James Poniewozik

It had to happen eventually: MTV has aged out of the MTV demographic. The used-to-be-music channel hits the big 2-5 today, putting it outside the 12-to-24 age group that is its chief marketing draw for advertisers. A quarter century after the moon man planted that multicolored flag on its air, MTV could run for Congress today. It can get

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Never let it be said that PBS is not a proactive organization: they’ve started censoring themselves before the government does it for them. Recently, the network announced a policy of digitally blurring out the mouths of people using foul language on video, as well as bleeping the audio. (Because really, why should lip readers have all

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A few weeks ago I blogged that, with the purchase of a new HDTV, I had abdicated the position of Professional Television Critic with the Worst TV Set in America. Now a new aspirant has claimed the throne: Matthew Gilbert of the Boston Globe, who, like I once did, bought his 20-inch set back when an innocent America was delighted by the

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Somebody’s been watching Nobody’s Watching, and soon more of them may be. As speculated here and elsewhere, the resurrection on YouTube of the rejected WB pilot of an inside-TV satire from the maker of Scrubs has led it to be picked up by an old-fashioned TV-box network, NBC. Per a Peacock press release this morning:

NBC has approved a

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What strikes you first about the war is how beautiful everything is. A picture-postcard landscape, rolling hills, Mediterranean-style buildings with terra-cotta roofs. But in the center, towering over everything like the canopy of a coal-black tree, is a plume of smoke. It is the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, and Israeli warplanes are

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In an increasingly tough media business, organizations have increasingly been using the buddy system to partner up for maximum impact: MSNBC with The Washington Post and Newsweek, NBC News with Discovery, TIME with the home of earnest dreamboat Anderson Cooper. If synergy is good enough for real news organizations, why not for fake-news

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Warning: The following post quotes the President of the United States and, therefore, contains language that may be unsuitable for small children.

When he ran for President in 2000, George W. Bush pledged to a Clinton-scandal-weary America that he would work hard to restore dignity to the nation’s highest office. Bush continued that

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The term "scrambled signals" is about to take on new meaning. CBS is announcing today that it has discovered a new medium to advertise its fall schedule on: your breakfast. Namely, millions of chicken eggs, on which it plans to stencil numerous corny promos for its shows. (To wit: "Crack the Case on CBS," for CSI.)

The technology

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NBC, the nowhere-to-go-but-up network, has a little bit of hope for the fall season. The broadcaster may be fourth in the ratings, but as of this moment, it is first in, um, "buzz." A report by Brandimensions, a branding and market research company, shows that it has three of the top five buzzed-about new fall shows, as measured by

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The Emmys have found their white knight. Tom O’Neil, the awards expert who blogs at Gold Derby under the auspices of latimes.com, says that critics who have lambasted the Emmys for rewarding old-fashioned, unadventurous programming and familiar faces don’t get how the Emmys work. Series and performers, he notes, submit individual

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Several weeks ago, I wrote a review of HBO’s new sitcom, Lucky Louie, which got yanked at the last minute from the print edition of Time, to make room for so-called breaking news. (Apparently they blew up some guy in Iraq. Priorities, people, priorities!) In it, I argued that the laugh-track comedy, dissonantly conventional except for

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FRAZER HARRISON / GETTY
Julia Louis-Dreyfus after the announcement of the nominees for the 58th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards, Thursday, in Hollywood, California.

This was the year the Emmy nominations were going to be different. Thanks to a new voting process–in which panels of specialist judges picked the nominees from shortlists of

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WARNING: Contains children, personal anecdotes, borderline insufferable cuteness

One perk of living in New York City is that, being in the nation’s capital of media, you regularly have the choice between seeing the mediated and the actual versions of events at the same time. If there’s a blizzard on the east coast, I can turn on my TV

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