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Spoilers for last night’s How I Met Your Mother coming up:
The character of Barney is a gift an a challenge for How I Met Your Mother. On the one hand, he’s hilarious, Neil Patrick Harris plays him brilliantly and he has largely put the show on the larger pop-cultural map. On the other hand, he’s sometimes a tough fit in a show …
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Because there’s already a pileup of TV on Sunday nights, because there’s only so much time in the day and because there are only so many fingers on my hands, I’m not doing a regular Dexter Watch this season. (To be fair, I haven’t done a regular Dexter Watch any other season either; while I’d admire and try to keep up with the show I’m …
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SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, pop in your earplugs, put on an old Beatles movie—maybe you should invite your dad and your girlfriend!—then catch last night’s episode of Mad Men.
It is not a revelation to say …
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Spoilers for last night’s episode of Boardwalk Empire coming up:
The impressive thing, and in a way the problem, of the pilot of Boardwalk Empire was that it was so movie-like. (An inevitable impression since it had Martin …
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Spoilers for last night’s Rubicon coming up:
It’s a cliché of storytelling that you can make a story more frightening by showing less what everyone is afraid of: the monster, the killer, the enemy, what have you. But it’s only started to dawn on me what a job Rubicon does of this, especially regarding its terrorist-hunt storylines. …
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To the great Sunday-night pileup that AMC and HBO have wrought, this weekend we add the return of Bored to Death.* There are a lot of things to love about the story of writer-turned-private-dick Jonathan Ames (Jonathan Schwartzman): the shaggy-dog hipster-noir stories, the highbrow-lit-meets-lowbrow-slapstick plots, the loving use of …
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The conversion of Washington, D.C. to full-time performance-art venue is complete. My column in the print TIME today (not yet online) is an expansion of my earlier blog post on Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s joint marches on the Mall Oct. 30, and it turned out to be fortuitously timed: Colbert today testified before a House Judiciary …
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Everybody’s Losing Their TV Job Day continues, as the New York Times breaks the news that NBC Universal head Jeff Zucker will step down once the company is taken over by Kable Town Comcast. Zucker tells Bill Carter that the move is not his choice, but it was clear the new owners wanted to bring in their own team.
Over the past decade, …
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Breaking news! CNN announced a major executive shakeup this morning, as its longtime U.S. president Jonathan Klein is leaving and being replaced by Ken Jautz, the current head of more-successful sister network HLN. The Associated Press reports that Klein was fired, while the official statement simply says that he’s leaving, but in any …
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I had dreams of doing a longer writeup of last night’s excellent Fringe this morning, but looking at the clock and my schedule, that’s not going to happen. Rather than keep you waiting any longer, I’ll throw this post open to your discussion.
In general, I feel like Fringe is finally becoming the show I hoped it would be when it …
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Note: For the record, any opinions I state about last night’s 30 Rock have nothing to do with any insinuations made by characters about those persons bearing my given name. Not, in any case, that there’s anything wrong with that.
Last season I was considering dropping 30 Rock from the regular rotation of shows I review weekly on this …
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Spoilers for last night’s season premiere of The Office following:
How you viewed the opening scene of The Office may say something about how you view The Office as a series right now. If you loved last season and saw nothing wrong with it—as apparently the producers did not—then maybe it was a delight to see the Dunder-Mifflin …
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American Idol announced its new judge panel yesterday, but overshadowed in that announcement were some less-headline-grabbing changes that—producers hope anyway—may make more of a difference in the kind and quality of music Idol produces.
For starters, legendary producer Jimmy Iovine will join Idol as an in-house mentor for season …
