That distant screeching sound you heard this afternoon was the sound of cable and media companies, collectively squealing like stuck pigs at a new report from the Federal Communications Commission, arguing in favor of "a la carte" pricing for cable. "A la carte" cable does not, alas, mean the ability to have your cable box [...]

Two thoughts, neither of them wholly baked, about last night’s episode of Lost (The usual spoiler-alert, avert-thine-eyes dictum applies here): (1) Maybe no big-network show has asked viewers to identify so closely with so many characters who are, by most TV’s moral lights, pretty bad people. There’s Eko, for instance, who ran drugs and murdered [...]

The amazing thing about American Idol is that it gets tens of millions of people to watch it two months before it really starts. It begins with the audition episodes-singer after deluded singer in city after deluded city-that lead into the Hollywood-audition episodes, and thence to the interminable semifinal rounds that will bring us, sometime [...]

The review disc of the first four episodes of this season’s 24 (debuts Sunday, 8 p.m. E.T.) comes with a message from Fox, in bold and underlined: "Do not divulge to your readers the events of the first 10 minutes in the first hour." Given that 24 is a serial show, that makes it kinda [...]

Last night, Lost returned, after a hiatus of—what was it, five, six years?—and came through on one of the promises of the producers to resolve some of the show’s tantalyzing questions: we finally saw the monster. Kind of. On an excursion into the island’s jungle, rocker-cum-junkie Charlie and African enigma Mr. Eko heard the by [...]

The dirty secret of my annual top 10 TV shows list is that it is not  really a top 10 TV shows list. Like TIME TV critics before me, I  concentrate on new shows and series, on the theory that a list of the straight-out best shows would include, say, Lost or South Park every  [...]

Let it never be said that HBO’s sitcoms neglect the wide panoply of human experience. They’re about such diverse people as aspiring actors, sitcom creators, washed-up actresses and hot young actors and their agents. Now Ricky Gervais (The Office) has created Extras, debuting Sunday, about, yes, the people who stand around in the background of [...]

Between 9 and 10 p.m., in retrospect, would have been a good time to switch over from the Emmys and watch “Rome” on HBO. The thing is, for much of the hour, you were pretty much watching HBO, anyway. As usual, the network steamrolled the miniseries-and-movie categories with such expensive, plush Emmy-acquisition devices as “The [...]

Blythe Danner just won Supporting Actress, Drama, for “Huff,” which is apparently on television. Who says awards shows aren’t educational? She then followed it up with a quickie blast against the war in Iraq: “Let’s get the heck out of there!” Oooh, let’s hope the FCC didn’t catch that one.

I don’t exactly know why Fox’s army of lawyers didn’t descend on the Emmy awards for “Emmy Idol” — classic TV themes sung by current TV stars — but thank God they didn’t. After seeing Donald Trump belt out “Green Acres” with Megan Mullally, I can confidently say I will not see something so horrifying [...]

Nothing against Earth, Wind and Fire or The Black-Eyed Peas, but did we really need to open up the Emmys with a song — set to the tune of EWF’s “September” — that reminds us there was, um, a lot of TV on TV last year? If there’s one thing you would think you can [...]

With scant seconds to go to the festivities, it occurs to me you might want my own predictions for the Emmys. I don’t have any — frankly, nearly every year that I try, I lose my own in-house pool to my wife. I’m not embarrassed by that; though I watch TV for a living, I [...]