SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, watch last night’s Mad Men, and be sure to keep track of whether they aired all the commercials.
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NBC Takes Southland's Badge. What's Next?
Sometimes networks cancel low-rated shows after their first season, and sometimes they cancel low-rated shows in their second seasons. NBC, after adding The Jay Leno Show this fall, shows itself willing to continually innovate with new and creative ways to get rid of dramas: it renewed cop show Southland at the end of last season, then …
Kandinsky, O’Keeffe and the Rise of Abstraction
Two big new shows in New York this fall touch on the moment when abstract art was a very new idea. “Kandinsky”, at the Guggenheim, traces the full career of the man who was one of the pioneers of the form. And over at the Whitney, “Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction” pushes aside all those cattle skulls (or most of them) to focus on the …
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The Morning After: Moving Forward?
As I mentioned last week, I haven’t given up on FlashForward, not quite yet, but it is distinctly in my I’ll-get-to-it-when-I-get-to-it category. I know it’s the kind of show that demands next-morning analysis, though—isn’t it?—so feel free to DIY it, and I’ll either update or sound off in the comments if I have something to add eventually.
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Fox News Awards Nobel for Pumpkin Throwing
After getting to my desk and seeing word that Barack Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, I turned on cable news to see the reaction. In particular, Fox News, the #1 cable news network and recent White House bete noire, whose reaction and coverage you might think would be interesting.
It was, mainly because—in the 9:00 ET …
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Office Watch: Getting a Little Misty
Spoilers for last night’s episode of The Office coming up after the jump:
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Dead Tree Alert: Dave in the Hot Seat
Because I am a TV critic and it is the law, my column in this week’s TIME is about David Letterman, where the scandal may go from here and how Dave is unlike (and like) the politicians he jokes about. Thus it re-encapsulates some of the things I’ve been writing about Letterman here this week, as well as during his June dust-up with …
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TV Tonight: Ring My Bell
Fringe is turning out to be even more like The X-Files than I suspected when it started—structurally, anyway, in that it’s breaking down between monster-of-the-week episodes, which I might enjoy but don’t feel compelled to watch right away, and mythology episodes, which focus on the overarching parallel-universe storyline and …
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South Park Watch: Shut Up, Billy Mays!
[Update: I deleted the embedded video here because it was causing some browsers to crash, and playing unprompted on my own browser, which annoys the crap out of me. But you can see it, other clips—and the full episode—at the South Park Studios website. Apologies.]
While we’re on the subject of product placement this morning, I’m …
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Reality Redemption for Michael Vick?
This is really turning out to be the week of scandal comebacks. Michael Richards returned to TV on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Don Imus returned to TV on Fox Business. David Letterman—well, that one’s still in progress. And now, reports the L.A. Times, Michael Vick is getting his own reality show. The Michael Vick Project (tentative title) …
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The Morning After: Buy It In Bulk
I highly recommend everyone go read Choire Sicha’s outstanding op-ed in the New York Times this morning about product placement in America, which among other notes that the film version of The Road even managed to work a plug for VitaminWater into a movie about the Apocalypse. (The Coca-Cola scene he mentions, by the way, was actually …
Irving Penn: 1917-2009
The great American photographer Irving Penn has died. Penn, who was 92, was one of the towering figures of American photography, a master of fashion photography, portraiture and lusciously detailed still life. Along with the late Richard Avedon he was the king of a certain kind of supremely lustrous American magazine photography in …
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TV Tonight: Secret Girlfriend: Who Do You Think You Are?
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Comedy Central, like any good targeted network with a young male audience, is constantly asking itself, What do guys like? Guys like comedy. Guys like the Internet. And guys like point-of-view porn and Girls Gone Wild videos. Ahem, so I’m told.
The channel has combined …