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The first thing you notice about Countdown with Keith Olbermann is its similarity to Countdown with Keith Olbermann. Indeed—considering how tough the NBC organization has been with intellectual property with its former late-night hosts–it’s striking how much of the rhetorical …
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Spoilers for last night’s season finale of The Killing below:
It’s a familiar story that, when a cable network debuts a deliberate, slow-to-unfold serial like The Killing, viewers start to worry that it’s not going to pay off. And TV critics like me, or other viewers who are enthralled with the promise of the series, counsel patience: …
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SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, get a crackling fire going and sit down to watch the season finale of Game of Thrones.
I’ve always resisted the shorthand that Game of Thrones is “fantasy Sopranos.” To me, the series has more in common tonally with a range of other HBO dramas–a mix of Deadwood, Rome, The Wire, even …
A new book published on the anniversary of JAWS’s release shares hundreds of rare photographs taken by local Martha’s Vineyard participants and bystanders
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One of the hoariest sci-fi tropes is the invading alien race that wants our women (or occasionally, to mix it up, our men). It never held up much to logical scrutiny; rare is the viewer who has, in turn, looked at a scary reptilian space creature and thought “mmm, I’d like to get me some of that.” (That it was able to put a human in …
Real-life horse whisperer Buck Brannaman is the star of an affecting new documentary
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As you know if you read this blog, I have love for Glee, but it’s a tough love and sometimes hard to justify. The show fascinates me and, especially in this past season, frustrates me. It can be transcendent and self-indulgent, emotionally true and utterly ridiculous, inventive and repetitive. Often within the same scene!
There are …
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In this week’s TIME, I have a feature on Louis CK, whose amazing, idiosyncratic comedy Louie returns to FX next Thursday. The piece looks at the unusual financial and creative deal that he has for the show, and how that allows him to make a show that’s a more individual vision than just about anything on TV outside, say, South …
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The Anthony Weiner twimmolation saga ended today with all the dignity began with: a heckler (Benjy Bronk from The Howard Stern Show) shouting his resignation speech down, cable-news anchors saying the word “sexting” repeatedly and Weiner saying he would step down “most importantly, so …
The Ryan Reynolds vehicle Green Lantern borrows from old film fantasies to make an Identi-Kit of blockbuster clichés
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It is almost too easy to be horrified and sanctimonious toward TLC’s Toddlers and Tiaras, which had its season 6 debut last night. But you know, sometimes the easy thing is the right thing.
The first new episode of the network’s highly successful child-pageant horrorshow was …
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Test Pilot is a semiregular feature sharing my first impressions of the pilots for next season’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 …
We’ve complained so often about Hollywood’s destruction of our childhood memories that it seemed appropriate to point out the happy exceptions.
