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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 165 days ago

Breaking Bad Makes a Deal for 16 Final Episodes

By James Poniewozik

The bad news: Breaking Bad is ending. The good news: Breaking Bad is ending (hopefully) on its own terms. After a prolonged and unfortunately public negotiation over its renewal with AMC, the producers of Breaking Bad will get a final run of 16 episodes to conclude the story of Walter White, chemistry-teacher-cum-criminal. The whole negotiation [...]

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Tuned In+TV Recap Breaking Bad: Season 4, Episode 5 | 166 days ago

Breaking Bad Watch: Road Trip!

By James Poniewozik
AMC

SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, open another bottle of wine and watch last night’s Breaking Bad. As TV dramas advance in years, they tend to get crowded. There are more characters, more storylines and often an intense race to up the stakes to keep the viewers’ interest. This applies to good dramas as [...]

+Review Movies | 168 days ago

Glee The 3-D Concert Film: The Church of Latter-day Songs

By Richard Corliss
Adam Rose / 20th Century Fox

The McKinley High glee club has accrued the odor, say the incense, of a secular religion

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 168 days ago

Louie Watch: Self, Love

By James Poniewozik

Last night’s double-shot of Louie was an example of a recurring structure of season two Louie episodes, and an unusual one for a sitcom. Louie is going about his business—work, life—and comes across another person. They talk. They just… talk. For a long time. And then the conversation goes in a direction you would not [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 168 days ago

The Morning After: Fox Shows Teeth in Debate

By James Poniewozik

Eight Republican presidential candidates debated on Fox News from Ames, Iowa, in advance of its straw poll this weekend. My colleague Michael Scherer liveblogged it at Swampland, and I’ll let you pick the winner: was it Mitt Romney, for not doing anything to jeopardize his frontrunner status? Michele Bachmann, for slapping down an attack on [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 169 days ago

This Is Actual News: Sesame Street Declares Bert & Ernie Will Not Gay-Marry

By James Poniewozik

Cross one potential culture-war issue off the books for campaign 2012: despite various online petitions‘ requests, Sesame Street has announced that longtime cohabitors Bert and Ernie “have no sexual orientation” and thus will not be getting married. This despite the fact that the fictional Sesame Street resembles a block in New York, where gay marriage [...]

+Review Movies | 169 days ago

30:Minutes or Less: Jesse Eisenberg and Aziz Ansari in a Go-Nowhere Fargo

By Richard Corliss
Columbia Tristar

The only entertainment value viewers can mine from this Grand Rapids mishigas is to meet the film on its own sub-basement level and count the movie references

+Movies | 169 days ago

Top 10 Berlin Wall Movies

By Richard Corliss
The Lives of Others, 2006

It’s been 50 years since the start of construction on the Berlin Wall. TIME looks back at 10 movies that were set in the time of the Wall—and now have outlasted it.

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Tuned In+Tuned In | 169 days ago

Walking Dead?; or, Can AMC Afford to Budget-Cut Its Way to Success?

By James Poniewozik

The Hollywood Reporter has a couple of interesting news items about AMC network right now. The first is a short news brief from this morning, reporting that AMC—the cable group including IFC, Sundance, WE and AMC network itself—showed a higher profit in its first quarter as an independent company, with both profit and revenue up [...]

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Tuned In+Tuned In | 169 days ago

Dead Tree Alert: Trash TV

By James Poniewozik

This week in TIME magazine, accidentally but appropriately timed with a cover on the decline of Europe and coverage of the general lack of good economic news anywhere, I have a plus-sized column about cable TV’s hot genre with a fitting theme for the age of austerity: shows about making money off old junk. The [...]

+Review Movies | 170 days ago

The Help: The Secret Lives of Maids

By Mary Pols
DreamWorks

It is safe to say actress Viola Davis will get an Oscar nomination for her uncompromising performance in this adaptation of Kathryn Stockett’s best seller

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Tuned In+Tuned In | 170 days ago

Team Loco Alert: TBS Cancels Lopez Tonight

By James Poniewozik

After two years–and a move from 11 p.m. to midnight to make room for Conan O’Brien–TBS is canceling George Lopez’s talk show, Lopez Tonight. The last show is tomorrow, so it’s going to be a busy 24 hours of finale writing. I can’t say I’ve watched the show extensively in recent months, but Lopez fans [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 170 days ago

Turns Out Gloria Steinem Not a Fan of The Playboy Club

By James Poniewozik

One of the more comical incidents of the recent TCA television critics’ press tour was the attempt by the makers of The Playboy Club to defend its romanticization of its eponymous Bunny hutch as “empowering” to women. A lot of the critics assembled laughed it off. But you know what would really help to bolster [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 170 days ago

CBS, for Some Reason, to Try Remaking Bewitched

By James Poniewozik

From the Dept. of Things You Were Not Aware You Asked For: CBS has ordered a script for a remake of the ’60s sitcom Bewitched. What sorcery is at work here? I’m going to go out on a limb and say that people who remember Bewitched fondly do more so out of affection—for the charms [...]

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Tuned In+News Media | 171 days ago

Credit Downgraded, Intensity Upgraded on Cable Biz News

By James Poniewozik

As you know, the stock market is way down. Or way up. Or in between, or both—I’m going to have to hedge my bets, because as I write this, the markets are whanging up and down like a telephone wire that an elephant just jumped off. Within the past hour or so, the Dow has [...]

+Music | 171 days ago

Top 10 Musical Collaborations

By TIME Staff
Musical Collaborations

Kanye West and Jay-Z’s “Watch the Throne” was so big, it required three different music labels to handle its release. TIME takes a look at other musical partnerships that packed a lot of punch.

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 171 days ago

Test Pilot: Once Upon a Time

By James Poniewozik

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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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 172 days ago

TCA Roundup: ABC Plays Dress-Up

By James Poniewozik

I checked out of the TCA television critic’s press tour a day and a half early, missing out on the final network to present, ABC, but plenty of TV writers have stayed to the bitter (except for the network-provided chocolate-chip-cookie swag) end. Here’s what they have to report. * As I wrote earlier this summer, [...]