Sometimes a Daily Show comedy segment involves an elaborate, reported-in-the-field setup. Sometimes it’s a lengthy, constructed satirical riff. And sometimes it just involves finding somebody doing something colossally hypocritical, collecting a whole lot of videotape, and letting it roll while you sit back and eat an entire …
Television
The Morning After: Am I Blue?
Last night in Los Angeles, my fellow TV critics who have already arrived at the TCA press tour attended a party thrown by the Playboy Channel at Hugh Hefner’s mansion. I sat in Brooklyn and watched America’s Got Talent. Not bitter! Because it meant I had the chance to see possibly the most awkward, degrading product placement I have …
TCA Roundup: Walking Dead Loses Its Head
Yesterday was a set-visit day for the writers at the Television Critics Association press tour in Los Angeles; today begins the first full day of sessions from cable networks. (I expect full reports from that Weather Channel panel, folks!) But there’s already some news emerging out of the TV-meets-journalism confab at the Beverly …
Fox Cuts Back Against Cable Cord Cutters
If you’ve gotten used to watching Fringe and Glee online the day after they air, without a cable subscription, you’re going to have to get more patient, or pay more money. Starting Aug. 15, Fox will restrict free online viewing of their shows to viewers who don’t have cable or satellite; unless you can provide verification that you pay …
The Path to the White House Runs Through AMC Mob Week
AMC announced that it’s scheduling its first-ever Mob Week next month, to be hosted by none other than former federal prosecutor, former NYC mayor, former TIME Person of the Year, former Presidential frontrunner, former Presidential primary washout and current, well, AMC movie-week host, Rudolph Giuliani.
As with Sarah Palin’s TLC …
TCA 2011: Achieving Critical Mass
With Comic-Con having just wrapped up, the reporting-about-TV business shifts immediately to LA, where the Television Critics Association summer press tour begins today. I’ll be going back this year, but only for part of it—I admire and weep for my colleagues who do the entire two-week stint, plus Comic-Con. I’ll be in LA next week, …
Operators Are Standing By*: Obama, Boehner Duel in Primetime
Speaking on primetime TV from the I Killed Osama Bin Laden Memorial Hallway, President Barack Obama attempted to swing people power to his side in the debt-ceiling debate, using the trappings of the office and an appeal to America’s sense of compromise. Assuming it still has one.
Obama’s address was an unusually directly political …
The Morning After: Curb Your Antagonism
Last night’s episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, “The Palestinian Chicken,” examined the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of chicken (if one ignores that a chicken lens would be opaque unless sliced very thin). I wouldn’t say it was as polarizing as the Mideast situation itself, but it at least has generated some hot …
Comic-Con Roundup: The Final Not-Final Answers to Lost
As Comic-Con wraps up in San Diego (at which point, I believe, people start getting on line for the panels at next year’s Comic-Con in San Diego), a few more items of TV news:
* Entering the panel discussion wearing a stormtrooper outfit and a Dharma jumpsuit respectively, Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof kicked off a discussion of the …
Breaking Bad Watch: Self-Defense
SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, turn off the videogame console, stop arguing the merits of slow- vs. fast-zombie shooters, and watch last night’s Breaking Bad.
As we left Walter White and Jesse Pinkman at the end of …
The Morning After: It's a Dog's Death
I loved the pilot of Wilfred when I reviewed it some weeks back, and I enjoyed the second and third episodes that FX sent out at the same time. But the main concern I had with the show was that it had the potential to either be a rewardingly weird and dark show or a more broad setup for one kind of dog joke after another. With the two …
Louie Watch: Your Beloved Racist Aunt
Every week I say that I’m not going to write about Louie every week, and yet again here comes another episode so weird and strangely affecting that I can’t not say a little something about it. So here goes again.
“Country Drive” was another of those Louie episodes that it’s hard to imagine working in a sitcom with a more conventional …
Comic-Con Roundup: Cornholio Returns, Alcatraz Debuts, Thrones Takes a Bow
Braver souls than I are in San Diego now, surfing the massive throngs of fandom and covering the panels at Comic-Con. A few reports from the first day’s sessions:
* Entertainment Weekly asked Con-sters what they thought of a screening of J. J. Abrams’ Alcatraz. (The implicit question seems to be “Is it the next Lost?” Having seen the …
