James Poniewozik

Pity the poor white person. Held back to a mere 99% of Senate seats and claiming only three of five American Idol crowns, nowhere are we more oppressed than in the hip-hop world, where we must be content with the occasional token like Vanilla Ice or Eminem, occasionally leavened by the self-effacing white minstrelsy of a Weird Al

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The brilliant-for-a-while teen soap The O.C. is officially departing after four seasons in February. I’m sad that the show, better than Beverly Hills 90210 or Dawson’s Creek, didn’t manage to last as long as either. I’m also glad, as the show proved the rule that no high-school drama should last longer than it takes to get through high

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A funny thing happened to my pick for best new fall show of 2006. It, uh, didn’t air in fall 2006. The suits at ABC decided to hold The Knights of Prosperity until January. The network said it held the show to give a promising series a launch time amid less new competition, but you could see how they might have thought that the show was,

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Oh, did I mention I was going on vacation? I could have sworn I had put up a post mentioning that I was going to be gone last week. Apologies to everyone who counted on Tuned In as a refuge from your alcohol-fueled, resentment-filled, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf family holiday get-togethers.

Today Tuned In returns to its regular

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Every year, my top 10 TV list is something of a misnomer. The first five, six or seven shows are usually pretty obvious and come to me more or less immediately. Beyond that, you have essentially a fifteen-way tie for eighth place. Below, in alphabetical order, is my next-10 list: shows that could just as well have been in one of the

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All three cable networks just carried live coverage of the press conference in which Miss USA Tara Conner was spared from losing her crown by pageant honcho Donald Trump, in exchange for agreeing to enter rehab. And I just have to say, thank God they finally ended the war in Iraq so we can afford to divert ourselves with light stories

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Amid all the hubbub in a certain newsmagazine over digital democracy, sousveillance and user-generated-media empires, let us take a moment to remember those who toiled at the old-fashioned, quaint task of making expensive entertainments, under contract to giant corporations, for millions of people to watch passively, while being paid a

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We tend to forget because it comes in the middle of Oscar-handicapping season, but the Golden Globes honors TV shows too. I’ll leave it to my movie colleagues to pick over the film nominees (except to say: Bobby? Wha? Are they sure they didn’t mean Best Comedy, Unintentional?). But the TV nods left a critic unfortunately little to grouse

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On NBC’s Heroes, the character Zach (Thomas Dekker)–the best friend of indestructible cheerleader Claire–was not supposed to  be one of the superpowered characters. It turns out, however, that he has the amazing power to transform himself from a gay teenager to a straight one. According to gay-news website afterelton.com, that’s

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VINCE BUCCI / GETTY
Prince performs during the American Idol Season 5 Finale in Hollywood in May, 2006.

CBS’s announcement that Prince will be the musical headliner of the upcoming Super Bowl is a step forward for the show’s musical interest (following on the last two, even older-and-less-relevant choices, The Rolling Stones and Paul

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One of the pleasures of the first season of Sleeper Cell, Showtime’s terrorism drama, was that it didn’t rely on as many TV contrivances as shows like 24–superhuman agents, miraculous computer hacks, women chased by cougars. It showed the fight against terrorism, and terrorism itself, as human enterprises with flaws and foibles. …

From my sometime nemeses at the Parents Television Council comes word that NBC, like Saul on the road to Damascus, may have had a change of heart in its dealings with the Bible-oriented cartoon VeggieTales. As I wrote earlier, NBC had been editing out overtly religious messages from the cartoon when broadcasting it as part of its

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In my Culture Complex column this week, Matt Lauer puts on his Cronkite costume. What NBC’s declaration of civil war vis-a-vis the fighting in Iraq means (that the momentum is against the White House in its Long War of Semantics) and doesn’t mean (that the media has suddenly decided to brave up and call ’em like it sees ’em, even if that

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