Tuned InTelevision
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 …
Tuned InTelevision
My review of The Newsroom is in this week’s TIME (here’s my blog post elaborating on it), and it was not a positive one. But there’s been so much ink and bandwidth used up on the show in advance that I’m more interested now in …
Tuned InTelevision
They may call it a “fleeting obscenity” case, but the journey of the lawsuit finally decided on by the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday, challenging FCC indecency charges, was anything but fleeting. The case stemmed from a flash of …
Tuned InNews Media
Maybe Ann Curry and Conan O’Brien should get together for a drink sometime. For a long while, she was second banana on NBC’s Today show, where she had read the news since the late ’90s. After Katie Couric left the program, her …
Tuned InTelevision
Sunday night, HBO premieres The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin’s attempt to do for cable news what The West Wing did for politics: present a romanticized version of a beleaguered institution, with a cast of hard-working idealists, long …
Tuned InMedia
Should audiences have to pay for digital entertainment? Is it really true that they’re not willing to? Though it’s nominally about music, the controversy that has blown up around an NPR blog post—in which a 20-year-old intern …
Tuned InTuned In
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 …
Tuned InReview
Let’s forget for a moment—maybe you already have—that Bristol Palin’s mother ran for vice president in 2008 and has been a figure of occasional media attention since then. Let’s forget the whirlwind of attention surrounding …
Tuned InTuned In
Back in the day, when Bart Simpson was not yet a twentysomething, Fox was known as the rebel network—the break-the-rules, take-some-chances, rattle-some-cages network. It was the relatively new broadcaster, anything it could do …
Tuned InTelevision
I cannot say that I hate-watched The Killing‘s second season. My connection with it was not passionate enough, the feelings it prompted not strong enough, for that. Let’s say that I sad-watched it. I was disappointed like a lot …
Tuned InReview
SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, wear something nice, get all your estranged friends together and watch the season finale of Girls.
“Your dreams are not what you thought they’d be!” —Jessa Johansson
If one line …
Tuned InTelevision
Beginning in late July, NBC will air the Olympics, which many, many people will watch. NBC also has to launch a new schedule of shows, whose success is not as certain a matter. To better connect the two, Thursday NBC announced a …
Tuned InTelevision
A recent study on TV brands by a research firm showed that HBO (along with Showtime) is one of the most politically polarizing channels on TV, loved by Democrats, not so much by Republicans. Here’s something that is probably not likely to ameliorate that situation: putting the severed head of the most recent Republican president on a …
