Entertainment

Last Idol review of the year is posted on the Time.com homepage. The final night played out pretty much as I suspected, playing wholly to Jordin’s strengths. Idol ballads are written precisely with a 17-year-old’s sense of melodramatics in mind, and I have a feeling that Jordin’s peer group will reward the 17-year-old wunderkind for it. …

Like you have to ask?

But also: The preview/debut of On the Lot, the moviemaking reality show from Mark Burnett and Steven Spielberg. I’ve seen only a few-minute trailer, from which I can’t tell much (lots of overwhelmed would-be directors touring real-life movie sets and saying “This is where it all happens!”). I don’t know if they can …

WARNING: Heroes spoilers ahead! Don’t think of the bogeyman!

NBC Photo: Trea Patton

So the Heroes season 1 — sorry “Volume 1″ — finale: I wasn’t overwhelmed. I wasn’t exactly underwhelmed either. Call me whelmed.

Nathan Petrelli, for better and worse, has been the subject of many of my questions this season. Such as: why, exactly, …

WARNING: 24 spoilers, if you care about that sort of thing.

So after all my hemming and hawing, I gave in and watched the 24 finale. Well, I “watched” it. Skipped the beginning, and the fast-forward button played a significant role, but finally I had to: in for a penny etc. And you know, I’ve gotta agree with Joanna from yesterday’s …

Heroes: obvs.

Less obvs: My HBO backlog. Over the course of my vacation and upfronts week, I received what feels like the next five years’ worth of future HBO programming: 5 episodes of Big Love, the perplxing-looking John from Cincinnati, Flight of the Conchords and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Exciting, but daunting, like bellying …

WARNING: Sopranos discussion dead ahead.

HBO

It all comes back to the pool. The pool, where Tony first saw the family of ducks nesting at the beginning of the series, precipitating his panic attacks and trips to therapy, and where A.J. made the suicide attempt that he was, fortunately, too inept to carry out. “Maybe it was a cry for …

Code Monkey meets WOW.

My Culture Complex column in the print TIME this week asks the musical question: why aren’t there more pop songs about white-collar workers?

We have office sitcoms, office novels and office movies, but where are the office pop songs? Rock music has never lacked for zillionaires to romanticize farmhands and

…

WARNING: Office spoilers.

So: it’s a date. Pam and Jim are together, Jam has been achieved, order has been restored to the universe. A good if not great season-ender, and if the conclusion didn’t have the holy-crap factor of The Kiss last year, Pam’s closeup reaction to Jim’s return during her interview was–like everything Jenna …

Last year’s Fox upfront was memorable. Not in a good way. Held at the Armory in New York, it ran two and a half hours, and the jury-rigged air-conditioning couldn’t begin to cool the sweltering cave-like room. It was a grisly, bloody-Antietam of a show, and many of the advertising executives–the people these galas are meant to …

To get into the CW upfront at Madison Square Garden, you walk through the “trend bar,” where waiters stand around with heaping trays of mini muffins and giant, CW-green-and-white posters announce the trends that the hip CW advertiser should be aware of. Not surprisingly, they are pretty much entirely about social technology and the …