Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | February 17, 2011

The Morning After: Survivor Reviver

By James Poniewozik

I promise to give up the meta-discussion of TV criticism after this week—I think—but there was one important issue that Josh Levin failed to address when critiquing the pitfalls of weekly TV-episode reviewing in Slate: It hurts your damn fingers. That is particularly the case on such a TV-heavy night as last night: we had [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | February 16, 2011

The Morning After: The Good Wife's Status Update

By James Poniewozik

Last night, The Good Wife aired its much publicized episode based on Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook and the controversies around the accuracy of The Social Network. (Emphasis on based on! I noted how conspicuously Diane referred to the plaintiff in the defamation suit as “a Mark Zuckerberg in the making,” so as to make crystal-clear that [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | February 15, 2011

The Morning After: Not So Mad About You

By James Poniewozik

When networks program new shows, they often take into consideration “flow”—how well viewers will transition from one show into the new, hopefully compatible show. But there’s flow, and then there’s imitation so distractingly total that, in the case of CBS’s new Mad Love, the show might as well be called How I Met the Timeslot [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | February 14, 2011

The Morning After: Pluck You

By James Poniewozik

Cee Lo Green could be a great performer if he would just stop taking himself so damn seriously, couldn’t he? Cee Lo, pictured here, performed with his Glee stand-in, Gwyneth Paltrow, in a Grammy Awards that featured several defining themes: * Songs that have been featured in the past season of Glee * Rihanna duetting [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | February 11, 2011

The Morning After: Crazy Little Thing Called Love

By James Poniewozik

I watched the opening arc of this season of Parks and Recreation several weeks ago, so my memory is a bit shaky, but “Ron and Tammy II” was for my taste a little broader and wackier than P&R at its absolute best. (Whereas Ben’s subplot as “Calzone Boy” was an excellent example of how well [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | February 10, 2011

The Morning After: Mostly Cloudy

By James Poniewozik

I try not to bore you with the details of my job as TV critic—but hey, it’s that or bore you with my TV criticism, right? I did not review last night’s debut of Mr. Sunshine in advance. The reason was not its quality, or my laziness, or lack of interest, but the awfulness of [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Advertising | February 7, 2011

The Morning After: Super Bowl Ads, the Light and the Dark Side

By James Poniewozik

Thanks for my kindly masters, this was the first year in several that I did not work through the Super Bowl and into overtime reviewing every single ad for time.com—I divvied up the game with colleagues Steven James Snyder, Feifei Sun and Josh Sanburn. I had the second quarter, which included personal fave from Volkswagen [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | February 4, 2011

The Morning After: Burying Your Grudges

By James Poniewozik

As I noted earlier this morning, I wrote my farewell column for Friday Night Lights on the show’s theme of community and interdependence: the way it shows how sustaining (and sometimes infuriating) a small town’s network of relationships and reliance can be. If I had two or three times the space, I might have written [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | February 3, 2011

The Morning After: Ill Wind Blows Weather Channel Good

By James Poniewozik

And here I thought it was only major national news when we got snow here in New York City! It may have taken a massive, thousand-plus-mile blizzard to do it, but the Midwest has wrestled back the crown of winter primacy from the East Coast, and the result—as a massive snowstorm buried Chicago and other [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+News Media | February 1, 2011

The Morning After: Window on the World

By James Poniewozik

I’m still largely out of commission today, but the news never takes a day off. So I thought I’d throw this post open for your thoughts on the TV news coverage of the astonishing events in Egypt—in particular, on Al Jazeera English, which most of us (me included) can only see streaming online. While the [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | January 31, 2011

The Morning After: Fringe Self-Watch, and a Programming Note

By James Poniewozik

Some personal business is going to keep blogging here light-to-nonexistent for the next day or two. In the meantime, I’ll turn this post over for your discussion of Fringe, which came back with a roaring return a week ago, but whose Friday episode I have yet to catch up on at this writing. Or, feel [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | January 28, 2011

The Morning After: Stop… Pooping!

By James Poniewozik

So here’s the deal: Now that Parks and Recreation is back and Archer has returned, on Thursday night we have several sitcoms that are capable of delivering a killer episode. Last season I tried for a while doing a picture gallery of Thursday comedies with paragraph reviews, but I felt I managed to hit everything [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | January 27, 2011

The Morning After: Sweet Emotion?

By James Poniewozik

While I don’t believe I’ve ever missed a performance round of American Idol, I don’t watch most audition episodes. Because I’m going to die someday and I’ll have to account for how I spent my time on Earth. But I caught the a chunk of last night’s tryouts in Milwaukee, including perhaps the show’s most [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | January 26, 2011

The Morning After: Lights On?

By James Poniewozik

Lights Out, FX’s strong new boxing drama that I gave a positive review, has been on the ropes in the ratings,* and I have no time today to review last night’s episode at length. I am part of the problem. But I want to see if Tuned Inlanders have stuck with the series up to [...]

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Tuned In+Uncategorized | January 19, 2011

The Morning After: Howard Stern, Leno and (His) Manhood

By James Poniewozik

CNN’s new primetime show Piers Morgan Tonight immediately improved on Larry King Live’s ratings its first night out, getting over two million viewers for its inaugural interview with Oprah Winfrey. Time will tell how much of that is due to Morgan and how much to the guest; as last night’s guest, Howard Stern, said: “What’s [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | January 12, 2011

The Morning After: Lights On

By James Poniewozik

Time and interest permitting I may do a regular (or semiregular) Lights Out Watch here as the season goes on. Having some catching up to do, however, and having written about 1500 words on the show in my review this week, I’ll leave further breaking down of the pilot to you. I will say that [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | January 10, 2011

The Morning After: Walk of Shame

By James Poniewozik

As I wrote in my roundup Friday, it was a big weekend for midseason TV debuts, and it was all I could do to keep up. If any Tuned Inlanders caught Bob’s Burgers (for which I’m optimistic, with reservations), Episodes (mixed, but improves as it goes on), Downton Abbey (looks great but have yet to [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | January 5, 2011

The Morning After: Going Through the Motions

By James Poniewozik

It’s nothing new in TV to encounter a reality show that is nothing new. Still, Paula Abdul’s Live to Dance, for CBS, was something of a milestone in the field of derivative reality TV: I’m not sure that I was able to identify a single original idea in it. There was the dance competition, of [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | December 21, 2010

The Morning After: Perfect Pitch, Im-Perfect Couples

By James Poniewozik

Quick spoilers for The Sing-Off—and brief thoughts on the preview of NBC’s Perfect Couples—coming up:

Tuned In
Tuned In+News Media | December 17, 2010

Never Forget: Jon Stewart Keeps Responding to First Responders

By James Poniewozik

9/11 was a tragedy that happened to the entire nation, and in its larger ramifications, to the world. But New Yorkers also felt it, and still feel it, on a personal level: not just the fear, the terrible sights and the awful memories (the rest of America watched 9/11; we smelled it), but also the [...]