Entertainment

I was thinking the other day–fielding a pitch from the HD Weather Channel, which I did not know existed–that in writing about TV today, you have to make a lot of judgments about how your audience watches TV. Do they have (or care about HD)? Do they watch on a big screen or a tiny media player? What channels do they have access to?

And …

The last in the series. I’m not sure whether this qualifies as a scoop or not, but I don’t believe I’ve seen Burns say that he plans to make a Vietnam documentary elsewhere (not that I’ve scoured all the clips):

What kind of distance in time do you need from an event to feel comfortable making a documentary about it?

KB: I think what …

Did you conceive this project before–

KB & LN: –before 9/11.

KB: And most of the interviews were done–and I’m thinking particularly of Sam Hynes’ interview–before the invasion of Iraq. So that when he says, in the beginning of the film, “There’s no such thing as a good war, only necessary wars and just wars,” and then we call …

SPOILER ALERT: This post reveals who was voted off last night’s Survivor: China. Also, the Ken Burns posts reveal who won WWII.

Monty Brinton/CBS

We interrupt Ken Burns Day at Tuned In to prove that we’re not all about lofty matters historical here. Survivor: China debuted last night, and while I can never judge the quality of any …

It’s interesting from the standpoint of today to see the images of death and gore that made it into the popular media and newsreels at the time.

KB: And the sequencing of that, which went from absolute buttoned-down control, where no one knew until after the war the actual casualties and loss and materiel at Pearl Harbor, to that one …

Does Ken Burns have anything to say about the attacks by Hispanics for leaving them out of the original version of The War? Does he ever!

Didn’t you have to take on faith that the four towns you picked would give you the whole scope of the war?

LN: Yes. We naively though that if you picked a big enough city, but not too big–if you …

I spoke with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick for a good hour and a half, getting far more stuff than I could work into a 660-word column in Time. Burns, in addition to being thoughtful about the process and pitfalls of documentary making, is a saltier speaker than you might expect from a PBS type, as well as quite the unembarrassed salesman. …

Carrying wounded in Okinawa. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

In my column this week, I sat down with Ken Burns and his co-director/producer, Lynn Novick, and talked about–well, a lot of things, but the focus of this column ended up being on their WWII documentary The War and its parallels to, and implied comments on, …

The front Briefing section of TIME opens with something called The Moment, which is sort of like a blog entry in print—a riff of a few paragraphs about an image or incident from the week’s news. I wrote this week’s, on the class reunion of the O.J. Simpson media industry, and I may as well reprint the whole thing here:

History, they

…

The loss of The Rich Inner Life of Penelope Cloud is Lost fans’ gain. TV Guide scoopmeister Michael Ausiello reports that, after the failure of the pilot, Cynthia Watros will be back next season to reprise the role of Libby (presumably in flashbacks):

“She’ll be in enough of the show for us to fill in the missing pieces of her story,”

…

Good for the Panthers or bad for the Panthers? NBC Photo: Bill Records

NBC says all the right things in its announcement that, this fall, it will make downloads of its shows available for free through the NBC Direct service. Viewers today want “more control,” says Vivi Zigler, Executive Vice President of NBC Digital Entertainment. …