First things first: I do not care whether the premise of NBC’s Revolution—all electricity, even batteries, ceases functioning, and civilization collapses—is physically plausible. I don’t know how the catastrophe happened. It …
Dead Tree Alert: Check, Please
My column (subscription required) is back in the print TIME magazine this week, and it catches up on what’s been one of the major distinguishing media features of the 2012 campaign: the rise, and limitations, of fact-checking in …
Glee Watch: Long-Distance Relationship
Spoilers for last night’s Glee below:
Glee, more than maybe any show on TV right now, has mastered the art of disappointing me just enough that I can never permanently give up watching it. When I try to remember season 3, I …
Change We Can Believe In: SNL Getting New Obama
The Presidential election is still almost two months away, but there’s already a personnel shift in the Oval Office. In an interview with the New York Times, Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels says that the show is retiring Fred Armisen’s imitation of President Obama and giving the job to Jay Pharoah, who demonstrated that he …
The Anti-Muhammad Video: Ridiculous, and Now Deadly Serious
In a saner world, the trailer for Innocence of Muslims would get no response other than as an example of terrible filmmaking. The 14-minute video, purporting to be excerpted from a larger movie propagandizing present-day Muslims …
TV Tonight: Guys With Kids
Nobody goes in intending to make a bad TV show. Not even Jimmy Fallon, a funny man, and the other producers of NBC’s Guys With Kids, which, let us get it out of the way, is a bad, bad TV show.
Katie Comes to Daytime, Asking the Weighty Questions
In September 2008, Katie Couric did an interview with Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, in which the candidate struggled to answer questions about policy and newspapers, an interview that shaped perceptions of …
TV Tonight: The New Normal
When I write my Test Pilot previews of new fall shows over the summer, I point out that they shouldn’t be taken as definitive reviews, because the pilots I see then can be reshot and recast before airing, or the show might evolve …
The Morning After: Back Into The Thick of It
The US and British governments, tied by history, are said to have a special relationship. So do US and British TV. Earlier this year, HBO debuted Veep, a series that attempted to translate both British government and British television to the US, by making an American vice-presidential version of Armando Iannucci’s profane government …
The Base, the Ratings and the Chair: The Conventions and TV
They’re sweeping up the confetti, and political reporters are already catching flights out of Charlotte and looking ahead to the debates. But America’s still processing the Republican and Democratic conventions–to the extent that it paid attention–and here are a few thoughts, in no particular order, about the marriage of TV and …
The Morning After: The Candidate of Change, Changed
“I recognize that times have changed since I first spoke to this convention. The times have changed and so have I.
“I’m no longer just a candidate. I’m the President.”
In 2008, candidate Barack Obama campaigned at the Democratic National Convention on hope and change. In 2012, the change was that he could no longer just …
The Morning After: Obama Turns to Bill Clinton, Explainer-in-Chief
Barack Obama has a reputation as a brilliant speaker, but not, on his own behalf, an effective talker. He has delivered passages of soaring rhetoric and inspired crowds, but as President, he has faltered at simply talking to citizens: laying out, convincingly, plainly, point by point, why and how he believes his policies will work and …
What We’re Learning from the Convention Ratings (Or Lack Thereof)
The ratings for the first night of the Democratic National Convention are in, and they’re not tremendously more impressive than those for the first night of the RNC: about 22 million viewers in the 10 pm hour, compared with about 20.5 million.*
*Update: The above figures are for the three broadcast and three cable networks (ABC, CBS, …