Tuned InUncategorized
Saturday is my last day at TCA TV critics’ press tour in LA (my colleagues will have to soldier on without me for ABC’s final presentation), and the network of the day was FX, which updated us as to what’s going on in the worlds of tortured male antiheroes and raunchy comedy. Some of the highlights:
* In the last year, FX was the …
Tuned InUncategorized
It was a packed day of sessions for Fox shows Friday at the TCA TV critics’ tour, including presentations for the dinosaur drama Terra Nova and reality-TV megafauna The X Factor. Here’s a sundry round of tidbits from the rest:
* When Fox held its upfronts presentation this spring, it had some programming news for the 2013 season: Seth …
Tuned InUncategorized
Friday afternoon, Fox held a panel for the new sci-fi series Terra Nova at the TCA TV critics’ convention. Unfortunately, they only had about half the session ready, and the CGI rendering still wasn’t done for most of the panelists.
I’m kidding! Friday afternoon, Fox held a panel for Terra Nova, about a family who time-travel to the …
Tuned InUncategorized
It has been too long since I’ve seen Simon Cowell be mean to people on a TV screen. But here he was at the TCA TV critics’ press tour session for The X Factor, appearing via satellite from what looked like a fancy hotel lounge in a geographically nondescript location. His first line, after materializing, supervillain-like, on the giant …
Tuned InUncategorized
This is what the TV obsession with demographics hath wrought: at TCA press tour session for the new thriller Ringer, Sarah Michelle Gellar, a 34-year-old woman, was fielding questions that implied she might be too old to be starring in a show on the CW network.
The meme began when one reporter at the panel began a question by …
Tuned InUncategorized
The TCA TV critics’ press tour tends to exist in a bubble separate from the breaking news of the world, but it ended up producing some news in the British phone-hacking scandal by way of a satellite appearance by Paul McCartney, the subject of an Albert Maysles documentary on Showtime about his post-9/11 Concert for New York.
McCartney …
Tuned InUncategorized
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqddY2sOk6U]
The 9/11 attacks happened almost ten years ago. Since then, we’ve lived through whole cycles of war and cultural change; Osama bin Laden is dead and Jack Bauer is off the air. This fall, one of 24’s producers is returning on Showtime with a terrorism thriller, Homeland, that’s very …
Tuned InUncategorized
America, meet Walden Schmidt. At the introductory CBS session of the TCA TV critics’ press tour, CBS programming head Nina Tassler had some news about Ashton Kutcher’s new character, who will take over for Charlie Sheen on Two and a Half Men this fall. Tassler described Schmidt, who will be introduced in a two-part season opener, as “an …
Tuned InNews Media
Keith Olbermann, former MSNBC star / bete noire, did not come up explicitly in the questioning at the MSNBC panel today at the TCA press tour. But his mutually negotiated departure earlier this year was a subtext of many of the questions addressed to news chief Phil Griffin and hosts Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell and Chris …
Tuned InUncategorized
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 bit of the spirit of his old …
Tuned InTuned In
I’m en route to the TCA press tour in Los Angeles, where I’ll be operating the Tuned In west coast bureau through Saturday. Much of today will be spent in transit, but I’ll be blogging from there the rest of the week–possibly a lot some days and little other days, depending how much time I spend in sessions or writing and how much time …
Tuned InUncategorized
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 hit zombie drama The …
Tuned InUncategorized
The TCA TV critics’ press tour continued yesterday with the first full day of panels, from various cable channels. What did we learn?
* That America, God help it, is going to be learning history from Survivor’s “Boston Rob” Mariano. Or at least “history,” as brought to you by the History channel, which means Around the World in 80 Ways, …
