James Poniewozik

I want to apologize to the makers of Kidnapped (NBC, Wednesdays, 10 p.m.) for not liking their show better. There’s a catchy enough premise: one kidnapping–the teen son of a superwealthy Manhattan family–investigated over the course of a season. There’s an interesting dual-track dynamic: an FBI agent (Delroy Lindo) leads the FBI

…

And verily, Oprah came unto Rachael. And Oprah spake, "Blessed are you, for you are Rachael, and upon this rock I will build my television empire. And neither the gates of the netherworld nor that has-been Martha Stewart shall prevail upon it."

Sorry for going all biblical on you, but there was a whiff of heavenly annunciation about

…

The New York Times takes a look today at the evening-news race two weeks after Katie Couric started and finds that she’s made the ratings race more competitive: Last week, CBS and NBC were neck-and-neck, with CBS winning by only 70,000 viewers. After a long period of NBC dominance, it is for now anyone’s game.

An interesting article as

…

Tonight, CBS premieres Smith, its entry in the one-name-title, high-class-thieves sweepstakes (Hu$tle, Thief, Heist). I’ll keep my review short, as compensation, since CBS, mercilessly, did not do the same with the pilot. Big Big Movie Star Ray Liotta occupies the grim title role as, you guessed it, a family man with a double life,

…

The consensus among TV critics is that this is an unusually strong new season of shows. A good half of the fall’s new shows are potential keepers, with attention-getting premises and cinematic looks. Spurred by challenging hits like Lost and itching for their debuts to
get attention, the networks have fallen back on their most

…

It’s rude to forget a birthday, but I believe Emily Post says it’s forgivable when the birthday is your own. Tuned In came into the world on Sept. 13, 2005, during that heady period of the mid-’00s when we all still believed that Martha Stewart was a celebrity. Back then, the blog was supposed to be temporary, intended to review the

…

To start off, I would like to apologize on behalf of my race for stealing the chicken. On the first edition of Survivor: Apartheid Island, the only sign of interracial conflict was a minor one, but it reflected poorly on the white man. Jonathan, one of the members of the Caucasian–and when’s the last time you’ve heard that word on

…

How will the Vieira era be different from the Couric era? Meredith has only been on the Today show for one morning, but so far, the answer is: steamier. We should remember–and a bio reel prepared by Today took pains to remind us–that she’s a serious newswoman, having 60 Minutes on her resume alongside The View and Who Wants to be a

…

School’s in by now in most of the country, and starting Sunday
night, it’s back in for HBO’s The Wire. When it debuted in 2002, it was
described, for lack of a better term, as a cop show. And it was, as far
as that went: the first season described a single investigation into a
Baltimore drug ring, beginning to end, going deeply into the

…

Start pointing fingers over a national disaster and somebody’s going to get ticked off. The 9/11 Commission learned that first, and now ABC has, having made a miniseries based on the commission’s report. Several former members of the Clinton administration have attacked the miniseries as a partisan hit job. In particular, former

…

Thursday night, Fox debuts two bad sitcoms that together pose a good question: What makes men more miserable–love, or the lack of it?

Taking the shows in reverse order, Happy Hour (8:30 p.m. E.T.) unintentionally makes both singlehood and couplehood into their own special kind of hell. Larry (Lex Medlin), a cocky, martini-mixing

…

"All summer long," Couric, says, "people have been asking me, how will you sign off at the end of your broadcast? I’ve racked my brain, and, so far, nothing has felt right." Couric then introduces a montage of famous anchor sign-offs–"Courage," "Good night and good luck," "Stay classy, San Diego"–and concludes that she’s opening up her

…

Well, I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard Peter Gabriel’s In Your Eyes introducing a segment on The PBS NewsHour. I hear the original idea–to have it blaring from a boombox, held aloft by Walter Cronkite–was rejected.