Tuned In
As if you needed proof that the week before Labor Day is the slowest news week of the year, I have the cover story in TIME magazine. It’s about Jay Leno, his new show and how this big gamble and cost-saving measure represents, as the cover line says “the future of TV” (for better or worse). It’s also about the irony: NBC is making a …
Tuned InUncategorized
Before The Jonas Brothers, before iCarly, before Hannah Montana—yea, even long before Saved by the Bell—there was the Saturday-morning live-action kids’ show. Like any good child of Generation X, I have chunks of my brainsphere better reserved for remembering physics equations and American history instead stuffed with memories of …
Tuned InUncategorized
This is Robo-James. The Morning After is a daily post in which humans can discuss the previous night’s television transmissions. Discuss, humans, discuss! Type on the clumsy keyboard interface with your puny flesh-hands!
On Aug. 31, Disney announced it would acquire the comic-book publisher Marvel for $4 billion. But the Mouse gets more than just the rights to Spider-man, The X-Men and other bankable superheroes: it also inherits Marvel’s vast …
Tuned In
Oh-so-briefly interrupting staycation to note that Charles Gibson is retiring as host of ABC’s evening newscast, to be replaced by Diane Sawyer, meaning that white-male TV anchors are now officially oppressed. Cue Glenn Beck editorial in 5, 4, 3…
Seriously, the interesting implication of the move for network evening news is how …
As planned, on Tuesday Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, met with members of Save Film at LACMA, the group attempting to preserve the museum’s 40-year-old weekend film program. What came of it? Hard to say. According to this morning’s LA Times, Govan is going forward with his recently announced …
Tuned InUncategorized
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9Odn5uWSfI]
I’m not really sure if I should be embedding this video. The clip above is from Relativity, my favorite Zwick-Herskovits drama of all, which ran one season on ABC in 1996-97. It’s on YouTube, as is apparently the whole rest of the series. Its provenance is, shall we say, open to …
Tuned InUncategorized
This is Robo-James. The Morning After is a daily post in which humans can discuss the previous night’s television transmissions. Discuss, humans, discuss! Type on the clumsy keyboard interface with your puny flesh-hands!
Okay, I know it’s only September but I’m pretty sure that this morning I ran across the strangest architecture story of the year. Rem Koolhaas has found it necessary to respond to a rumor sweeping China’s webspace that his CCTV headquarters in Beijing was designed to suggest female genitalia. (Until now many Chinese had been content …
Tuned InUncategorized
The Tuned In Jrs. have recently become fans of Wheel of Fortune, which addiction we’ve been supplementing by Tivoing reruns of the 1980s episodes currently airing on GSN. Among their discoveries: Vanna White’s job was much more physically taxing. Below, someone’s YouTube tribute to the old puzzleboard, on which she then had to turn the …
Tuned InUncategorized
This is Robo-James. The Morning After is a daily post in which humans can discuss the previous night’s television transmissions. Discuss, humans, discuss! Type on the clumsy keyboard interface with your puny flesh-hands!
I spent some of the weekend reading 1959: The Year Everything Changed by Fred Kaplan, a columnist at Slate who covers politics as well as cultural topics. (I’ve been known to multi-task myself sometimes, so I know such things are possible.) I’m always a little wary of books that make grand claims in their subtitles, which seems to be …
Tuned InUncategorized
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My father was Catholic, my mother is Jewish. That means I was always Jewish, technically and culturally. In practice, as a kid I went to Catholic church; when I became a good teenage atheist, I stopped going to church, but I never had any Jewish religious education. I was always aware, …
