Tuned InUncategorized
You don’t know how adorable it can be for a 10-year-old girl to impersonate a Spanish Inquisitor until you’ve seen it in person. Last night, as the five surviving members of Monty Python reunited on stage at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York City, they were temporarily upstaged by Talia, a girl they invited onstage to perform her …
Tuned InNews Media
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wI6UONWCq7A]
For a few horrifying hours yesterday, TV news and its audience thought they might be witnessing the death of a child in real time. Instead, it turned out we were literally distracted by a shiny object. The silvery experimental balloon hurtling through the air over Colorado did not, it …
Tuned In
In this week’s print TIME magazine, I review the cartoon empire of Seth MacFarlane, who dominates Fox’s Animation Domination with three animated sitcoms on Sunday nights. (And in his spare time, besides appearing in FlashForward, is going to do a variety special for Fox and Microsoft.) Regular readers will not be surprised that I am …
Tuned In
As I write this, we don’t know if the story of the Mylar balloon that went sailing over Colorado, attracting wall-to-wall TV news coverage, was tragic or not. We don’t know if it was real or a hoax, if six-year-old Falcon Heene was ever in the balloon. But it is undoubtedly a strange story. And, it turns out, the Heene family has been in …
Because there was a heavier than usual influx last week of art stories that needed fast attention I postponed comment on the design for the new home of the much-fought-over Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, which was unveiled last week. So, taking a deep breath…
Tuned In
As Jamie Weinman at MacLean’s has noted, there seems to be a little bit of a critical backlash out there against 30 Rock, which returns tonight on NBC. Having seen the first two episodes of the season, I both get the pushback and don’t get it. On the one hand, they show off the show’s brilliance at topical commentary and throwaway jokes, …
Tuned InUncategorized
With last night’s episode, Modern Family cemented its claim as strongest new comedy of the fall. A few thoughts:
* I hadn’t really realized, before last night, that we hadn’t seen any meaty scenes with Claire and Mitchell interacting as brother and sister. With the arrival of Mom (Shelley Long) providing the excuse, this episode added …
Tuned InUncategorized
First a little programming note: I’m going to be at the Ziegfeld Theater tonight,where the five surviving members of Monty Python will be honored for their 40th anniversary, after a screening for the theatrical cut of the new Python documentary, Almost the Truth: The Lawyer’s Cut. (The full, six-hour version begins airing on IFC Sunday …
Tuned InUncategorized
Spoilers for last night’s Glee coming up after the jump:
After years of doing installation art, dead animals in formaldehyde and pictures painted entirely by his small army of studio assistants, work that made him one of the most famous artists in the world, Damien Hirst is showing paintings in London this week that he did all by himself. And the British critics are tearing him to pieces.
Tuned InRemembrance
Professional wrestler and sometime actor Captain Lou Albano died this morning at age 76. I never followed his career inside the ring, but like any kid who watched too much MTV in the ’80s, I was plenty familiar with his work as the father figure in Cyndi Lauper’s videos. Beyond those claims to fame, Albano’s ubiquity on MTV, and his …
Tuned InUncategorized
The emerging consensus in Tuned Inland is that Thursday is becoming a problem. A high-class problem, yes: too much good (or at least potentially good) TV. I don’t even watch Grey’s Anatomy, yet at this point, I find myself finishing my time-shifted Thursday-night programming somewhere around the following Monday—especially since Mrs. …
Tuned InUncategorized
It took me most of last season to really get into Sons of Anarchy, but this fall’s season 2 of the biker-gang drama has really found, as it were, a higher gear. So I apologize again that other work is keeping from doing a longer write-up again. (On a related note: I got a review screener for season 4 of Friday Night Lights and am …
