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

TCA Roundup: Is AMC the New HBO? Is HBO the New AMC?

The TCA TV critics’ press tour (which I will be joining next week) continued with its cable round yesterday, as critics and reporters heard from AMC, a critics’ darling that has recently taken some dings in its Teflon armor over the season finale of The Killing, ugly negotiations over Mad Men and a shakeup at [...]

+Tuned In | 182 days ago

Dead Tree Alert: Are These MTV's 30 Best Videos?

By James Poniewozik

This Dead Tree Alert is a bit of a cheat; there is no new issue of TIME magazine this week. But MTV turns 30 years old on Monday, and in the issue currently on newsstands, there’s a photo spread on 30 highlights from MTV’s 30 years on the air. And, for a bit more fun, [...]

+Uncategorized | 182 days ago

Louie Watch: Tunnel of Love

By James Poniewozik

No time for a lengthy writeup of last night’s excellent Louie, “Subway/Pamela,” but a few quick, bulleted thoughts: * There are a lot of great things that Louie does, but it deserves more credit for bringing back the art of the silent film, as in the (mostly) wordless subway sequence that opened the episode.

+Review Movies | 183 days ago

Cowboys & Aliens: Two Great Genres, One Mediocre Movie

By Richard Corliss

Timothy White / Universal Studios and DreamWorks II

Hollywood sharpies spend endless hours at pitch meetings dreaming up hybrids of famous movies, and sometimes they hit pay dirt. “It’s like Jaws, but on a spaceship”: Alien. Then the hybrid blossoms into its own format until it devolves and devours its own with Alien vs. Predator and finally collapses, exhausted into the heap of [...]

+Music | 183 days ago

The 30 All-TIME Best Music Videos

By TIME Staff

Thirty years ago, MTV began to beam a budding art form — the music video — into homes across the U.S. TIME takes a look back at the most memorable clips from three decades’ worth of music television

+Uncategorized | 183 days ago

TCA Roundup: That's PROFESSOR Boston Rob to You

By James Poniewozik

The TCA TV critics’ press tour continued yesterday with the first full day of panels, from various cable channels. What did we learn? * That America, God help it, is going to be learning history from Survivor’s “Boston Rob” Mariano. Or at least “history,” as brought to you by the History channel, which means Around [...]

+Uncategorized | 183 days ago

Video: The Daily Show Catches Fox's Religious Conversion (Over Terrorism)

By James Poniewozik

Sometimes a Daily Show comedy segment involves an elaborate, reported-in-the-field setup. Sometimes it’s a lengthy, constructed satirical riff. And sometimes it just involves finding somebody doing something colossally hypocritical, collecting a whole lot of videotape, and letting it roll while you sit back and eat an entire turkey. That’s what Jon Stewart and company did [...]

+Advertising | 183 days ago

The Morning After: Am I Blue?

By James Poniewozik

Last night in Los Angeles, my fellow TV critics who have already arrived at the TCA press tour attended a party thrown by the Playboy Channel at Hugh Hefner’s mansion. I sat in Brooklyn and watched America’s Got Talent. Not bitter! Because it meant I had the chance to see possibly the most awkward, degrading [...]

+Uncategorized | 184 days ago

TCA Roundup: Walking Dead Loses Its Head

By James Poniewozik

Yesterday was a set-visit day for the writers at the Television Critics Association press tour in Los Angeles; today begins the first full day of sessions from cable networks. (I expect full reports from that Weather Channel panel, folks!) But there’s already some news emerging out of the TV-meets-journalism confab at the Beverly Hilton. For [...]

+Tuned In | 184 days ago

Fox Cuts Back Against Cable Cord Cutters

By James Poniewozik

If you’ve gotten used to watching Fringe and Glee online the day after they air, without a cable subscription, you’re going to have to get more patient, or pay more money. Starting Aug. 15, Fox will restrict free online viewing of their shows to viewers who don’t have cable or satellite; unless you can provide [...]

+Uncategorized | 185 days ago

The Path to the White House Runs Through AMC Mob Week

By James Poniewozik

AMC announced that it’s scheduling its first-ever Mob Week next month, to be hosted by none other than former federal prosecutor, former NYC mayor, former TIME Person of the Year, former Presidential frontrunner, former Presidential primary washout and current, well, AMC movie-week host, Rudolph Giuliani. As with Sarah Palin’s TLC series or Donald Trump’s work [...]

+Uncategorized | 185 days ago

TCA 2011: Achieving Critical Mass

By James Poniewozik

With Comic-Con having just wrapped up, the reporting-about-TV business shifts immediately to LA, where the Television Critics Association summer press tour begins today. I’ll be going back this year, but only for part of it—I admire and weep for my colleagues who do the entire two-week stint, plus Comic-Con. I’ll be in LA next week, [...]

+Uncategorized | 185 days ago

Operators Are Standing By*: Obama, Boehner Duel in Primetime

By James Poniewozik

Speaking on primetime TV from the I Killed Osama Bin Laden Memorial Hallway, President Barack Obama attempted to swing people power to his side in the debt-ceiling debate, using the trappings of the office and an appeal to America’s sense of compromise. Assuming it still has one. Obama’s address was an unusually directly political speech [...]

+Uncategorized | 186 days ago

The Morning After: Curb Your Antagonism

By James Poniewozik

Last night’s episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, “The Palestinian Chicken,” examined the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of chicken (if one ignores that a chicken lens would be opaque unless sliced very thin). I wouldn’t say it was as polarizing as the Mideast situation itself, but it at least has generated some hot discussion at [...]

+Uncategorized | 186 days ago

Comic-Con Roundup: The Final Not-Final Answers to Lost

By James Poniewozik

As Comic-Con wraps up in San Diego (at which point, I believe, people start getting on line for the panels at next year’s Comic-Con in San Diego), a few more items of TV news: * Entering the panel discussion wearing a stormtrooper outfit and a Dharma jumpsuit respectively, Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof kicked off [...]

+TV Recap Breaking Bad: Season 4, Episode 2 | 186 days ago

Breaking Bad Watch: Self-Defense

By James Poniewozik

SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, turn off the videogame console, stop arguing the merits of slow- vs. fast-zombie shooters, and watch last night’s Breaking Bad. As we left Walter White and Jesse Pinkman at the end of the Breaking Bad season premiere, they were both shaken, terrified—but still employed and alive. When we [...]

+Review Movies | 189 days ago

Captain America: Been There, Saved That

By Richard Corliss

Approach Captain America: The First Avenger with caution. It could leave you super-pooped and quite possibly super-duped

+Tuned In | 189 days ago

The Morning After: It's a Dog's Death

By James Poniewozik

I loved the pilot of Wilfred when I reviewed it some weeks back, and I enjoyed the second and third episodes that FX sent out at the same time. But the main concern I had with the show was that it had the potential to either be a rewardingly weird and dark show or a [...]