Adam Taylor / FOX
+TV Recap House: Season 8, Episode 14 | March 20, 2012

House Watch: The Parent Trap Edition

By John Cloud

In which we unravel mysteries behind two blind men—this week's patient as well as his visionless doctor

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Tuned In+Television | December 9, 2011

Parks and Recreation Watch: Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose!

By James Poniewozik
Mike Ansell/NBC

Spoilers for last night’s Parks and Recreation below: Last night after rewatching “Citizen Knope” (having gotten a screener earlier in the week), I tweeted half-jokingly that Parks and Recreation had become “the Friday Night Lights of comedy.” Jokingly, because the moving, optimistic ending to the episode made me mist up—not the first time this show [...]

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Tuned In+Tuned In | September 19, 2011

Emmys 2011: Getting It Mostly Right — the Awards, at Least

By James Poniewozik
Emmy

When someone asks, “What did you think of the Emmys?” — let’s pretend this is a question that comes up in daily conversation — it can mean two things: the Emmy Awards, and the Emmycast itself. The broadcast this year was not exactly prizewinning, marred by too many flubbed attempts at humor and some, er, [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | July 16, 2011

Friday Night Lights Watch (Repost): Let's Go Home

By James Poniewozik

Last night, one of TV’s greatest drama about family, community, faith–and, incidentally, football–Friday Night Lights, came to an end on NBC. When this excellent, moving finale aired in February on DirecTV, I reviewed it here. For those of you who have been watching on NBC, I reprint it below. Spoilers, obviously: In my preview column [...]

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Tuned In+Television | July 14, 2011

Emmy Nominations 2011: The Good, the Bad and the Surprises

By James Poniewozik

The Emmy Awards are a big ocean liner that turns very slowly, and this year’s nominations, announced this morning, were no exception: a lot of familiar faces and a few new (or old but underrecognized) entries. So there were a slew of nominations for Mad Men, Modern Family and [Insert Name of HBO's Big Movie/Miniseries [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | May 14, 2011

Friday Night Lights Watch: Are We There Yet?

By James Poniewozik

Quick spoilers for last night’s Friday Night Lights below: I had planned, this week, to return to my regular schedule of reviewing Friday Night Lights for its NBC run, which I’ve dropped the ball on, so to speak, for the last couple weeks. You know what God does when you make plans: He dumps a [...]

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Tuned In+April 15, 2011

TV Tonight: Friday Night Lights' Last Season (Again)

By James Poniewozik

If you didn’t watch it on DirecTV last year and earlier this year, or if you didn’t buy the already-available DVD set earlier this month, you can start watching the fifth and final season of Friday Night Lights via good-old-fashioned rabbit-ears broadcast TV tonight. I absolutely loved the third season of FNL (its first on [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | February 10, 2011

Friday Night Lights Watch: Let's Go Home

By James Poniewozik

Spoilers for the series finale of Friday Night Lights up next: In my preview column for the finale of Friday Night Lights, I made a comparison—obvious in retrospect, so maybe someone has made it before—between FNL and It’s a Wonderful Life. Both are stories about American towns and the pull (and sometimes the burden) of [...]

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Tuned In+February 9, 2011

TV Tonight: Friday Night Lights Out

By James Poniewozik

Tonight, the lights go out in East Dillon, as DirecTV airs the last episode ever of one of the past decade’s greatest TV series, Friday Night Lights. Rather than re-invent the wheel, here’s another link, in case you missed it, to my farewell column last week, in which I wrote about FNL as one of [...]

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Tuned In+February 4, 2011

Dead Tree Alert: Friday Night Lights, America's Team

By James Poniewozik

My column in the print edition of TIME this week celebrates Friday Night Lights, which airs its series finale on DirecTV next week. (The column went to press before NBC announced that it will begin airing the last season April 15—though a DVD of the full season will be available ten days earlier.) I wanted [...]

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Tuned In+October 27, 2010

TV Tonight: One Last Season for FNL

By James Poniewozik

Tonight on DirecTV, Friday Night Lights returns for the last time (or the last time until the final season re-returns for its second run on NBC next year, for which no date has yet been set). I’m going to follow the same practice I did last year: because most Tuned Inlanders don’t have access to [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | August 12, 2010

Fifth—and Yes, Final—FNL Season Gets Date

By James Poniewozik

I don’t recall if the upcoming season 5 of Friday Night Lights was already officially the season’s last, or all-but-officially (I’d been going on the assumption, but last I spoke with DirecTV, they wouldn’t say it flat-out), but in any case it’s official now. The fifth and final season of FNL debuts on the satellite [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | August 6, 2010

FNL Watch: Against the Wind

By James Poniewozik

Spoilers for the season 4 finale of Friday Night Lights coming up: I love Friday Night Lights. I am guessing that you, since you are reading this post, love Friday Night Lights. And so I know that at some point over the last four years, you and I have both had some version of the [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | July 30, 2010

FNL Watch: Leveled Playing Field

By James Poniewozik

Spoilers for Friday Night Lights coming up: Two exchanges between Eric and Tami Taylor stood out to me in this episode. The first is the most obvious, is the one that played off the condition of the Lions’ home field on the eve of the Panther game, which became a metaphor for the rough situations [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | July 16, 2010

FNL Watch: Less Money, Mo' Problems

By James Poniewozik

Good news: my DSL pipeline has been restored, so I’m back in blogging business. Bad news: between at set visit today (to the downtown site of AMC’s Rubicon) and general falling behind from my computer problems, I don’t have time for a full blog review of Friday Night Lights, “Injury List.” Update: Whoops! And fortunately, [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | July 9, 2010

FNL Watch: A Question of Choice

By James Poniewozik

Spoilers for Friday Night Lights coming up: This is a good place to talk about choice. Not choice as in “a woman’s right to choose,” though the subject of this episode of Friday Night Lights was abortion, but choice as in a storyteller’s ability to choose how best to make believable decisions in a narrative, [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | June 18, 2010

FNL Watch: Run and Gun Offense

By James Poniewozik

Spoilers for Friday Night Lights coming up: Only one of the problems Coach Taylor signed on for when coming over to coach East Dillon was rebuilding a broken-down sports program from scratch. Another was dealing with a body of players, many of whom have much rougher home lives and more deep-seated problems than he encountered [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | June 11, 2010

FNL Watch: Get Out of Town

By James Poniewozik

Spoilers for tonight’s Friday Night Lights coming up: Last week gave us some devastatingly emotional scenes in Friday Night Lights‘ “The Son,” a high-water mark for the season to this point, if not for the whole series. The followup, “Stay,” gave us a set of stories that were about aftermath: the aftermath of Matt’s father’s [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | June 4, 2010

FNL Watch: The Good "Son" Returns

By James Poniewozik

I’m not sure how much appetite there is for a Friday Night Lights Watch here at Tuned In—devout fans may have already watched it on DirecTV, and the NBC run of season 3 elicited relatively few comments on those occasions I covered it last year. But season 4, with Coach Taylor taking over the struggling [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | May 7, 2010

TV Tonight: FNL Begins Its Instant Replay

By James Poniewozik

The wait is over for those of you without one of those little DirecTV pizzas stuck to your house: the fourth season of Friday Night Lights returns to NBC tonight, and it’s worth the wait. I reviewed the season (based on the first few episodes) back in the fall, and I found that—while you might [...]