Tuned InRemembrance
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is8jEXY1WjI]
Barbara Billingsley, best known as Cleaver family matriarch June in Leave It to Beaver, has died at age 94. Through June Cleaver, Billngsley created one of that handful of TV characters who we’ve come to know not just as people but as symbols of the ideas and social threads of an …
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It’s been heavily foreshadowed for a while to anyone watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, but sure enough, on last night’s TDS we learned that Stephen Colbert didn’t get a permit (or “didn’t get a permit”) for his March to Keep Fear Alive counterpoint to Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity. So last night, overseen by the …
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I’ve been writing a lot in this space lately about the disappointing fall broadcast lineup, and how the networks have all but given up launching challenging shows (particularly dramas), turning that job over to cable. (It’s worth noting, by the way, that however badly Lone Star flamed out, even the most successful of the network’s …
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Spoilers for 30 Rock’s live episode coming up. I am typing this post LIVE, with no edits or backspacing to correct typos! You can’t prove that I didn’t!
30 Rock may be about a lot of things—work, politics, gender and race, snack foods—but at its most enjoyable it’s a TV show having fun with the idea of being a TV show. So “Live …
Tuned InNews Media
Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly was a guest on The View today, and brought up the subject of, as he referred to it, “the mosque down here on 9/11.” As you might have guessed, he, Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar had a reasonable and good-natured discussion about sensitivity and civil liberties an angry, bleeped-out shouting match that resulted in …
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There’s often less to say about a decently successful episode of a sitcom than a bad one, which is about where I stand on Modern Family’s “Strangers on a Treadmill.” Three of the four storylines hit (the miss being Jay’s quinceanara foul-up, which was pretty much one underdeveloped joke), and maybe the most noteworthy accomplishment of …
Tuned InTV Ratings
It’s a common and understandable myth that TV shows stay on the air by getting as many viewers as possible. They don’t. In commercial television, shows stay on the air by making money, something that relates to, but does not correlate directly to, getting as many viewers as possible. If you’re a network that airs commercials, you …
I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to notice the rather startling shift in tone and intensity of last night’s Caprica. All season long, the show has been trying to find a way to pull in bigger Battlestar Galactica-like ratings, even as some sci-fi pundits have mused that the show isn’t electric enough for their tastes. Now, full …
Tuned InNews Media
I’m about to say something that may seem cynical, so first: Seeing the Chilean miners (still being evacuated as I type this) emerge from the rescue pod into the light has been moving, inspiring and a reminder of the power of live television news to deliver a story of raw human triumph.
OK, now the little-bit-cynical part: the news story …
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Spoilers for last night’s Glee following:
One criticism I’ve heard from non-fans of Glee is that the show is essentially American Idol with a script. And I could see how an episode with the title and theme “Duets” could reinforce this view. On its face, the episode’s structure was little more than an Idol challenge, “OK, …
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Not a lot to say about last night’s How I Met Your Mother, which again offered relatively little on the promised larger-storylines-development for this season. Still, I enjoy the show’s little love letters to New York City like “Subway Wars”; the fact that they so blatantly look like they’re shot on a set in California only adds to …
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIJORBRpOPM]
It is October 2010, and the Democratic governor of West Virginia, running for Senate, is demonstrating his bona fides to the citizens of his state with a campaign commercial in which he shoots a Senate bill.
And this guy thinks he had it …
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The zombie girls sitting next to me were pissed off. In pallid makeup with artful angry gashes on their cheeks, they like the rest of us had stood in line for an hour or more to get into the IGN Theater at the Javits Center to see 6 1/2 minutes of AMC’s The Walking Dead, and they could barely see the big screens. “This is …
