Tuned InNews Media
So it’s official: Eliot Spitzer, one of America’s top ten favorite former governors forced from office by sex scandal, will be co-hosting a nightly opinion roundtable show on CNN. (His co-host: conservative political columnist Kathleen Parker.) To sum up: expressing hugely unpopular opinions about Israel = media-career-ender. Getting …
Tuned InNews Media
The news since yesterday has been dominated by Rolling Stone’s bombshell story about Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who (along with aides) made disparaging remarks about Obama Administration officials (i.e., his civilian bosses). There’s something quaint—and I say this as a magazine writer—about the notion of a major Washington scandal, …
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Yesterday, a power outage knocked out the cameras just before a taping of Jimmy Kimmel Live. Faced with canceling the taping, Kimmel instead did what you or I have done when we’ve needed quick video of something—grabbed the nearest thing with a camera on it. In this case, his Apple …
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Judging TNT’s new cop drama Memphis Beat is less a critical question than a philosophical one. In brief, the series, starring Jason Lee, is mostly a standard-issue summertime basic cable cop procedural, somewhat distinguished by less frantic pacing, a touch more attention to character beats, and a smidgen of local color. So the …
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Test Pilot is a semiregular feature sharing my first impressions of the pilots for next fall’s shows. These aren’t reviews, since these pilots can be rewritten, recast and retooled before airing, and the shows that eventually get on the air can prove much better or worse. But, premature opinions are why God invented the Internet, so …
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Having gotten the formality of the third-season premiere out of the way, HBO officially picked up its biggest hit, True Blood, for a fourth season. It’s interesting to see where HBO has gone since the days—way back in 2008—of True Blood’s premiere. The writers’ strike had just ended, The Sopranos was gone, shows like Tell Me You …
In honor of Disney’s classic’s anniversary, TIME takes a look back at the top 10 saddest kids’ movies ever made.
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There were a lot of criticisms of American Idol last season. Was the biggest problem that the show was poorly cast? That it focused too much on the revolving-door drama at the judges’ table and Simon Cowell’s departure? That Ryan Seacrest began to steamroll over the show with …
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I could have added a link to my Treme review below, but this is good enough for its own post: Alan Sepinwall has a post-season postmortem interview with David Simon, in which the show’s co-creator talks about the first season, addresses some criticisms of the show, explains his thinking behind some of the storylines and talks a bit about …
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When I visited the set of Community last summer, creator Dan Harmon had recently gotten the unwelcome new that his show was going to be slotted against The CW’s Vampire Diaries. For some reason, this sent him into a riff about an idea for his new show a drama about Italian mobster vampires: “Madonn’, I’m a vampire! Gabbagool!”
Maybe …
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Spoilers for the first-season finale of Treme coming up:
Treme finished its first season with a finale that very much mirrored its pilot: sprawling, wide-ranging, deliberately paced, and—at about 83 minutes—expansive. It recalled our first encounter with these characters in ways both stylistic (another montage to the sound of a …
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Spoilers for Friday Night Lights coming up:
Only one of the problems Coach Taylor signed on for when coming over to coach East Dillon was rebuilding a broken-down sports program from scratch. Another was dealing with a body of players, many of whom have much rougher home lives and more deep-seated problems than he encountered with the …
There’s the hero and then there’s the less heralded but equally awesome friend. TIME takes a look at some of cinema’s best wingmen.
