HBO photo: Claudette Barius

It’s a big HBO weekend: besides Tell Me You Love Me and James Gandolfini’s understatedly moving Iraq documentary Alive Day Memories, Curb Your Enthusiasm returns for its sixth season. What I’ve seen so far looks far better than the underwhelming fifth season–if it keeps this up, I may regret sacrificing …

We’re watching you, Poniewozik. NBC

In this week’s TIME, of course, an excerpt from my All-TIME 100 TV shows list. Nothing you can’t already see online, but a little something for the print readers who don’t yet have the Intertube hose connected to their computing machines.

To keep the discussion of the list alive, I’m going to try …

Alexander, DeKay and Walker’s labor of Love. HBO photo: Doug Hyun

Let me say this up front: Mrs. Tuned In and I are doing great. We love each other very much. Everything’s fine, really.

I feel compelled to say this because I realize that it’s impossible to write about the realism of HBO’s new drama Tell Me You Love Me–particularly, …

BRAVO

If a show’s ratings potential can be judged by the number of people who ask me about it, unsolicited, before it comes out, Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style will be the top-rated television show of 2007. “Have you seen it yet?” people ask me. And “Is it any good?” And “Can I borrow the DVD?” And “Please tell me it’s good, or I’ll have to …

I told you I had something big planned for you after my summer vacation, and here it is: another freaking list! Some time ago, time.com conscripted me to come up with a list of the top 100 shows in TV history. (We’d already covered movies, music and novels, but let’s be glad they got around to TV before the 100 All-TIME quiltmakers’ …

Five decades after the Nixon-Kennedy debates, three decades after an actor and former TV host was elected president and a good decade and a half after Bill Clinton blew sax on the Arsenio Hall show, the perception still persists that anytime a candidate uses TV strategically, it’s a sign that he or she is a new kind of media-savvy …

Every year around now, people ask me which fall shows I think are going to be hits and which ones will tank. Every year around now, I tell them that it’s my job to decide whether shows are good and interesting, not whether they’ll make money for some giant corporation. If I were in the hit-picking business, I’d have a corner office in …

Some critics love to have their blurbs quoted in ads. Some dread it. (When Fox highlighted an especially overheated quote from my review of Dark Angel–“We have seen the Woman of the Future, and she kicks butt”–I wanted to go into hiding for a week.) Either way, they don’t generally show up themselves to do the blurbing. But ABC, and …

So a few weeks ago, my iPod–my ancient, pre-video iPod–broke. Stared making clicky sounds and showed that picture of an iPod with cartoon X’s for eyes that is the most adorable way imaginable of telling you that you need to buy a new piece of electronic equipment.

I decided to hold off buying a new one, because the iPhone had come …

Is there a less appetizing phrase than nonalcoholic flavor strip? Except for “CBS rum-family saga,” no.

(Thanks to tvtattle for the link.)