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As if you needed proof that the week before Labor Day is the slowest news week of the year, I have the cover story in TIME magazine. It’s about Jay Leno, his new show and how this big gamble and cost-saving measure represents, as the cover line says “the future of TV” (for better or worse). It’s also about the irony: NBC is making a …
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Watch me enter the exciting world of online video/radio/streaming-thingies this afternoon! I’ll be calling in to Mediaite’s Office Hours webcast around 4:35 p.m. ET; the whole show starts at 4 p.m. ET, and you can find details here. The other guest (separately) will be Contessa Brewer of MSNBC. I’ll be talking matters media and …
Tuned InUncategorized
My TiVo lives! The TiVo which replaced the one that died, that is. Which replaced the one that died eight months ago. Last December, I let you know in detail when replacing my defective TiVo box required 14 hours on the phone with TiVo and Time Warner NYC customer service to finally get the CableCard decoders properly installed. So, …
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Expanding further on the Poniewozik public-radio empire, I was a guest this weekend on NPR’s On the Media, talking about the cultural importance of Dungeons & Dragons and holding forth on my own junior-high-era dorkosity:
A correction, by the way. During the interview, Bob Garfield asked me to recall a character I played from my D&D …
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This press release came in over the transom from Fox Reality Channel: "From FremantleMedia, producers of American Idol, comes AMERICAN IDOL EXTRA — the first-ever series to reveal the backstage drama of what really happens on AMERICAN IDOL after the weekly vote-off show on FOX. "The original Fox Reality series, which is produced by
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With last night’s finale of Project Runway—which, don’t worry, I’m not going to spoilerizeify for you—plenty of us are going to want to fill the hole that the fashion show’s absence leaves in our Wednesday nights. Especially those of us who are Bravo executives. Heidi Klum’s Survivor-on-the-catwalk has given the cable channel ratings and
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The euphemism "character actor" is elegantly condescending. Every actor plays characters. Most often, the term simply means an actor who has managed to have a career despite certain physical defects or peculiarities. (It’s a blind-date phrase. "Is she cute?" "Um, she’s got a great, uh, character.") But for a few notable actors it means
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[Spoiler disclaimer: I watched Lost last night. If you didn't, there's the door.]
Last week I was a little embarrassed to bring up the theory that Lost is playing out as a metaphor for the war on terror. This week, I’m embarrassed I didn’t have the idea earlier.
Last night, Sayid (Naveen Andrews), a former torturer in Saddam’s army, …
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Whose side is Jack Bauer on? Last season of 24, a lot of pundits had decided: he was the Bush administration’s chief pop culture rationalizer of the war on terror. Several times in the season, Jack (Kiefer Sutherland) or his colleagues were called on to torture—giving injections, breaking fingers, improvising elecrocutions—to get key …
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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 deliver a
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Tuned In
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 deliver a
…
Tuned In
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
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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,
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