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With a settlement of $2 million, our long national nightmare is over. (And Hasbro will have to start paying for Lite Brite advertising again.) Now to attack the real urban threat: sneakers hanging from power lines.
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How I Met Your Mother (weirdly, it’s about the Super Bowl, as if to promote its network’s broadcast retroactively), Heroes, 24–although, after the last couple episodes, it’s on thin ice with me. A little more Bauer family drama and they can blow the whole thing up as far as I’m concerned.
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Variety is reporting that Jeff Zucker is going to be promoted to chief executive of the entire NBC Universal company, later today or tomorrow. It’s a curious move, because Zucker has headed up the NBC television business for the last several years, during which, you may recall, there has not exactly been a ton of good news for the …
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My Super Bowl ad-review extravanganza is now up. It doesn’t take comments, so feel free to use this post to tell me how thoroughly full of it I am.
To be honest, I’m too exhausted and commercialed-out to sum this up into one big wrap-up synthesis (I was shocked when I looked at the finished product online–65 freaking ads? How do they …
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Continuing what is fast becoming a tradition here at Tuned In–namely, letting C. Brown come up with post topics for me–our correspondent asks:
Who do you think is going to bite it on Heroes? I’m praying for Simone.
Glad you reminded me, C. Brown, because while I have no inside knowledge I do have a theory. The producers have been …
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It was a night to do a Midwestern boy’s heart good. There was Indianapolis squaring off against Chicago, of course. But in the end–or rather at the half–it was Minneapolis who tore up the field. When CBS announced Prince as the Super Bowl halftime act, I worried it meant that the wizard of Paisley Park had been officially neutered. No …
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Elsewhere on time.com, I’ve reviewed last night’s Super Bowl ads. (I’ll post a link once the extravaganza goes live. Update: Knock yourself out.) In other words, I already gave at the office–the home office–so I’m turning over the comments for your reactions. Any of the spots close the deal?
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OK, so 45 minutes to game time — there are what, like three people using the Internet right now? Still, I’m multitasking with my laptop in front of the TV, so I may as well post. I’m going to be rating the Super Bowl ads for our Monday-morning postmortem at time.com. But I may have already found my winner in the pregame show: the …
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In the spirit of today’s theme–namely, that corporate America is all about getting the customers to do the work for you–let’s turn it over the mic to commenter C. Brown:
James, how much tv do you watch in a day? I’m just curious is all.
Because I think my job is just so tremendously fascinating, I’m devoting a post to this. I get …
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Of all the things David Letterman has given us–the Top Ten list, Stupid Pet Tricks, the Alka-Seltzer suit–maybe the most influential is the mainstreaming of absurdist humor. Back when Letterman was working as a local weatherman in Indiana, it was a truly weird thing for a weathercaster to talk about “hailstones the size of canned …
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Speaking of Super Bowl ads, a few days ago in a post about big advertisers sitting the game out, a reader commented that the commercials have been less effective because the games are less interesting:
Coaches challenges suck the life right out of a series. Players can’t celebrate naturally whenever they make a good play without getting
…
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It’s appropriate that I’ve spent the past couple days writing about a nontraditional form of advertising; this week in my Culture Complex column, I look at what’s been happening to a traditional form of advertising, the TV commercial.
In the days of product placement, guerilla ads and TiVo, TV spots don’t have the pop-culture reach they …
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…is The Sarah Silverman Program, because I’ve already seen it. You should, though, and I want to hear what you think, because as I wrote (and have heard), it’s a polarizing show. But mostly because I’d love to see what the Venn diagram of Comedy Central watchers + time.com readers is.
