Tuned InTelevision
I don’t watch House Hunters a lot. But when I watch House Hunters, I watch a lot of House Hunters. Get me in the right bored moment, a holiday weekend, an aimless evening with nothing compelling on the DVR, and if I flip on HGTV I’ll watch 3 or 4 in a row. (Maybe more. OK, many more.)
It’s partly the diabolically clever way HGTV airs …
Tuned InTelevision
In the original 1978–91 series of Dallas, J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman) and his brother Bobby (Patrick Duffy) fought each other over the future of the family oil business. In TNT’s remake, they’re back, but now J.R.’s son John Ross …
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
A decade ago, two of the most distinctive voices in TV belonged to writer-producers whose characters machine-gunned crisp dialogue at a blinding words-per-minute rate. Aaron Sorkin, with The West Wing, turned his verbal …
Tuned InTelevision
SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this review, put a mask on your face, breathe deeply and watch last night’s Season 5 finale of Mad Men.
Season 5 of Mad Men ended with Don Draper in a bar, fielding an advance from a cute young …
Tuned InMedia
This morning, Tom and Ray Magliozzi announced that this fall they will stop making Car Talk, the auto-advice/comedy show they’ve done for NPR for 25 years — pretty much, I realized, my entire adult driving life.
I haven’t always had a car all that time — I ditched the wheels for most of the ’90s after moving to New York City — …
Tuned InTelevision
At some point in the third season of Showtime’s Nurse Jackie, I thought I had a sense of what its pattern was going to be from here on out. The show had set up a provocative scenario by focusing on Jackie Peyton (Edie Falco), a …
Tuned InTelevision
I spend enough time over the course of my year griping about awards and awards ceremonies that it’s only fair I should open the floor to comments when the one award-giving body I belong to takes its turn. The Television Critics’ …
Tuned InTelevision
In the latest print edition of TIME, I have an early Father’s Day present for all the dads out there: a look at how the image of the hands-on, Baby Bjorn–wearing dad has become a go-to sight gag in TV and movies. From my column (subscription required):
The baby carrier is a symbol of a generation of dads–the Baby Bjorners–who,
…
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 InAdvertising
Children’s TV programming and junk food have been tied since the beginnings of the medium, as in the above video of an early Mickey Mouse Club, sponsored by “your friendly neighbor who bottles Coca-Cola.” Now, however, the Disney corporation plans to kick ads for many sugary and fatty foods off its programming (including ABC Saturday …
Tuned InTelevision
Cable TV has given us reality shows about attractive young urbanites in all kind of permutations: geographic (The Real Housewives of Your City Here), ethnic (Shahs of Sunset), and occupational (Million-Dollar Listing, et al.). …
Tuned InRemembrance
Richard Dawson, actor, game show host and professional charmer, died Saturday at age 79. Dawson first came to fame on American televisions as good-humored British POW Cpl. Newkirk on Hogan’s Heroes, but he was best-known as a sly, saucy daytime TV conversationalist on Match Game and, most famously, Family Feud.
On Match Game, that …
