Tuned In+Uncategorized | July 5, 2011

While I Was Out: A Little Luck, Colbert's PAC, The Final Chord

By James Poniewozik

I’m back from vacation! Related: I was on vacation! Before we get back to business as usual (i.e., superficial blog posts, grudgingly written and read with a feeling of vague dissatisfaction) a quick rundown of a few things that happened in TV while I was away:

* HBO released a new (albeit very short) trailer for the David Milch / Michael Mann horseracing drama Luck, which is currently a 2-to-1 favorite as my most anticipated new show of 2012.

* The Voice ended its first season  with high ratings and chose its first winner, Javier Colon. (I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that, if this is a spoiler for you, it didn’t matter that much to you.) Should he be properly referred to as “winner of The Voice”? Or simply as “The Voice”? Is he required to use “The Voice” as a stage name, wearing a cape and a bodysuit emblazoned with a “V,” while fighting crime on the side?

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | June 24, 2011

Dead Tree Alert: From Oprah to Olbermann

By James Poniewozik

My column in the dead-tree issue of TIME out today looks at the return of Countdown with Keith Olbermann, not so much from a review perspective but looking at Olbermann as the latest example of a media star leveraging his or her brand. Oprah launched the OWN channel, Glenn Beck is turning his show into [...]

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Tuned In+News Media | April 8, 2011

RIP Jon Stewart's Glenn Beck Impression, 2009-2011

By James Poniewozik

It was too soon. Dammit, they took him from us too soon. So it was that, with the announcement that Glenn Beck would be leaving his Fox News show, Jon Stewart and his Daily Show writers took what they must have assumed would be the years’ worth of Beck material they would have in the [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | April 7, 2010

Net Neutrality's Strange Bedfellows

By James Poniewozik

God help me, I think I actually agree with the Parents Television Council on an issue involving the FCC. Regular readers of this blog know that I’ve rarely seen eye-to-eye with the “broadcast decency” advocacy group, which has (among other things) spearheaded efforts to police the content of primetime TV. The reason: I’m all for [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | December 7, 2009

Fox News, Talk Radio Hosts Strike Gold

By James Poniewozik

If you watch a lot of TV news, you become well aware of the consumer options for free credit reports, health-care products for the elderly and—if you watch Fox News in particular—gold. A fascinating story up at Politico examines the symbiosis between the conservative talkers peddling disaster and the various companies peddling the yellow stuff.

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Tuned In+December 2, 2009

TV Tonight: "The Body" of Evidence

By James Poniewozik

We live in the age of paranoia: Presidential birth certificates, Vice-Presidential-candidates’ grandkids, terrorist attacks, flu vaccines—there is nothing that cannot become the stuff of conspiracy theory. So it is prescient thinking, if not spectacular TV, that TruTV enlisted wrestler-turned-governor-now-turned-TV-star Jesse “The Body” Ventura to host Conspiracy Theory, which debuts tonight.

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | November 23, 2009

Your Guide to the Coming Glenn Beck Century

By James Poniewozik

Have you heard what one of Obama’s czars is saying now? Apparently this guy is out there telling people that he’s assembled a council of advisers to chart a new course for America. He wants to undo the last century of American history. And he—get this—says the U.S. needs “a hundred-year-plan” and “we need to [...]

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Tuned In+News Media | October 5, 2009

Imus Debuts on Fox Business; Talks TIME, Drinking With Beck

By James Poniewozik

Fans of cowboy-hatted angry scarecrows doing radio shows on TV had reason to rejoice this morning, as Don Imus returned to the air on Fox Business Network, after having left MSNBC following his “nappy-headed hos” scandal. (In the meantime, his show was carried for a period on RFD-TV.) I’m not among those fans, so I [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | September 25, 2009

Glenn Beck Gets His SNL Closeup

By James Poniewozik

If you haven’t yet seen it, Glenn Beck received a tribute greater than the cover of TIME magazine last night: a Saturday Night Live (in this case Weekend Update Thursday) parody. I have to think there is far more you could do with a Beck opening monologue than this snippet. (Think Ben Affleck’s Keith Olbermann.) [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | September 22, 2009

Beck to Couric: Obama Better Than McCain, Hillary Better Than Both

By James Poniewozik

Katie Couric is launching a new online interview series, called @katiecouric,  this week, and her first subject is a pretty big get, at least if you believe what you read in TIME magazine: Glenn Beck. (Fun fact: Back and Couric have the same publicist. Because he just despises the MSM’s bias, not their professional assistants.) [...]

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Tuned In+September 17, 2009

Glenn Beck on the Cover of TIME: Mad or Glad?

By James Poniewozik

TIME’s cover story this week, by politics writer David von Drehle, is about Glenn Beck. (Cover line: MAD MAN.) I suspect one or two of you have an opinion about it.

+Looking Around | September 16, 2009

Curiouser and Curiouser

By Richard Lacayo

A few days ago I mentioned here that Christopher Knight, the art critic of the Los Angeles Times, had noticed the odd fact that the logo for last weekend’s anti-Obama march on Washington makes use of a symbol with a long pedigree on the militant left, a raised fist. It turns out that the Rolling [...]

+Looking Around | September 14, 2009

Glenn Beck: Closet Communist?

By Richard Lacayo

The Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight has a hilarious (and perfectly valid) follow-up today on Glenn Beck’s recent attempt to draw sinister inferences of fascist and communist content in the 30s-era artwork around Rockefeller Center. I posted about Beck’s tirade just before I disappeared last week on a long work trip. (Not to [...]

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Tuned In+September 11, 2009

Don't Tell Me What 9/12 Means, Glenn Beck

By James Poniewozik

Today, you are already aware, is the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Tomorrow, you may or may not be aware, is the date of Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project, which the Fox News host will be marking with a live-TV event in Washington, and which he announced in March in an effort to bring us [...]

+Looking Around | September 4, 2009

Glenn Beck: Crack(ed) Symbologist

By Richard Lacayo

Glenn Beck, the conservative commentator and self-proclaimed “rodeo clown”, found a new hobby horse the other night — secretly “communist” and “fascist” art buried into the exterior design program of Rockefeller Center. In Beck’s rant he also managed to imply that “Rockefeller”, it’s not clear which Rockefeller he meant, was also somehow a secret communist. [...]