Tuned In
Watch me enter the exciting world of online video/radio/streaming-thingies this afternoon! I’ll be calling in to Mediaite’s Office Hours webcast around 4:35 p.m. ET; the whole show starts at 4 p.m. ET, and you can find details here. The other guest (separately) will be Contessa Brewer of MSNBC. I’ll be talking matters media and …
I’m detouring today into Thomas Pynchon-land.
Tuned InUncategorized
At the TV critics press tour earlier this month, NBC walked back its quick declaration of Conan O’Brien as “The New King of Late Night.” And you can see why. Last week, David Letterman beat Conan O’Brien in total viewers. Wait, let me elaborate: a week of Letterman reruns beat a week of O’Brien originals.
NBC will argue, and not …
Tuned InUncategorized
This is not something a good TV critic likes to admit, but I made liberal use of the fast-forward button watching last night’s special Octomom: The Incredible Unseen Footage. I have an excuse, in that I had a Top Chef writeup to do, but also enough of the show was devoted to Suleman’s unhinged 911 calls that I could blessedly speed
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Tuned InUncategorized
Spoilers for last night’s season premiere of Top Chef coming up after the jump:
Here’s another of those stories that got started while I was on vacation but has many twists and turns to come. A few weeks ago the Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced that starting in October it would be “suspending” its longtime weekend film program, in order to “rethink” it, which sounded like an euphemism for sweeping it …
Tuned InRemembrance
Don Hewitt, who launched and executive-produced the newsmagazine colossus 60 Minutes, died today. His own news organization remembers him here.
It’s been a sad summer for CBS News, and yet one that’s reminded the world of that network’s huge role in reporting the news of the 20th century. Like Walter Cronkite, Hewitt was of a generation …
Tuned In
Tonight, Top Chef returns to Bravo, with season 6, set in Las Vegas. Tomorrow, the show’s estranged big sibling, Project Runway, returns after a long, litigation-induced absence, on a new network (Lifetime) and with new producers.
My headline aside, it’s not like anyone has to choose between the two shows, which the networks had the …
Tuned In
Spoilers for last Sunday’s True Blood coming up after the jump:
Tuned InUncategorized
The ratings for the first season 3 episode of Mad Men are in, and though AMC did not give the show the extravagantly expensive ad campaign it did in season 2, it scored its highest rating ever–2.8 million, up a third from last year. Granted that number wouldn’t be a minor hit on a big network, but it’s a jackpot for AMC.
Another sign …
If you follow the arts you already know that the Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton has a museum-in-progress in Bentonville, Ark., where her father, Sam Walton, opened his first retail store in 1951. On Monday her Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which is still under construction, announced a new director. Don Bacigalupi, presently …
Tuned InRemembrance
Robert Novak, the political columnist and longtime TV pundit, has died of brain cancer. I’m not going to claim to have been a big fan–of his politics, I’ll admit, but also of the style of TV confrontation he and others plied–but I was a big watcher of his, for years. And the man who “relished his ‘Prince of Darkness’ public persona,” …
Tuned In
There’s a fascinating read in The Wrap by Joe Adalian, about the theory by columnist and NPR host Bob Garfield, in his book The Chaos Scenario, that the broadcast TV model is going to collapse. In a nutshell, advertisers are going to wise up and stop paying more for fewer viewers, starting a spiral of cheaper programming and …
