Image: Dan Harmon attends the 2012 PaleyFest presentation of "Community" at Saban Theatre on March 3, 2012 in Beverly Hills, California.

Community Without Dan Harmon? Suits Axe Auteur, and Fans Lose

Harmon was one of a small but growing number of TV creators who are inseparable from their shows. He was also, admittedly, a royal headache of an employee. But by making the show without him, the studio and NBC may be punishing the audience most.

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Upfronts Watch: Fox Tinkers, NBC Laughs Through Its Tears

Nino Munoz/NBC

I was out of town yesterday as broadcast-network upfront season began, with NBC and Fox announcing their new fall schedules for advertisers. I’ll be attending and/or following the remaining announcements this week, and I’ll have some more thoughts on the new NBC and Fox shows later, when I’ve seen pilots, but here’s the quick-and-dirty on [...]

Howard Stern Joins List of Parents Television Council Foes…Again

Mark Seliger / NBC

The Parents Television Council has called on advertisers to jump ship from NBC’s America’s Got Talent after the shock jock signed on as a judge

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NBC Gets a Jump on Upfronts with J.J. Abrams, Lots of Comedy

You may have heard that the NBC network has had a touch of trouble in the ratings lately. A slew of its new shows failed this season; Smash and Grimm will be back but have been, at best, far less than a smash and just better than grim; and its once must-see Thursday now does [...]

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Smash Gets an Encore. Its Creator Doesn’t. Can the Show Change Its Tune?

Will Hart/NBC

In a day of mixed messages, the musical gets a second season and creator/showrunner Theresa Rebeck gets the hook. But did she really let the show’s “creative direction” go awry, or was that direction clear from the opening curtain?

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Human Beings Rejoice! Community Returns to NBC March 15

NBC

When NBC pulled Community from its schedule in December, saying it would bring the show back in midseason, fans began to spin all sorts of dark predictions as to what would happen to the show. Well, if you bet on “NBC will bring it back in midseason, just like it said,” get ready to collect: [...]

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TV Dinners: NBC Orders Hannibal Lecter Series

Everett

During the writers’ strike a few seasons ago, CBS experimented with rerunning Showtime’s Dexter in primetime. The episodes were edited for broadcast, and while they raised unsurprising protests over a major network airing a show whose protagonist is a serial killer, the problem in the end was that a dark, pay-cable drama is a better [...]

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The Morning After: NBC, Finally Something to Sing About?

Lewis Jacobs/NBC

After a post-Super Bowl promo, NBC got a huge number of new fans to tune in for the second season of The Voice. To my surprise, I’m one of them.

The Best and Worst Super Bowl Commercials of 2012

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Animals, beer, women in bikinis—all the things that one would expect from Super Bowl commercials were present. TIME grades the Super Bowl XLVI ads

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In Previews: NBC Is Going to Make Damn Sure You Sample Smash

NBC

NBC is aggressively sneak-peeking the pilot of the musical that its midseason hopes are riding on. If you’ve seen it online, give us your opening-night thoughts.

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NBC Announces: America’s Got Howard Stern

Your chances of winning the next edition of America’s Got Talent for butt bongo just got better.

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Intermediate Suspended Animation: NBC’s Midseason Slate Puts Community on Hold

Lewis Jacobs/NBC

NBC says the inventive comedy will be coming back before long. And TV, after all, is a business. But this is still the opposite of Batman.

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Rock Center with Brian Williams: When Bad Titles Happen to Good Anchors

This morning, NBC announced the title for its long-awaited primetime newsmagazine: Rock Center with Brian Williams, which will debut later this season, marks a big entry into the nighttime news business, with the network throwing its primary anchor and some of its greatest resources into a—oh, stop. I can’t do this. Because all I can [...]

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The Sing-Off Names New, Super-Sized Cast

Because Tuned In aims to be your one-stop source of information on The Most Important Show on Television, The Sing-Off, I wanted to get you the list of the 16 competing groups for the new, longer version of the a cappella competition that will air starting in September. The main distinguishing feature of the list [...]

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Turns Out Gloria Steinem Not a Fan of The Playboy Club

One of the more comical incidents of the recent TCA television critics’ press tour was the attempt by the makers of The Playboy Club to defend its romanticization of its eponymous Bunny hutch as “empowering” to women. A lot of the critics assembled laughed it off. But you know what would really help to bolster [...]

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NBC Day at Press Tour: Up All Afternoon

I arrived at the Beverly Hilton for TCA press tour in the middle of the afternoon, so I missed the first half of NBC’s day of presentations, in which we learned that The Playboy Club is actually about the empowerment of women and that new programming chief Robert Greenblatt would like to bring a little [...]

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NBC Sets Its Dates for Fall

NBC became the last of the major broadcast networks to announce its fall premiere dates yesterday, and it like its peers (despite NBC’s ratings, I’ll still use the term “peers”) is debuting most of its new shows in the traditional late-September premiere week. Among the shows not on this schedule is 30 Rock, which, as [...]

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NBC Keeps Olympics, Will Air Them (Sort of?) Live

NBC, which has had every Olympics the last two decades save 1994, has kept the games through 2020, despite competition from Fox and ESPN. Unlike its rival bidders, NBC had not promised to air the games live (and has in past years insisted on saving events for primetime on tape-delay). But after winning the bid [...]

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Upfronts 2011: NBC Hopes for Turnaround, Trump Not Running for President (UPDATED with Video)

The headline first: At NBC’s upfront schdule presentation to advertisers today in New York, Donald Trump announced that he is not running for President. (As I told you in February.) The announcement, which may have stunned political reporters who forgot that Trump did the same thing in 1988 and 2000, was brief: “as much as [...]

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Upfronts 2011: A Dozen for NBC

NBC announced its 2011–12 schedule today, the first of the big networks to show its hand for Upfronts Week. (Click here for clips of all the upcoming shows.) I’ll have some thoughts on the previews we see after the upfronts presentation tomorrow, but here are some highlights, followed by the schedule: * NBC launches six [...]