American Idol‘s contract negotiations continue to be carried out in public. Last week, Paula Abdul’s manager noted that Idol’s judge/dancer/singer/free-verse poet has not been made a contract renewal offer yet. This kind of public talk is usually a negotiation strategy; Abdul herself has said as much in interviews. But this didn’t stop …
NYT = NPR? Can a Pay Paper Seek Foundation Money?
My column in TIME this week is about the various plans media outlets are considering to float their operations as their old business model is suffering. On the heels of this comes a report that the New York Times is considering—but only considering—getting foundations to support its reporting, as public broadcasting does. In an …
HBO Fills More Thrones
We might as well make this a prospective-HBO-series theme morning. Word is out of several new casting decisions for HBO’s pilot of A Game of Thrones, the pilot to be shot this fall for a potential fantasy series to be based on George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. Sean Bean (Boromir in The Lord of the Rings) will play …
Skull and Bones
James Ensor is one of those artists it’s hard to get a handle on, because unless you’re Belgian, and not many people are, it’s hard to see much of his work. He had a long life — 1860 to 1949. But the period we know him for is brief — the 1880s and ’90s. Plus he worked in discordant styles, influenced by Bosch, Breughel, satirical …
Neighborhood Journalism II: Adrian Grenier, My BFF
There really is no escaping TV. Case in point: as I posted earlier, I was biking to my local food co-op this morning when I came across the setup for a shoot of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire pilot. But that was not the only TV-related encounter I had this morning; it was not even the only HBO-related encounter I had this morning.
Neighborhood Journalism I: HBO Working on Scorsese Series
Before 6 this morning, I was riding my bike to work a shift at the Park Slope Food Co-op—that’s right, I basically am Gerald Goode—when I came across a block closed to parking, with street signs announcing shooting for HBO “series” Boardwalk Empire.
The show is actually a pilot for a series under consideration (produced by …
Walter Cronkite
America’s most renowned news anchor died on Friday. My appreciation of him is on time.com:
Newsman Walter Cronkite, who died at the age of 92, was so thoroughly and uniquely linked with the word “trust” that it is tempting to say that the word should be buried with him. In the generation since he left the anchor desk at the CBS Evening
…
Julius Shulman: 1910-2009
The great architectural photographer Julius Shulman has died. Shulman did for L.A. Modernism what George Hurrell did for Rita Hayworth, gave it luster. He understood the beauty of the plane and void combinations of architects like Richard Neutra and Pierre Koenig, and he made their elegant wood and glass boxes seem natural byproducts …
Dead Tree Alert II: Get Fired Up for Torchwood: Children of Earth
If you’ve been hearing about next week’s BBC America miniseries, Torchwood: Children of Earth, which I briefly review in TIME this week, you may have thought it’s not for you. You may think you need to be a fan and follower of the Doctor Who spinoff, Torchwood, or Doctor Who itself, to appreciate it. I can tell you that’s not true, …
Dead Tree Alert I: Who Pays for News?
My current TIME column combines some themes I’ve written about in a few Tuned In posts lately, looking at the lengths journalists are going to to fund their work, and pointing out that even “free” news is paid for by somebody:
Will ___ save journalism? Lately it seems easier to find ruminations on that subject than to find
…
Why Journalists Are Like SCOTUS Nominees
Because of a disconnected cable box (unhooked for TIME’s office move) and a desktop Mac that has a hard time with streaming video, I’m not watching the Sotomayor hearings today. But having watched some of the first three days, and having read much of the commentary, it strikes me that you could replace “judges” with “journalists,” and …
Emmy Nominations: Something for (Almost) Everyone
The 2009 Emmy nominations came out this morning, bigger and—well, yeah, bigger. To spread the nominee wealth, draw in more fans of more shows (and, maybe, to increase the odds that the broadcast networks won’t get shut out by cable), the major categories were bumped up to six and even seven nominees.
The result: even more …
The Morning After: Dark and Light
Last night saw a couple summer-TV debuts I didn’t get around to reviewing. We had the Jerry Bruckheimer drama Dark Blue, with the ever-loud Dylan McDermott, in which TNT strove to break the stereotypes established by FX and AMC and boldly prove that a cable network can make a cop show just as formulaic as anything the big networks can …