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Every spring, the daffodils bloom in April, kids start playing baseball again, and I get to type the sentence: “Emphasizing the stability of its lineup, CBS announced a fall schedule with just a handful of changes.” CBS is strong, and it is stable; it’s arguably the only TV network left able to put together a lineup like the Big Three …
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Spoilers for last night’s Glee below:
It has become my unofficial theory that episodes of Glee are good to the extent that they do not involve the adults in the cast. “Funeral,” however, upended this expectation, with an episode that saw the return of Actual Sympathetic Human Sue Sylvester, while all but putting the New Directions …
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When I interviewed Sopranos creator David Chase back in 2002—before the show’s first season since 9/11—he went on a tear about the theory, then popular among TV executives, that the terror attacks meant that people would want “comfort food” programming. “People are going to want less complexity, people are going to want more …
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Spoilers for last night’s How I Met Your Mother below:
Part of me is inclined to look at last night’s episode as the Arcadian Hotel—blown up, history, time to move on. There have been some strong moments in the past season of How I Met Your Mother—Marshall’s father’s death and Barney’s discovery of his own dad—but the series as …
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In recent years, ABC has been the announc-iest of the networks in upfronts weeks, unveiling copious amounts of new shows in good years and bad. (This is partly because it’s had schedule holes to fill but partly because it has a habit of announcing all its midseason shows, while other networks sometimes keep some of their midseason …
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Fox may not look it, but it’s getting old; the network is celebrating its 25th anniversary next season. While it continues to do well with American Idol, that show is a venerable hit, now in its 10th edition. Like a lot of people getting older, Fox likes to tell itself it still thinks young—that it’s the network of attitude and …
The mob scene of a couple thousand critics pushing and shoving, pleading and shouting, to get in; the hushed anticipation as the film began; and at the end, the belligerent booing answered by defiant applause. What stoked the …
TIME celebrates the 25th anniversary of Top Gun’s release by listing everything we love about the Tom Cruise flick
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The headline first: At NBC’s upfront schdule presentation to advertisers today in New York, Donald Trump announced that he is not running for President. (As I told you in February.) The announcement, which may have stunned political reporters who forgot that Trump did the same thing in 1988 and …
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Fox, which previews its new series for advertisers this afternoon in Manhattan, released its 2011–12 schedule today, including four new comedies, three dramas and a new unscripted series. Among the highlights: Alcatraz, the much buzzed-about prison enigma from J. J. Abrams; The X-Factor, from Simon Cowell; the return of Kiefer …
The other night we had the pleasure of meeting Mia Wasikowska, the wan, wonderful young actress who has played the title roles in Alice in Wonderland and Jane Eyre and was in Cannes to promote her new film, Restless. Tall and polite, and flashing deep dimples she almost never reveals on screen, the 21-year-old Australian rhapsodized …
When a child dies, it is a tragedy for the parents, an upsetting of the natural order. But when a child kills, is the parent also guilty of the crime? We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lynne Ramsay’s solid, scary film that became …
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SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, retire to your deck—overlooking a terrifying thousand-foot drop—and watch last night’s Game of Thrones.
The first few episodes of Game of Thrones, because they had such a vast world to establish, involved a lot of talking: characters talking about history, about dragons, about who …
