Well, it may not have come to that yet. But Miley Cyrus, after releasing an album under her own name and totally unintentionally distancing herself from her child-star image in Vanity Fair, has now told E! Online that “We’re thinking this [the upcoming third season] is our last season.”
Disney begs to differ, noting that no mortal may …
Remember when Fox Business Network launched? Remember when it was the biggest TV news of all time, including the actual invention of television itself? Remember when News Corp was going to parlay the Fox and Wall Street Journal brands into a business juggernaut that would probably culminate in Rupert Murdoch’s face being printed on every …
Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer vamp it up with Ball. / HBO photo: Jamie Trueblood (surname not a typo)
Oh, you commenters! Always with your commenty comments! Wilson writes:
This isn’t about Mad Men (which was awesome) but James P’s other favorite show, “Tell Me You Love Me.” What happened there?
And Tom Shaw drops a broad hint:
On
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What do you get for $25 million? For AMC and Mad Men, about a million pairs of eyeballs. The season 2 premiere of the much-lauded-by-critics, not-as-much-watched-by-people drama drew about 1.9 million viewers. That’s not much by broadcast network standards—or even by TNT network standards—but it’s more than double the show’s average …
ABC
So I’m flipping channels last night, and I come across a reality-competition show in which someone’s been rushed to the hospital after drinking too much in a hot tub. Business as usual, right? Something on MTV, or maybe Big Brother? No: I was watching Fine Living Network. Which, though how this slipped under my radar is beyond me, …
The notion that the media is biased in favor of Barack Obama has become an article of faith—at least among those people who have run campaigns against Barack Obama. Now there’s a new study that finds a definite Obama slant in campaign coverage—the other way.
A study of the first six weeks of the general-election campaign by the …
As long as we’re on the subject of advertising this morning, there’s an interesting ad review by Seth Stevenson in Slate for a Scion XB spot, which asks whether it takes the Volkswagen “Think Small” strategy—turn a product’s weakness into an asset—too far. The weakness in this case is that the car looks like a box, or, more …
Losing his tight grip on the short hairs of the public imagination? / AMC
SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, finish your Valentine’s Day shopping and watch the season two premiere of Mad Men.
Because Mad Men‘s Matthew Weiner wrote for The Sopranos, the comparisons between the two shows tend to get overdone. But the opening …
Untitled, #696-05, Richard Misrach, 2005/FRAENKEL GALLERY, PACE/MacGILL, MARC SELWYN FINE ARTS
Criticizing things for a living, it gets strenuous. Even critics need a vacation. So this critic is taking off the next three weeks to vacate. Back on Monday August 18.
Meanwhile, if you have some free time of your own, you can check out …
From my e-mail inbox to you, the tireless Rebecca Winters Keegan reports on this weekend’s Lost panel at Comic-Con:
Noon, Saturday
The Lost panel is happening in the 6500-seat Hall H after the Heroes panel. Some attendees stood in line for seven hours to get inside. Season five hasn’t begun taping yet, so it’s not clear what
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Tory Belleci confronts a robo-shark for MythBusters. / Don Feria/Discovery Channel
One more item of mine in the print TIME I forgot to mention. Discovery’s Shark Week begins Sunday, and I reviewed the first two installments:
MythBusters: Shark Special and Surviving Sharks Discovery, 9 p.m. E.T., July 27 & 28
MythBusters uses its
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Rebecca Winters Keegan reports on the Comic-Con session for HBO’s upcoming True Blood, as well as vampire movie project Twilight.
Vamp/human affairs became a hot topic of discussion at the True Blood panel. “Apparently sex with vampires is really kind of great,” said Ball, the creator of Six Feet Under and writer of American Beauty.
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As I mentioned earlier, TIME’s Rebecca Winters Keegan will be sending occasional updates from Comic-Con. (She promises a Lost dispatch over the weekend.) Because of her job, though—covering all of Hollywood as well as all of America west of the Mississippi—she’ll have to focus a lot on the movie sessions. For supplemental TV …