James Poniewozik writes TIME magazine's Tuned In column, about pop culture and society. Tuned In, the blog version, is about the stuff we used to call "TV," whether it's in your living room, on your computer or - once the networks figure out the technology and line up the advertisers - in your dreams themselves.
WARNING: If you haven’t watched last night’s Battlestar Galactica and don’t want it spoiled, go the frak away.
SCI FI Channel Photo: Carole Segal
It’s a strange experience watching sci-fi shows on advance screener DVDs. Because so many scenes contain effects that are added in postproduction at the last minute, the episodes are often
Any given season, there are at least a couple series that I watch, loyally and attentively, even though they are not, in any aesthetically defensible sense of the word, good. This year, that award has to go to Jericho, CBS’s postapocalyptic drama set in Kansas after a multiple nuke attack cripples the U.S. The
Who’s afraid of YouTube? Viacom may be, but not Her Majesty’s broadcasters. The BBC has just announced a deal to launch three channels on YouTube, which will carry BBC news, documentaries and clips and video diaries from programs including Doctor Who. The broadcaster says it has worked out a …
My Culture Complex column in this week’s Time looks at the Lost Tomb of Jesus controversy as an example of the love/hate/love-to-hate relationship between Hollywood and Christianity.
Just to be clear: I’m not taking a side on the accuracy of the documentary, or for that matter the New Testament; you want to hear from someone who …
[Before anyone gets all exercised, the title refers to this. Clip made relatively SFW by bleeping, sadly.]
Comedy Central
The Sarah Silverman Show
It’s always a pleasure to discover that a series I’ve favorably reviewed actually stays good after the opening episodes. That’s the case with The Sarah Silverman Program, which I’ll be watching
Virginia Heffernan over at the New York Times blog mill has one of those wish-I’d-thought-of-it-first posts, about YouTube as a parenting tool. I thought of her post this morning as the Tuned In brood shared a light media snack of the OK-Go treadmill video. (The panda sneeze is another favorite, and a favorite pastime is doing random …
SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t watched Lost yet, avert your eyes before you get struck by a meteor. Or an asteroid. I don’t know the difference.
ABC/MARIO PEREZ
Last night, Lost got back to the core of what the show is all about. Not the characters, or the mystery, or the numbers, or the relationships, or any of that. I’m talking about …
I’m told one or two of you are interested in The Lost Tomb of Jesus, the documentary airing Sunday night on Discovery, produced by James Cameron, which purports to reveal the ossuaries containing the physical remains of Jesus Christ, and, in case that were not controversial enough, his wife (Mary Magdalene) and son. This morning, …
YouTube fans hoping to get to the sweet nutmeat of the Oscars without having to digest the massive, fibrous husk that is the rest of the broadcast are out of luck. Variety reports that the Academy has compelled the video-sharing website to pull popular excerpts of actual, entertaining portions of the broadcast, including the opening …
Finally caught up with this week’s Heroes, which was easily the best of the year. Of course, I might just be saying that because it was essentially an episode of Lost (one present-day story, built around a flashback).
But we don’t want to go down that road again, do we? Taken on its own terms, the episode was …
According to TV Week, NBC is launching a multimillion-dollar campaign to rebrand its Thursday sitcom block from “Must-See TV” to “Comedy Night Done Right.” Which begs the question: Is this a TV network or an Applebee’s?