart fantasy parable, but it torpedoes its lofty intentions with flights of idiocy so wrongheaded as to be almost endearing

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Test Pilot: Awake

Test Pilot is a semiregular feature sharing my first impressions of the pilots for next season’s shows. These aren’t reviews, since these pilots can be rewritten, recast and retooled before airing, and the shows that eventually get on the air can prove much better or worse. But premature opinions are why God invented the Internet, [...]

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Jill Abramson Becomes New York Times' First Female Top Editor

In an unexpected move, The New York Times announced this morning that Bill Keller, executive editor since 2003, would be stepping down to write full-time, and will be replaced in September by longtime deputy Jill Abramson. I tend not to blog much here about personnel changes in print journalism—those being of interest mainly to, well, [...]

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The Anthony Weiner Mystery: A Tough News Package to Handle

Was Anthony Weiner framed, or did he self-twimmolate? Was it his package or was it hackage? We don’t know, and after a round of TV-news interviews yesterday, we may be even farther from knowing. The controversy over the Twitter photo of a tumescent man in undies posted to Weiner’s Twitter feed grew more frenzied after [...]

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2012 Watch: Can This Dog Huntsman?; or, Who Decides What a Major Candidate Is?

Public Policy Polling recently conducted a survey of Republican voters in early caucus state Iowa. In it, they placed former Utah governor Jon Huntsman‘s support at one. Not number one. Not 1%. One guy polled says he would vote for Huntsman. Meanwhile, former Godfather’s Pizza CEO and Tea Party darling Herman Cain came in tied [...]

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TV Tonight: Men of a Certain Age

In my column last week on the “manxiety” trend in the new fall shows, I singled out TNT’s Men of a Certain Age as one example of a series taking a subtle, non-insulting look at what it means to be a man. Focusing on three guys pushing 50—played by Scott Bakula, Andre Braugher and Ray [...]

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Pardon the Interruption: PBS Planning Ad Breaks Within Shows

The major difference between PBS and commercial broadcasters used to be, well, commercials. For-profit TV relied on ads, PBS didn’t. OK, maybe it had sponsors, but nothing so crass as commercials. Then, OK, maybe it had “enhanced” sponsor messages, which looked a lot like commercials to the layman, but at least they didn’t interrupt the [...]