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Top Chef Vs. Chopped: Who Rules the Food TV Kitchen?

Unlike the stunt-heavy Top Chef, which seems to have grown bored with cooking, Chopped is reliable, workmanlike and procedural, the Law & Order of cable food-competition shows.

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Glee Watch: The Bully Becomes the Bullied

FOX

On the plus side, the beginning of last night’s Glee was a very effective 15 minutes or so of television. The bad thing: it was very effective television—for about 15 minutes or so.

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Human Beings Rejoice! Community Returns to NBC March 15

NBC

When NBC pulled Community from its schedule in December, saying it would bring the show back in midseason, fans began to spin all sorts of dark predictions as to what would happen to the show. Well, if you bet on “NBC will bring it back in midseason, just like it said,” get ready to collect: [...]

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Serial Killers: Are HBO-Style Dramas Ruining the TV Episode?

HBO

I’m currently fighting off a cold so potent that you probably caught it simply by reading this sentence, so blogging may be a little light for a while. Fortunately, my colleague and critic-pal Ryan McGee at the A.V. Club has offered up an essay that should keep you busy for a while. In it, he [...]

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TV Tonight: The ’90s Are Back, with PBS’ Clinton

PBS

It may not be the most novel political insight to point out that history repeats itself, but the most intriguing thing about watching PBS’s new American Experience documentary, Clinton (airing tonight and tomorrow), is seeing how quickly it does. So many elements of today’s politics are here—a deeply polarized Washington, a new President criticized by [...]

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TV Weekend: Life’s Too Short

HBO

Ricky Gervais, The Guy Who Makes Jokes About About Celebrity, is in danger of becoming that dreaded thing: a comedian with one shtick, getting progressively less funny.

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TV Weekend: The Simpsons At 500

FOX

For its 500th episode, the series that spoofed American family life, pop culture, the media, politics and monorails now spoofs… The Simpsons.

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Dead Tree Alert: The DJ in Chief; or, Running for Office, One Pop Song at a Time

Campaign music doesn’t win elections, but it’s part of that positive feedback loop that’s created when a campaign’s message and its messaging are working well together.

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The Morning After: I’ll Be There for You

ABC/PETER "HOPPER" STONE

An unexpected thought occurred to me after watching last night’s Modern Family: Is it the 2012 equivalent to Friends?

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TV Dinners: NBC Orders Hannibal Lecter Series

Everett

During the writers’ strike a few seasons ago, CBS experimented with rerunning Showtime’s Dexter in primetime. The episodes were edited for broadcast, and while they raised unsurprising protests over a major network airing a show whose protagonist is a serial killer, the problem in the end was that a dark, pay-cable drama is a better [...]

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TV Tonight: The Loving Story

HBO

For Richard and Mildred Loving, their marriage was a pretty simple matter. They grew up in a small Virginia town where everyone pretty much knew everyone, fell in love (not without some obstacles; she found him “arrogant” at first) and got hitched. For the enforcers of Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws, their marriage was also a simple [...]

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The Morning After: Second Act

Patrick Harbron/NBC

I was not as smitten with Smash as many of my fellow TV critics, but “Callbacks” did make a couple of choices that I liked very well.

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And the Grammy for Best Animated Pig in a Burrito Ad Goes To…

“Back to the Start” was, with the possible but unlikely exception of Chrysler’s Clint Eastwood spot, better and more mesmerizing than any of the highly publicized ad extravaganzas from last week’s Super Bowl.

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Grammy Watch: Whitney’s Legacy, in TV and Divas

Cliff Lipson/CBS

The Grammys honored Houston in the awards themselves, which showcased forceful women who had dominated the year in music, and reminded us of her TV influence as American Idol’s diva ideal.

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The Morning After: 30 Rock at 60 Minutes

Ali Goldstein/NBC

“Hey Baby, What’s Wrong?” had that padding-it-out feeling, as if the writers were students trying to meet a ten-page term paper requirement by fiddling with the margins and the font size.

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The Morning After: How the Mighty Have Fallen

Michael Becker / FOX

I mentioned earlier on this blog that I’ve decided to save hours and sanity by skipping the American Idol auditions this season. I make an exception, at least partially, for the Hollywood round, which is one of my favorite parts of Idol even if Idol’s TV audience doesn’t seem to share that opinion. But last [...]

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House Pulls the Plug. Too Soon or Too Late?

Warwick Saint/FOX

The patient had been diagnosed some time ago by TV-biz observers, but Wednesday Fox called House M.D.‘s time of death for the end of this season, after eight years on air. Fox cited “the decision” that Hugh Laurie and the producers made, but it seems fairly mutual: Fox reportedly wanted to cut the show’s budget [...]

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JC Penney and Ellen, Lowe’s and All-American Muslim: A Tale of Two Bigotries

The contrast between how Ellen and All-American Muslim were treated shows that, once viewers make friends with another group on TV, bigotry becomes bad business.

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Twimmolation Alert: Roland Martin Gets His Ascot in Hot Water at CNN

Haraz N. Ghanbari / AP

Martin may or may not have meant his tweets about David Beckham and wearing pink as homophobic, but they’re obnoxious regardless.

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Sorkin’s Newsroom Plans Premiere, Adds to Vast History of Fake TV Networks

http://dragonball.wikia.com/wiki/NBS_News

The fictional cable network in The Newsroom will reportedly now be ACN, for Atlantis Cable News, joining a digital-cable-tier’s worth of fake-network names from TV’s past.