Tuned In+News Media | 52 days ago

You’re Sorkin in It: HBO’s Newsroom Trailer Looks Pretty Familiar

By James Poniewozik

Taking advantage of the tune-in audience for the season premiere of Game of Thrones, and the built-in overlap between fans of fantasy epics and cable news, HBO previewed a trailer for its Aaron Sorkin drama The Newsroom last night.

+Television | 55 days ago

TIME Plays the Game of Thrones, and Lives to Tell the Tale

By Ishaan Tharoor
HBO

We get ready for Sunday’s season two premiere with a board game full of betrayal, intrigue and very confusing rules.

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Tuned In+Television | 70 days ago

A Third Horse Dies, and HBO Cancels Luck

By James Poniewozik
HBO

Under pressure from PETA, the network shut down the show as it was shooting its second season. Every frame of Luck exuded love of horses, but–like the races it faithfully chronicled–it ended up killing them.

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Tuned In+Television | 93 days ago

Serial Killers: Are HBO-Style Dramas Ruining the TV Episode?

By James Poniewozik
HBO

I’m currently fighting off a cold so potent that you probably caught it simply by reading this sentence, so blogging may be a little light for a while. Fortunately, my colleague and critic-pal Ryan McGee at the A.V. Club has offered up an essay that should keep you busy for a while. In it, he [...]

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Tuned In+Review | 97 days ago

TV Weekend: Life’s Too Short

By James Poniewozik
HBO

Ricky Gervais, The Guy Who Makes Jokes About About Celebrity, is in danger of becoming that dreaded thing: a comedian with one shtick, getting progressively less funny.

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Tuned In+Review | 100 days ago

TV Tonight: The Loving Story

By James Poniewozik
HBO

For Richard and Mildred Loving, their marriage was a pretty simple matter. They grew up in a small Virginia town where everyone pretty much knew everyone, fell in love (not without some obstacles; she found him “arrogant” at first) and got hitched. For the enforcers of Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws, their marriage was also a simple [...]

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Tuned In+Television | 106 days ago

Sorkin’s Newsroom Plans Premiere, Adds to Vast History of Fake TV Networks

By James Poniewozik
http://dragonball.wikia.com/wiki/NBS_News

The fictional cable network in The Newsroom will reportedly now be ACN, for Atlantis Cable News, joining a digital-cable-tier’s worth of fake-network names from TV’s past.

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Tuned In+Television | 170 days ago

Breaking News! Aaron Sorkin’s HBO Cable-News Drama Gets a Name

By James Poniewozik
Aaron Sorkin Horizontal

Things are moving along at the HBO Aaron Sorkin Project formerly known as “Untitled Aaron Sorkin Project.” According to Alex Weprin at TVNewser, the series, set at a fictional cable-news network now has a name… wait for it… Newsroom. (Or possibly The Newsroom. If they decide to spice things up with the definite article.)

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Tuned In+Television | 176 days ago

HBO Signs David Milch and His New Partner, William Faulkner

By James Poniewozik

HBO announced today that it signed a new contract with one of its favorite writers, David Milch, who created Deadwood, John from Cincinnati and various projects that never made air for the network, and whose horseracing drama Luck debuts next month. (A sneak preview will air Dec. 11.) In connection with the deal, the network [...]

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Tuned In+Tuned In | 204 days ago

First Horse Out of the Gate: HBO to Sneak-Peek Luck Pilot

By James Poniewozik

HBO has announced a premiere date, Jan. 29, for its David Milch / Michael Mann horseracing drama Luck. But should you care to lay odds on it early, the network will run a sneak preview of the pilot episode on Dec. 11, after the season finale of Boardwalk Empire. Then HBO will hold its horses, [...]

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Tuned In+TV Recap Boardwalk Empire: Season 2, Episode 4 | 220 days ago

Boardwalk Empire Watch: Slap Happy

By James Poniewozik
HBO

“What Does the Bee Do?,” the fourth episode of Boardwalk Empire’s second season, returns to a familiar theme about power: whether it is better–oh, hell, you don’t want to talk about that, do you?

