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TV Weekend: Curb Your Enthusiasm Lives to Kvetch Again

Spoiler alert: in this season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, a lot of people get really mad at Larry David. All right, the spoiler alert is probably not necessary. When David and Jerry Seinfeld created Seinfeld, their mantra “No hugging, no learning” was a reaction against the good-hearted, sentimental sitcoms of the Cosby era. For the [...]

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TV Tonight: Torchwood: Miracle Day

I remember once watching a sketch* about an all-you-can-eat restaurant that hid a horrible secret: the diners were not allowed to eat all they wanted to, but rather forced to eat all they could physically hold. The premise of Torchwood: Miracle Day, the Americanization of the British Torchwood series that debuts tonight on Starz, is [...]

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Dead Tree Alert: Avenging Grace

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, my column in this week’s TIME will seem familiar. It’s essentially my post from earlier this week on judge-and-jury Nancy Grace and the Casey Anthony trial, tightened to fit a page in the magazine, and updated to cover her reactions to the not-guilty verdict that night and [...]

Zookeeper: Kevin James' Animal Distraction

Sony Pictures

The star can be funny and endearing, but here he’s buried under derivative gags and ritual humiliation

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One More Life to Live: ABC Soaps to Survive on Internet

All My Children and One Life to Live are not going down the soap drain after all. In a surprising announcement—but I’ll bet a pleasing one to fans who felt betrayed by the cancellations—ABC has sold the rights to both longtime soap operas to the Prospect Park company, which will produce them and run them [...]

Horrible Bosses. So-So Movie. Excellent Jason Bateman!

John P. Johnson / Warner Bros. Pictures

It’s Hangover Hitchcock, with guys putting toothbrushes down their pants, locking each other out of cars, debating who would get raped in prison first and bumbling through a plot to commit murder

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Breast Practices: Too Many Boobs in Game of Thrones?

Game of Thrones has ended its first season on HBO, but a debate rages on. Namely, if winter is coming, why don’t the women put some damn clothes on? In the Los Angeles Times, TV critic Mary McNamara used Game of Thrones, with its many female nude scenes, as a launching point to make a [...]

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NBC Sets Its Dates for Fall

NBC became the last of the major broadcast networks to announce its fall premiere dates yesterday, and it like its peers (despite NBC’s ratings, I’ll still use the term “peers”) is debuting most of its new shows in the traditional late-September premiere week. Among the shows not on this schedule is 30 Rock, which, as [...]

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The Office to James Spader: You're Hired!

The previous season of The Office ended with a cliffhanger, as Dunder-Mifflin interviewed a series of candidates to replace Michael Scott, played by a squad of guest stars. Now comes word that the show has made a hire—sort of—by signing up James Spader as a series regular. (Consider yourself spoiler-alerted if you don’t want to [...]

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Chewed Up, Spitzered Out at CNN

The bad news: Eliot Spitzer has lost another job. The good news: there’s no legal investigation involved this time! In a big shakeup of CNN’s trouble primetime lineup, the former New York governor’s In the Arena has been cancelled, to be replaced, beginning Aug. 8, with Anderson Cooper’s AC 360, now at 10 p.m. ET. [...]

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The Morning After: Combat Fatigue

The 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is coming up in two months, and there will be no shortage of tributes and specials designed to remind us how far we have or haven’t come since then. (I just received screeners for the final season of Rescue Me, one of the signal post-9/11 series, which is [...]

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Casey Anthony Is Acquitted; the Media Trial Is Just Beginning

You could have watched the Casey Anthony verdict on another channel besides HLN,* but that would have been like watching election returns on ESPN. Other networks covered the trial, some more fervently than others — notably TruTV, formerly known as Court TV. But it was HLN that threw itself into the trial with lust and [...]

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Comedy Central to Roast the Notoriously Media-Shy Charlie Sheen

File this under Things the World Does Not Necessarily Need But Will Get Ratings Anyway: Comedy Central will air a roast of Charlie Sheen on Sept. 19. That is, coincidentally (which is to say, I assume not coincidentally), the night the new Two and a Half Men lineup with Ashton Kutcher returns on CBS. All [...]

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Fox News Hoax Attack Shows Need to Treat Twitter As Serious News

The 4th of July tends to be a slow news day, but that wasn’t the case on Fox News’ politics Twitter feed—for all the wrong reasons. Early in the morning, a hacker group commandeered the account and posted a series of hoax messages indicating that President Obama had been assassinated in Iowa. (The President was [...]

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While I Was Out: A Little Luck, Colbert's PAC, The Final Chord

I’m back from vacation! Related: I was on vacation! Before we get back to business as usual (i.e., superficial blog posts, grudgingly written and read with a feeling of vague dissatisfaction) a quick rundown of a few things that happened in TV while I was away: * HBO released a new (albeit very short) trailer [...]

Cirque du Soleil's Zarkana: The Summer's Great Stage Show

Don Emmert / AFP / Getty Images

With the official premiere of its new show, ‘Zarkana,’ Cirque du Soleil has finally found its ideal home: New York City’s Radio City Music Hall

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Tricky D—: On Halperin's D-Bomb

I’m sure this happens to you all the time: you go on vacation for a few lousy days, and next thing you know, one of your coworkers calls the President a dick on live TV. For those of you who haven’t followed the story, TIME’s Mark Halperin went on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Thursday morning and [...]

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Building a Better Tuned In: What Would You Like to See Here?

I’m still on vacation (this is a robo-post, so I am writing on the assumption that an asteroid has not struck the Earth in the interim). But I thought the long holiday weekend would be a good time to crowdsource some ideas from you, the readers, for a Tuned In redesign that will hopefully happen [...]