Tuned In
This press release came in over the transom from Fox Reality Channel:
"From FremantleMedia, producers of American Idol, comes AMERICAN IDOL EXTRA — the first-ever series to reveal the backstage drama of what really happens on AMERICAN IDOL after the weekly vote-off show on FOX.
"The original Fox Reality series, which is produced by
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Tuned In
With last night’s finale of Project Runway—which, don’t worry, I’m not going to spoilerizeify for you—plenty of us are going to want to fill the hole that the fashion show’s absence leaves in our Wednesday nights. Especially those of us who are Bravo executives. Heidi Klum’s Survivor-on-the-catwalk has given the cable channel ratings and
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Renee and Brian Sparks and their son, Nick, a black family from Atlanta, switch ethnic identities with the help of makeup in the new reality series
FX / AP
We all know why the movies are superior to TV, right? TV relies on formula and cliches. It repeats itself, it insults your intelligence and it has no sense of subtlety. The
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According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the world was expected to exhaust its reserves of Brokeback Mountain jokes in early February. Hollywood is a resourceful town, however, and within the first 90 seconds of the Oscar broadcast last night, it pulled another one from its stockpile, as Billy Crystal and Chris Rock popped their heads
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SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t watched Lost yet, avert thine eyes. Besides, aren’t you supposed to be working?
I don’t think I realized until watching last night’s episode how masculine Lost has been this season. Lots of Locke, lots of Jack, lots of Sawyer and Charlie — mucho testosterone-y bluster and bighorn-ram head-butting.
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On last night’s debut of The Amazing Race, we saw what has become a regular occurrence on reality TV. One of the racing teams, a pair of sisters, was helicoptering over the city of Sao Paolo, Brazil. "We’re closer to the heavens now," one of them said. "Let’s pray. Jesus, just don’t let us come in last."
It seems that you can hardly
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If you watched the Winter Olympics, you would have gotten the impression, from the endless commercials, that Deal or No Deal was the only program on the NBC network. And at least this week, you would not be far from wrong. NBC is running the show five nights this week (before it becomes a regular weekly show).
This scheduling move may
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The euphemism "character actor" is elegantly condescending. Every actor plays characters. Most often, the term simply means an actor who has managed to have a career despite certain physical defects or peculiarities. (It’s a blind-date phrase. "Is she cute?" "Um, she’s got a great, uh, character.") But for a few notable actors it means
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The marquee event of the Winter Olympics—women’s individual figure skating—began last night, and like any good American, I watched American Idol instead for the first two hours. (Yes, I know I’m on vacation. Hey, restaurant critics have to eat on vacation, too.) At 10 p.m., I switched over to figure skating, where NBC had
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Tuned In’s globe-spanning staff of one will be on vacation next week- exploring the exotic wilds of Brooklyn with Tuned In, Jr., who’s off school- so you can expect posting to be lighter, if not nonexistent. It should be a good week of TV to miss anyway: Lost is a rerun, Fox will run another 16 or so episodes of American Idol and we
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Tuned In
[Spoiler disclaimer: I watched Lost last night. If you didn’t, there’s the door.]
Last week I was a little embarrassed to bring up the theory that Lost is playing out as a metaphor for the war on terror. This week, I’m embarrassed I didn’t have the idea earlier.
Last night, Sayid (Naveen Andrews), a former torturer in Saddam’s army, …
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Tonight on national TV, Vice President Dick Cheney announced that, in the accidental shooting of his hunting pal Harry Whittington, the buck stopped with him. Sometimes, though, it takes three or four days for the buck to make it to its stop. (Maybe its plane was routed through LaGuardia during Sunday’s blizzard.) So it was that Cheney …
Tuned In
Whose side is Jack Bauer on? Last season of 24, a lot of pundits had decided: he was the Bush administration’s chief pop culture rationalizer of the war on terror. Several times in the season, Jack (Kiefer Sutherland) or his colleagues were called on to torture—giving injections, breaking fingers, improvising elecrocutions—to get key …
