Usually, a major American tragedy isn’t a major American tragedy until the entertainment industry overreacts to it. After the Littleton school shootings, TV executives pulled scenes of violence; after 9/11, movies and TV shows featuring terrorism and spectacular explosions were held until it was deemed safe (and profitable) to scare
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Between the news tickers, stock numbers, story captions and "BREAKING NEWS" screamers, we’ve already gotten used to our cable news channels being lit up like the Ginza at midnight. But the newest addition to cable-news screens is the picture-in-picture inset, the video box in the lower-right corner that tracks an image from one story
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Like a new fall show that you would have expected to be canceled by now but has managed to escape the axe, Tuned In is staying on the air, but with some scheduling changes. Now that the deluge of debuts is over, I won’t be blogging on the same daily (or near-daily) basis. But I’ll keep posting—when there’s a new show worth
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Today Apple computer announced
its long-awaited video iPod, which will no doubt, like every
new Apple release, be thoroughly coated in the slaver of admiring
journalists before it hits the shelves. What most grabbed my attention,
though, was a new feature that has the potential to iTunes-ify network
TV. Thanks to a deal with ABC, iPod
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The most notable accomplishment of Freddie (Wednesdays, 8:30 p.m. E.T.), the sitcom vehicle for Freddie Prinze, Jr., is that it manages to be bad in two entirely different ways. On the one hand, it’s as lame and inane as its high-concept premise: a swinging bachelor’s life changes when his female relatives move in with him. There’s a
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Say whatever you want about Hot Properties (ABC, Fridays, 9:30 p.m. E.T.): it strikes a resounding blow for feminism. The brainchild of a female creator (Suzanne Martin), it proves that women can stereotype themselves as well as any man.
Following on the high, pointy heels of Related, this sitcom, set in a New York City real-estate
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Sex and the City is the Velvet Underground of TV shows. Everyone who bought the VU’s first album, it is said, started a band. And sometimes it seems like everyone who saw Sex and the City created a TV show. Take Related, (The WB, Wednesdays, 9 p.m. E.T.), a comedy-drama about four loving, bickering young sisters. Let’s tick off the
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Watching some upcoming episodes of HBO’s engrossing Rome recently, I saw something unusual for that show: a black man. The episode takes place in Egypt; the character is a Nubian soldier under King Ptolemy XIII. He has, by my count, one line, before being killed.
TV critics, understandably, have taken shots at the major networks for
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When Will & Grace announced it was doing a live performance for its season opener, Americans shared the same reaction: "Damn it! Will & Grace is still on the air! I owe the guy in the next cubicle five bucks!" Which is pretty much what NBC was going for. In a few short years, Must-See Thursday devolved into Must-Tape-While-Watching-CBS
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It’s a long-debated question which the public hates more, lawyers or journalists. But people at least hate lawyers better. Whatever their contempt for the legal profession, TV viewers never get sick of watching legal dramas, whereas the recent history of TV shows about journalists is the history of failure. Ink ran dry. Lateline
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On TV, to paraphrase Jane Austen, a young man in possession of a new sitcom is generally considered to be in no need of a wife. Not so on How I Met Your Mother (Mondays, 8:30 p.m. E.T., CBS). On the face of it, Mother is a pretty conventional sitcom. There’s a laugh track; there’s no single-camera movie look to it; there are young
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It’s probably an exaggeration to say that you’re either a Lost person or a Desperate Housewives person—considering the ratings, plenty of people must watch both. But I’m definitely a Lost person, and to know why you need only watch the season premieres of both shows.
The Lost debut was excellent on a story level: it showed us
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Between the success of NBC’s Medium (which just won Patricia Arquette a Best Actress Emmy) and tonight’s debut of CBS’s Ghost Whisperer, we have learned an important lesson about the dead: they can be a real pain. Always with the nudging! Always with the demanding! "Tell my wife I love her!" "Avenge my death!" "Help me find my way to the
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