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Your computer continues to eat your TV. Online gossip guru Perez Hilton–who did a bit this summer on Victoria Beckham’s NBC reality special–premieres What Perez Sez About tonight on VH1. (Or is it just called What Perez Sez? There seems to be some disagreement.) Out of sheer curiosity I (which, as always, means, “at least my TiVo”) …
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It didn’t take long after that cloudless Tuesday on the Eastern seaboard for the Sept. 11 attacks to become video wallpaper–the crashes, the fireballs, the towers collapsing, over and over and over. Six years later, plenty of people are still bothered by how often and how casually TV news replays what are, after all, the images of …
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Bernard Shaw and Peter Arnett from Baghdad in 1991.
When I finished the All-TIME 100 TV Shows list, I had so much leftover list-making energy that I came up with a sidebar list of 10 influential TV news events. The editors of time.com decided that was one more bell and/or whistle than the package needed. But waste not, want not: I give …
So here it is, the sixth anniversary of that morning. Last night I was walking down the Hudson River boardwalk near my apartment in Jersey City, N. J., which is directly across the water from where the World Trade Center used to be. Every year, there’s a memorial at this time produced by scores of floodlights positioned some blocks …
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In today’s installment of That Darn List!, the problem of good shows that turn bad. One problem I dealt with over and over when deciding whether to put long-running series on my top-100 list was what to do with shows that started great and ended embarrassing. Do the sanctimonious years of M*A*S*H outweigh the hilarious years? Could The …
And the winners, if that’s the word for it, of this controversial commission are Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Tod and Billie, a husband and wife team, are two of the most gifted and thoughtful architects I know. Their American Folk Art Museum in New York is on my short list of the great jewel box interiors anywhere in the U.S. It …
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Topic of the morning: Britney Spears’ performance at the VMAs–cringingly unwatchable trainwreck, or brilliant work of meta commentary?
Think about it. The Britney we saw on stage was a listless, lifeless, gone-to-seed shell of the dynamic teen sexpot we remembered from stage just a few years ago. She was inert, unenthusiastic and a …
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…courtesy of his mouthpieces at Best Week Ever. Now if I can only get Seven of Nine pissed off at me, I can die happy.
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HBO photo: Claudette Barius
It’s a big HBO weekend: besides Tell Me You Love Me and James Gandolfini’s understatedly moving Iraq documentary Alive Day Memories, Curb Your Enthusiasm returns for its sixth season. What I’ve seen so far looks far better than the underwhelming fifth season–if it keeps this up, I may regret sacrificing …
I’m still travelling around on assignment, but couldn’t resist taking note of the latest speculation about Damien Hirst’s $100 million — or is it? — skull. When I posted a few weeks ago about news of the sale, I wondered out loud if the details of this “sale” would ever be made fully public. Today both the Washington Post and the …
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We’re watching you, Poniewozik. NBC
In this week’s TIME, of course, an excerpt from my All-TIME 100 TV shows list. Nothing you can’t already see online, but a little something for the print readers who don’t yet have the Intertube hose connected to their computing machines.
To keep the discussion of the list alive, I’m going to try …
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SPOILER ALERT: No reading this post until you’ve done an honest day’s work for it, you bum.
So who knew that Mad Men would also turn out to be Carnivale? I’m impressed that, within this already detailed period piece, there turns out to be another period piece (Don/Dick’s childhood in the Depression) that’s just as engrossing and …
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Alexander, DeKay and Walker’s labor of Love. HBO photo: Doug Hyun
Let me say this up front: Mrs. Tuned In and I are doing great. We love each other very much. Everything’s fine, really.
I feel compelled to say this because I realize that it’s impossible to write about the realism of HBO’s new drama Tell Me You Love Me–particularly, …
