Tuned In
This week’s column in the print TIME looks at Twitter as a literary art form. No, seriously. With the emergence of satirical accounts like @BPGlobalPR, which has mercilessly flogged BP over the Gulf oil spill, the fake-Twitter account has come into its own as Twitter’s indigenous genre of fiction. What is Twitter lit good for? What are …
Tuned InRemembrance
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5Zjt4WwM3A]
Actress Rue McClanahan died this morning, reportedly of a stroke, at age 76. McClanahan had a wide and varied career on stage, in film and on television, but she’s most widely remembered for playing the vivacious and bodaciously lusty senior Blanche Devereaux in the sitcom The Golden …
Tuned InNews Media
The initial bids came in yesterday in the first round of the Washington Post company’s sale of Newsweek. I’ve held off saying much of anything about the magazine’s sale, because (1) I don’t want it to seem like Schadenfreude (as a working-today-but-tomorrow-who-knows journalist, I feel none) and (2) the last matter on which anyone is …
Tuned InUncategorized
Halfway into the opening monologue of his stage show at Radio City Music Hall last night, Conan O’Brien stopped to address a woman in the front row, getting to her seat late with a drink from the bar. “That drink better have been worth it,” he mock-scolded, then asked her for a sip. “You can’t just walk into my show late, holding a …
Tuned InUncategorized
Quick spoilers for last night’s Justified coming up after the jump:
A big ongoing issue in TV today is serial vs. episodic drama: that is, dramas that tell stories that unfold over an entire season or season as opposed to ones that tell stories wrapped up in a single episode. An extreme example of the former would be The Wire or Six …
Tuned InUncategorized
It’s after Memorial Day weekend, and that means it’s time for summer reality programming on the broadcast networks. Last night, NBC debuted Losing It with Jillian, a truly repellent spinoff of The Biggest Loser that alternated between weight-loss coach Jillian Michaels verbally abusing an overweight family and mawkish moments of …
Tuned InUncategorized
Spoilers for last night’s Glee coming up:
Last night, we learned that New Directions were in a funk because they had been intimidated by Vocal Adrenaline. And Rachel was in a funk over her breakup. And Quinn was in a funk over her pregnancy. And Will was in a funk over the glee club’s prospects. And he put Sue into a funk over her …
Tuned InUncategorized
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mq5lIwkupJU]
Over at Maclean’s, Jaime Weinman (a great, vastly knowledgeable critic you should be reading regularly) has an insightful post wrestling with the question of why Parks and Recreation has a vastly improved second season, but it didn’t result in improved ratings. He posits that the …
Tuned InAdvertising
When I wrote my print TIME feature on the end of Lost, one section I had to drop for space had to do with how much money ABC was asking for ads in the finale—reportedly $900,000 a pop—even though Lost was not close to the highest-rated program on TV. That fact points to something that has potential to shape the business, and thus …
Tuned InUncategorized
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 …
Tuned InUncategorized
Over the weekend, Survivor officially turned ten years old, having given us a decade of assorted and sundry competition reality shows (as well as the inspiration for Lost). Yesterday, on Survivor’s tenth birthday, the website Reality Blurred delivered quite a present: a leaked copy of the nine-page rule book given contestants on the …
Tuned InTuned In
Brief spoilers for last night’s Breaking Bad coming up after the jump:
Tuned InRemembrance
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qUOrIJqCto]
Gary Coleman, best-known for his performance as a child actor as Arnold Jackson in Diff’rent Strokes, died today of a brain hemorrhage. He was 42.
Coleman will be remembered by people who grew up with his catchphrase (“Whatchoo talkin’ ’bout, Willis?”) and his portrayal of a spunky …
