High-powered, successful women Shields and Nina Garcia. / Bravo Photo: Barbara Nitke
SPOILER ALERT: Spoilers for Project Runway coming up after the jump.
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The YouTube Channel
After I watched The Line for the first time, I re-watched it last night with Mrs. Tuned In—on TV. TiVo, for you non-cultists, now allows you to search for and stream YouTube videos directly to your TV. (I don’t know if the entire database is available, but TiVo touts “millions” of videos, and having tried to search for several obscure …
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Anakin You Feel It?
I’ve been spending more time than the average adult lately thinking about Anakin Skywalker. This is in part because the Tuned In Jrs. recently came into possession of the Lego Star Wars prequel videogame, allowing them to discover the franchise’s whole Jar Jar Binksian backstory. And I’ve been working on Time’s fall arts preview, one …
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They Walk (or Sit) The Line
2008 hasn’t been a great year for TV. There was the strike, for starters, and while we still have a third of the year to go, we haven’t seen any amazing debuts on the order of Mad Men. But while it’s been a weak year for TV on TV, TV online’s been doing just fine, thanks.
Yesterday was the debut of the last installment of The Line, a …
Tuned InTV Ratings
Nielsen, By the Numbers
For those Tuned Inlanders interested in the business-and-ratings side of TV, Nielsen has launched a new blog with regularly updated ratings and other stats on media and branding. Nielsen keeps a lot of their research proprietary, of course, but for media numbers junkies, it’s a nice all-on-one-page general resource.
The …
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More Mad Men, Sopranos and Sex
Since we discussed the parallels between “The Benefactor” and The Sopranos yesterday, I want to recommend Andrew Johnston’s outstanding breakdown of the episode, and what Mad Men has learned from Matthew Weiner’s old show, at The House Next Door:
The Sopranos was a highly serialized show from the beginning, and in some ways became more
…
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Also, "Beijing" Actually a Studio Lot in Burbank
Following on the heels of that Olympics fireworks fiasco comes a New York Times report that the nine-year-old girl who sang a patriotic ballad in the opening ceremonies, while floating suspended from wires, was performing to another girl’s vocals. The kicker: the Olympic stagers apparently went with the switch because the seven-year-old …
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A First Look At: My Own Worst Enemy
I can’t call this a Test Pilot post, because NBC still hasn’t sent a full pilot of this Christian Slater drama. But given how bare the fall cupboard is so far, let’s take a look at the preview scene NBC recently posted (apologies for the embedded ads):
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Beijing's Fireworks: Flaming Outrage or Pyrotechnicality?
NBC’s coverage of the Olympic opening ceremonies is coming under fire (so to speak) for its presentation of the “fireworks” at the beginning of the spectacular. The event opened with a sweeping tracking shot, moving over the Beijing skyline as “footprints” exploded over them, one for each Olympiad. The one hitch: the fireworks weren’t …
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…And One More "Celebrity" Spot
Presented in the interest of equal time and completism, since we started the morning with one. This time from McCain again:
As Marc Ambinder (where I got the link) notes, it’s hard to know how widely McCain means web videos like this to be picked up, or whom it’s meant to persuade. But mocking the real-people testimonials is curious, …
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Internet Fails to Kill Olympics
The ratings—and/or the highly speculative guesswork—are in, and it turns out a billion people watched the Opening Ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, over 34 million of them in the U.S. (That’s a smaller percentage of our population, but to be fair, much of the rest of the world’s population doesn’t have Cartoon Network.)
Beyond …
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Isaac Hayes, 1942-2008
Isaac Hayes, who died over the weekend, was famous as an R&B singer/songwriter, but was most familiar to TV fans as the voice of Chef on South Park. When Chef was killed off the show—after a famous falling out between Hayes and Parker-Stone for the show’s making fun of Scientology, of which he was an adherent—it was a big loss: a …
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You're a Celebrity! No, You're a Celebrity!
In a new ad, the Obama campaign casts John McCain as “Washington’s biggest celebrity” and reminds us of his numerous media and Hollywood appearances:
I dunno. Maybe I’m alone in this, but I’ve never been that convinced that the “Barack Obama is a celebrity” attack angle is damaging per se to Obama. (I’m with Jimmy Kimmel, who ran the …
