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Rosie O’Donnell, it appears, is going to make an effort to become the next Oprah, for the first time since the last time she tried to become the next Oprah. Several reports say that she’s preparing a new syndicated talk show, to try to fill the void left by Oprah as she leaves network TV to start her own cable channel.
I don’t see it …
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Last night, Showtime returned United States of Tara, with Tara having (seemingly) gotten her alters under control over the season break, and Nurse Jackie, in which Edie Falco’s character had tamed her demons—not so much. A few thoughts about the latter premiere after the jump:
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There comes a point in any show about friendship where you have to ask: why are these people friends? Not how did they come to meet, but just why have they decided to bond together as a social unit?
Don’t get me wrong, I love How I Met Your Mother, but you could see how this insular set of five characters, seen in the right light, …
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Showtime was generous enough to send eight and six episodes, respectively, of Nurse Jackie and United States of Tara. My midseason TV-writing schedule, however, has not been quite so generous, so I have yet to get through both megasets of screeners. I’m going to spin it, however, and say that this is actually better for blog …
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There are plenty of other places on this website and elsewhere where you can read about the implications of health care reform’s passage, politically and medically. But what about the implications for the media?
On this, I’m going to have to agree 100% with former Bush speechwriter David Frum: this “is a huge win for the conservative …
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Spoilers for the season three premiere of Breaking Bad coming up after the jump:
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You could have spent yesterday night glued to cable news or C-SPAN, watching a contentious debate over the politics of health care in America. Or you could have put on ABC and watched the first episode of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution. Which, in its own way, is also a contentious debate over the politics—or at least the culture—of …
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I liked Breaking Bad from the get-go; it had one of the best drama pilots I’ve ever seen, and I put it on my list of the 10 best shows of 2008 its first season. But season one did have its problems, chief among them a common affliction of cable dramas: a sense of frenzy and hurry, as if the show felt we’d lose interest if it didn’t …
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ABC’s FlashForward returned/relaunched last night, hoping to address some of the complaints that dogged the first half of the season. I thought the two-hour return episode was an improvement in a story sense, giving us some serious movement on the backstory of who and what caused the blackouts. …
Tuned In
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In 2007, Discovery aired the documentary series Planet Earth, which wowed critics, drew huge ratings and showed a nation of consumers what those new big-screen TVs were really for. An expansive nature documentary full of luscious, hard-to-get HD visuals, it combined a vaguely …
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Tuned InRemembrance
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Fess Parker, star of numerous Disney movies (Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier)—and TV’s Daniel Boone—has died at age 85. I’m a generation too young to have many firsthand memories of him (for some reason, I was never a fan of the old Disney movies as a kid), so most of my …
Tuned InNews Media
Going outside its current stable of reporters and anchors, ABC is hiring longtime CNN international reporter Christiane Amanpour to host the Sunday-morning This Week interview show vacated by George Stephanopoulos. TV Newser has the details; among them, that she’ll start in August, until which White House correspondent Jake Tapper (who’s …
