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I remember once watching a sketch* about an all-you-can-eat restaurant that hid a horrible secret: the diners were not allowed to eat all they wanted to, but rather forced to eat all they could physically hold. The premise of Torchwood: Miracle Day, the Americanization of the British Torchwood series that debuts tonight on Starz, is a …
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If you’re a regular reader of this blog, my column in this week’s TIME will seem familiar. It’s essentially my post from earlier this week on judge-and-jury Nancy Grace and the Casey Anthony trial, tightened to fit a page in the magazine, and updated to cover her reactions to the not-guilty verdict that night and the next morning (when …
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All My Children and One Life to Live are not going down the soap drain after all. In a surprising announcement—but I’ll bet a pleasing one to fans who felt betrayed by the cancellations—ABC has sold the rights to both longtime soap operas to the Prospect Park company, which will produce them and run them daily online.
According to …
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Game of Thrones has ended its first season on HBO, but a debate rages on. Namely, if winter is coming, why don’t the women put some damn clothes on?
In the Los Angeles Times, TV critic Mary McNamara used Game of Thrones, with its many female nude scenes, as a launching point to make a larger criticism of HBO: “Maybe it’s time to tone …
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NBC became the last of the major broadcast networks to announce its fall premiere dates yesterday, and it like its peers (despite NBC’s ratings, I’ll still use the term “peers”) is debuting most of its new shows in the traditional late-September premiere week. Among the shows not on this schedule is 30 Rock, which, as announced long …
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The previous season of The Office ended with a cliffhanger, as Dunder-Mifflin interviewed a series of candidates to replace Michael Scott, played by a squad of guest stars. Now comes word that the show has made a hire—sort of—by signing up James Spader as a series regular. (Consider yourself spoiler-alerted if you don’t want to …
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The bad news: Eliot Spitzer has lost another job. The good news: there’s no legal investigation involved this time! In a big shakeup of CNN’s trouble primetime lineup, the former New York governor’s In the Arena has been cancelled, to be replaced, beginning Aug. 8, with Anderson Cooper’s AC 360, now at 10 p.m. ET. In the fall, CNN will …
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The 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is coming up in two months, and there will be no shortage of tributes and specials designed to remind us how far we have or haven’t come since then. (I just received screeners for the final season of Rescue Me, one of the signal post-9/11 series, which is timing its finale to the anniversary.) …
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You could have watched the Casey Anthony verdict on another channel besides HLN,* but that would have been like watching election returns on ESPN.
Other networks covered the trial, some more fervently than others — notably TruTV, formerly known as Court TV. But it was HLN that threw itself into the trial with lust and bloodlust, that …
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File this under Things the World Does Not Necessarily Need But Will Get Ratings Anyway: Comedy Central will air a roast of Charlie Sheen on Sept. 19. That is, coincidentally (which is to say, I assume not coincidentally), the night the new Two and a Half Men lineup with Ashton Kutcher returns on CBS. All of which gives Comedy Central’s …
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The 4th of July tends to be a slow news day, but that wasn’t the case on Fox News’ politics Twitter feed—for all the wrong reasons. Early in the morning, a hacker group commandeered the account and posted a series of hoax messages indicating that President Obama had been assassinated in Iowa. (The President was not in fact even in the …
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD3ec9ADHbQ]
I’m back from vacation! Related: I was on vacation! Before we get back to business as usual (i.e., superficial blog posts, grudgingly written and read with a feeling of vague dissatisfaction) a quick rundown of a few things that happened in TV while I was away:
* HBO released a new …
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I’m sure this happens to you all the time: you go on vacation for a few lousy days, and next thing you know, one of your coworkers calls the President a dick on live TV.
For those of you who haven’t followed the story, TIME’s Mark Halperin went on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Thursday morning and made that characterization of President Obama’s
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