Tuned In

Breaking Bad Watch: When I Heard the Learn’d Meth Cooker

AMC

SPOILER ALERT; Before you read this post, turn off that karaoke machine, grab some vegan s’mores and watch last night’s Breaking Bad. It’s been a methodical and steady first few episodes for season four of Breaking Bad, starting with the excruciatingly patient showdown of “Box Cutter,” then two episodes that examined many of the characters [...]

Tuned In

Game of Thrones, Mad Men and Nick Effing Offerman Top TV Critics' Awards

Sunday night, the TCAs—the Teen Choice Awards—will be handed out on Fox, with millions watching. Saturday night, a less-lauded TCAs—the Television Critics Association awards—were handed out at the Beverly Hilton, away from the cameras but with (I have to assume) much better winners. Among the winners (full list appears after the jump) were Friday Night [...]

Tuned In

FX at TCA: More Louie, Wilfred, Philly. Less Pants.

Saturday is my last day at TCA TV critics’ press tour in LA (my colleagues will have to soldier on without me for ABC’s final presentation), and the network of the day was FX, which updated us as to what’s going on in the worlds of tortured male antiheroes and raunchy comedy. Some of the [...]

Tuned In

Fox at TCA: Seth MacFarlane Remaking Cosmos (Really); Zooey Deschanel Sprinkles Pixie Dust

It was a packed day of sessions for Fox shows Friday at the TCA TV critics’ tour, including presentations for the dinosaur drama Terra Nova and reality-TV megafauna The X Factor. Here’s a sundry round of tidbits from the rest: * When Fox held its upfronts presentation this spring, it had some programming news for [...]

Tuned In

Fox at TCA: Dino-Drama Terra Nova Is Still, Slowly, Evolving

Friday afternoon, Fox held a panel for the new sci-fi series Terra Nova at the TCA TV critics’ convention. Unfortunately, they only had about half the session ready, and the CGI rendering still wasn’t done for most of the panelists. I’m kidding! Friday afternoon, Fox held a panel for Terra Nova, about a family who [...]

Tuned In

Still Crazy After All These Years: Simon & Paula's Disjointed X Factor Reunion

It has been too long since I’ve seen Simon Cowell be mean to people on a TV screen. But here he was at the TCA TV critics’ press tour session for The X Factor, appearing via satellite from what looked like a fancy hotel lounge in a geographically nondescript location. His first line, after materializing, [...]

The Interrupters: Heroes in an Urban War Zone

Kartemquin Films

An enthralling new documentary tracks a group of reformed criminals fighting a plague of violence in Chicago

Tuned In

CW at Press Tour: Sarah Michelle Gellar and I Are Getting Older

This is what the TV obsession with demographics hath wrought: at TCA press tour session for the new thriller Ringer, Sarah Michelle Gellar, a 34-year-old woman, was fielding questions that implied she might be too old to be starring in a show on the CW network. The meme began when one reporter at the panel [...]

Tuned In

Press Tour: Paul McCartney Says His Phone Was Hacked, Will Go to Police

The TCA TV critics’ press tour tends to exist in a bubble separate from the breaking news of the world, but it ended up producing some news in the British phone-hacking scandal by way of a satellite appearance by Paul McCartney, the subject of an Albert Maysles documentary on Showtime about his post-9/11 Concert for [...]

The Whistleblower: Rachel Weisz Against the Sex Trade

Sophie Giraud / Samuel Goldwyn Films

The Oscar winner delivers a great, subtle performance as a Nebraska cop trying to right wrongs in Bosnia

The Change-Up: Body Swapping, Plus Fake Boobs and F Bombs

Richard Cartwright

Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds trade bodies, but this comedy does little to switch up a familiar movie formula

Rise of the Planet of the Apes: Chimpan-tastic!

20th Century Fox

As both a simian simile and a wonder of technology, this reboot is a triumph — the year’s finest action movie

Tuned In

Showtime at Press Tour: The Post-24 Terror of Homeland

The 9/11 attacks happened almost ten years ago. Since then, we’ve lived through whole cycles of war and cultural change; Osama bin Laden is dead and Jack Bauer is off the air. This fall, one of 24′s producers is returning on Showtime with a terrorism thriller, Homeland, that’s very similar in subject and very different [...]

Tuned In

The Morning After: Live Every Week Like It's Shark Week

The irony of attending the TCA TV critics’ press tour is that, between the daytime sessions is that it leaves you little time for actually watching television, between the daytime panels and the evening schmooze events. (I know, it’s a rough life. Well, it is for the talent, anyway. Last night’s CBS/CW/Showtime panel featured Sarah [...]

Tuned In

CBS at Press Tour: Ted Danson, Child Forensic Scientist!

The big news out of CBS’s press tour had to do with the information (or lack thereof) about Ashton Kutcher’s introduction on Two and a Half Men. But there were tidbits from the various other panels, including the revelation that Ted Danson was groomed to play a CSI from his earliest years: * “I grew [...]

Tuned In

Test Pilot: American Horror Story

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, [...]

Tuned In

CBS Unveils Ashton Kutcher's New Character: Walden Schmidt, Man of Mystery

America, meet Walden Schmidt. At the introductory CBS session of the TCA TV critics’ press tour, CBS programming head Nina Tassler had some news about Ashton Kutcher’s new character, who will take over for Charlie Sheen on Two and a Half Men this fall. Tassler described Schmidt, who will be introduced in a two-part season [...]

Tuned In

Which Is Worse: Much Less Breaking Bad, or Much More?

The story over AMC’s feud with the Sony studio over Breaking Bad broke while I was just getting to press tour, but for those of you who haven’t heard about it: things are getting tense between network and studio over the fifth and ostensibly final season of the show. The makers of Breaking Bad want [...]