Before I went to the HBO panel on new series John from Cincinnati, I didn’t know much about it. Having seen a reel of clips, and having heard creator David Milch (NYPD Blue, Deadwood) hold forth on it for a half-hour, I know even less.

As best as I can summarize: It’s about several generations of a surfing dynasty in Southern

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Last summer at the TV critics’ tour, there was a minor brouhaha when a reporter charged that many of the TV journalists left a conference room before the presentation by Roger Ailes of Fox News–the implication being that liberal TV critics were staging a walkout against the conservative Ailes.

Conservatives who were offended at the

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Today is HBO day at the cable press tour. It would be impolite to say so, since today also featured presentations by AMC, GSN, Sundance and sundry other abbreviations and nouns. But charmed as we were to see the world’s greatest cat at the GSN luncheon–to promote the network’s airing of the Cat-Minster cat competition, we met last

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Television is the most influential and widely enjoyed entertainment medium in the world. Except, apparently, among the people who make and work in television. If you cover TV for any length of time, you learn that people in the TV biz watch, or at least say they watch, incredibly little TV. Especially their direct competition.

At the

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I would have posted this earlier, but the dirty little secret is that even some of us who work at TIME have a hard time remembering it now comes out on Fridays. (Run to the newsstands, people! Run like the wind!) In the print issue, my Culture Complex column looks at the new season of 24, in the light of the charges–which I’ve disputed

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There’s nothing a man likes better than sitting down in an easy chair with a cold brewski and spending a night with the Lifetime network. That, at least, was the message, slightly exaggerated, from that channel’s presentation at the TCA tour this afternoon. Producer Mark Gordon, fielding a question from my colleague Aaron Barnhart,

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ESPN’s presentations–the funny promotional ads, the energy, the explosive graphics–are almost enough to make me wish I actually cared about sports. Even the opening panel in ESPN’s morning, about NASCAR–which I should have identified with having survived the slog up the 110 to Pasadena list night–didn’t quite do the trick for me,

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PASADENA — Oooh! I love bylines! Makes me feel all reporter-y!

People who say that being a TV critic involves nothing more than sitting on your can and pretending to care about TV shows don’t know what they’re talking about. Sometimes it involves sitting on your can and pretending to care about the people in TV shows. This week is the

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I’m traveling today to California on vitally important TV-critic business. That means I’ve been spending time on research, such as studying up on the new Transportation Security Administration rules to see if they allow me to bring an In-N-Out burger on a plane as a carry-on for the return trip. Don’t you judge me.

So I haven’t taken …

The Apple announcement of its iPhone came today, and was characteristically heralded by TV news with the fanfare reserved for terror alerts and cellphone video of dead dictators or live celebrities. (I’ll leave it to my pal Lev Grossman to explain the details, but apparently you can speak to people on it, even if they are not physically

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Last night on How I Met Your Mother, the five main characters reminisced about how they each lost their virginity. The capper was a fake reminiscence by Barney (Neal Patrick Harris) that lifted the details from the movie Dirty Dancing, which the show cleverly depicted by replaying the "Love Is Strange" scene from the movie, with Harris’

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