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 232 days ago

TV Tonight: George Harrison: Living in the Material World

By James Poniewozik

Elsewhere at time.com, TIME film critic Richard Corliss reviews Martin Scorsese’s George Harrison documentary, George Harrison: Living in the Material World, which airs in two parts on HBO tonight and tomorrow: The “quiet Beatle” — the one who told an interviewer, “I’m even more normal than normal people” — was also the nicest Beatle: the [...]

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Tuned In+Tuned In | 240 days ago

First Look: HBO’s Luck

By James Poniewozik

Among the things I didn’t get around to blogging about yesterday: Before the season premiere of Boardwalk Empire, HBO screened a trailer for horseracing drama Luck, which debuts in January. (They also aired an even briefer tease for season 2 of Game of Thrones, with no footage, just a recitation of the Red Priests’ line [...]

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Tuned In+News Media | 259 days ago

Breaking News! HBO Picks Up Sorkin’s Cable-News Series

By James Poniewozik

While this may not count as the most stunning development in TV, HBO has made it official: it’s greenlighted a season of Aaron Sorkin‘s yet untitled drama set at a cable news network, starring Jeff Daniels as a talented but difficult high-profile anchor. With little to go on but the premise and Sorkin’s history, I’m [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 300 days ago

TCA Roundup: Is AMC the New HBO? Is HBO the New AMC?

By James Poniewozik

The TCA TV critics’ press tour (which I will be joining next week) continued with its cable round yesterday, as critics and reporters heard from AMC, a critics’ darling that has recently taken some dings in its Teflon armor over the season finale of The Killing, ugly negotiations over Mad Men and a shakeup at [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 322 days ago

Breast Practices: Too Many Boobs in Game of Thrones?

By James Poniewozik

Game of Thrones has ended its first season on HBO, but a debate rages on. Namely, if winter is coming, why don’t the women put some damn clothes on? In the Los Angeles Times, TV critic Mary McNamara used Game of Thrones, with its many female nude scenes, as a launching point to make a [...]

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Tuned In+426 days ago

TV Weekend: Mildred Pierce

By James Poniewozik

As a director, Todd Haynes (Safe, I’m Not There) sometimes seems less like a filmmaker than an enthusiast: a collector, say, of a certain brand of out-of-production figurine (he cast his early Karen Carpenter biopic, Superstar, with Barbie dolls) or a passionate fan of a highly particular out-of-fashion design genre. His 2002 film Far from [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 442 days ago

Julianne Moore Is… Sarah Palin! Cast the Rest of HBO's Game Change

By James Poniewozik

HBO announced today that it has signed Julianne Moore to play then-Alaska-governor Sarah Palin in its coming movie Game Change, a behind the scenes account of the 2008 election that dishes dirt on Republican and Democratic campaigns.* (The film is being directed by Jay Roach, who helmed HBO’s Recount, about the 2000 election’s aftermath.) Should [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | 443 days ago

Michael Chabon to Fight Nazis With Magic for HBO

By James Poniewozik

Novelist Michael Chabon is developing a series for HBO, titled Hobgoblin, about magicians fighting Nazis in WWII. Now keep in mind that the project—on which Chabon is teaming with wife Ayelet Waldman—is in an early, pre-pilot stage of development. So as with all such embryonic projects (Aaron Sorkin’s cable-news show for HBO, or the Hollywood-gossip [...]

+TV Networks | 456 days ago

Big Love Watch: All About the Mormons

By Richard Corliss

Big Love is anomaly among HBO shows, in that it avoids the obligatory nudity and rarely utters a curse stronger than “G.D.” With these self-imposed restrictions, the series has to find subtler ways of providing its shocks. Sunday’s episode, “D.I.V.O.R.C.E.,” boasted two jolts—mouth-to-mouth scandals that touched on the series’ interlocking themes of the sacred and [...]