We’re only a couple weeks away from the July 25 return of Mad Men, so what better time to get back into the rhythm of debating the actions, motivations and true lies of Don Draper. TIME is just about to interview Jon Hamm about the show’s new season. Is there anything you want to know? Questions you’re dying to have answered. Just click here.
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TV Weekend: Hung and Hangin' on HBO
This Sunday, HBO returns the second season of Hung and the seventh of Entourage, two series that I continue to follow despite their considerable challenges, but for very different reasons. With Hung, the story of a Detroit-area male prostitute (Thomas Jane) and his pimp (Jane Adams), I feel that there’s a really good dark comedy about …
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TV Tonight: Futurama
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After seven years in cryogenic suspended animation—well, with a few wake-up breaks for TV movies—Futurama comes back to life tonight as a weekly animated series on Comedy Central with a one-hour, two-episode premiere. And appropriately enough, the comedy about the future crew …
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The Morning After: Still Hot for Cleveland?
Ignoring the mandate of Universal Approbation for Betty White Projects in the year 2010, I gave Hot in Cleveland a mostly negative review last week, finding the show stale and clichéd despite a strong performance by White and not-terrible ones by her sitcom-alumnae costars. America responded by tuning in five million strong to the …
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See Bristol Palin's Acting Debut
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The Palin Family’s domination of American television …
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Meanwhile, on the Mahut-Isner Channel…
The endless Wimbledon match has resumed at 2 sets and 59 games all on ESPN3 and ESPN U. Clear your calendar for the day.
[Update: And finally, Isner has won the match, taking the final set 70 to 68. Thus ruining Daily Show writer Tim Carvell’s theory that one of the players would eventually have to find a “Candidate” to replace him.]
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YouTube vs. Viacom: Everybody Wins?
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[Note: The above video is definitely not intended for children.]
A federal judge yesterday ruled in favor of Google and YouTube yesterday in Viacom’s lawsuit, saying that the site was not liable for copyright infringement because its users had uploaded copyrighted video to the site. …
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The Winner… ESPN!
OK, I guess I can see why some of you find this whole sports-on-TV thing so exciting. It was quite a day for sports, in particular sports on ESPN, starting with this morning’s US vs. Algeria World Cup match, which ended (spoiler alert!) in a breathtaking 1-0 American victory on a Landon Donovan goal in what I am told is called stoppage …
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Who Do You Have to Sleep With to Get a CNN Show? Ask Eliot Spitzer!
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 …
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Rolling Stone's Coup and The Power, and Limits, of Magazines
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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Jimmy Kimmel Live, on His Macbook
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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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TV Tonight: Memphis Beat
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: Lonestar
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 …