James Poniewozik

Tonight, NBC debuts Windfall, a drama about a group of friends and strangers whose lives change after they split a $386 million winning lottery ticket. It’s an interesting premise–marriages are threatened, families feud, claims are challenged–and though it’s a little tepid and slow I might review it at more length in the regular

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Fans of HBO’s Shakespeare-with-Tourette’s Western have reason to rejoice, or at least to mourn a little less: Deadwood will not be fed to the pigs after the season 3, which starts Sunday. Not exactly. After weeks of confusion, in which the network seemed ready to let one of its highest-rated and most-praised remaining dramas die a season

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It’s appropriate that The Sopranos’ halfway-through-the-season finale should end at Christmas: it left so many shoes waiting to drop that they were like stockings hung by the chimney.

Consider the number of storylines raised early in the season left unresolved and in most cases barely moved forward. The young, gun-buying Arab

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"And to our top story this morning, which is Katie," said Matt Lauer, on Katie Couric’s last day of waking up America for NBC. On behalf of the Today show staff, let Tuned In just say how glad we all are that no one blew up the White House this morning. Boy, would it have been awkward putting that in the number two slot!

Fortunately, it

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Denis Leary’s firefighter dramedy Rescue Me returns for its third season tonight on FX, and while I recommend that you catch it for all the reasons I’ve written about before–Leary’s acid-dripping, self-destructive performance, the show’s treatment of machismo and self-deception and Irish Catholic guilt–another reason is that it has a

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SPOILER ALERT: If you don’t yet know what happens when you don’t press the "Execute" button in the hatch, press the "Back" button on your browser.

Jack, Kate and Sawyer captured by the Others. The hatch blown up. Locke and Eko possibly blown to smithereens. Michael and Walt on a boat. Sayid, Sun and Jin on another boat. Claire and

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In another sign of the deep, lightning-fast changes sweeping the news media, ABC today took the radical step of naming an old white man as sole anchor of World News Tonight. Charles Gibson–originally floated as a likely successor to Peter Jennings when Jennings died last year–got the job he was passed over for in December, when ABC

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SPOILER ALERT: This post reveals plot points from last night’s Sopranos, including the one you’re probably wondering about.

Nobody changes: this, if anything, is the relentless message of The Sopranos. For six seasons, the characters have conformed to their patterns, their upbringing and their form despite their best efforts: Carmela,

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The upfronts are over, the stars are jetting back to L.A., and the ad executives are dry-cleaning the spilled Campari off their party suits. The fall schedule annoucements found 5 or 6 networks—depending whom you count—in wildly different situations: NBC flailing, ABC feeling good but filling a lot of holes, Fox and CBS

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Everyone, if they live long enough, becomes their parents. For Fox, that moment came today, at its upfront at the Armory in Manhattan. It unveiled a schedule that promised stability and consistency, replacing only a few shows. It previewed two traditional sitcoms, one starring Brad Garrett, and boasted a Jerry Bruckheimer procedural.

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At Madison Square Garden this morning, the brand-new CW network unveiled it’s slogan, Free to Be… Around half the actors and producers at The WB and UPN are Free to Be this morning, after their shows were canceled in the merge: Free to Be updating their resumes, getting new head shots, organizing their sock drawers.

The CW only

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SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t watched Lost yet, you have no business within 100 feet of a computer.

So we finally saw Walt and learned what happened at the Others’ camp with Michael.  Some of it was obvious (the Others are interested in Walt’s abilities and have been testing him), some less so (turns out Michael was actually telling the

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CBS is the Tevye of TV networks: Tradition! Tradition! It’s CBS that gives you 60 Minutes, old-school crime procedurals, old-fashioned sitcoms, shot with three cameras in front of a studio audience, that actually stay on the air from season to season. For every Survivor, there’s an NCIS–uncool, meat-and-potatoes programs that heartland

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