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Full disclosure: I am a sucker for the man-befriends-nonhuman-creature genre of sitcoms. So when I first caught wind of Wilfred, an adaption of an Australian comedy about a man who sees his neighbor’s dog as a six-foot guy in a dog costume, my tail began wagging involuntarily. Maybe …
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FX’s Louie, the dark-comic vision of Louis CK, returns for a second season tomorrow. My feature on the comedian and the new season is in this week’s TIME magazine. For that article, last month I sat down with Louis CK in an apartment in Upper Manhattan that was doubling as the show’s set and …
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Yesterday was the first day of summer, the longest, lightest day of the year, which made it the astronomically perfect day for ABC to premiere its companion piece to Wipeout, 101 Ways to Leave a Game Show.
The premise was simple: the host asked a group of contestants challenging, multiple-choice questions about—I don’t know, facts …
Tuned InTV Ratings
The numbers are in for Keith Olbermann‘s first night on Current. You can’t tell a lot from any new show’s first night ratings—ask Jay or Conan—and there is not much direct precedent for a cable-news star moving shop to an almost-unknown network.
But for one night anyway, I would bet Olbermann and Al Gore are happy. According to the …
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The brand-spanking-new Broadcast Television Journalists Association has announced the winners of its brand-spanking-new Critics’ Choice Television Awards. The winners (list follows the jump) include some usual-suspects shows like Mad Men, but also underrecognized series like Fringe, whose John Noble (best supporting actor) deserves …
Tuned InNews Media
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The first thing you notice about Countdown with Keith Olbermann is its similarity to Countdown with Keith Olbermann. Indeed—considering how tough the NBC organization has been with intellectual property with its former late-night hosts–it’s striking how much of the rhetorical …
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Spoilers for last night’s season finale of The Killing below:
It’s a familiar story that, when a cable network debuts a deliberate, slow-to-unfold serial like The Killing, viewers start to worry that it’s not going to pay off. And TV critics like me, or other viewers who are enthralled with the promise of the series, counsel patience: …
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SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, get a crackling fire going and sit down to watch the season finale of Game of Thrones.
I’ve always resisted the shorthand that Game of Thrones is “fantasy Sopranos.” To me, the series has more in common tonally with a range of other HBO dramas–a mix of Deadwood, Rome, The Wire, even …
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One of the hoariest sci-fi tropes is the invading alien race that wants our women (or occasionally, to mix it up, our men). It never held up much to logical scrutiny; rare is the viewer who has, in turn, looked at a scary reptilian space creature and thought “mmm, I’d like to get me some of that.” (That it was able to put a human in …
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As you know if you read this blog, I have love for Glee, but it’s a tough love and sometimes hard to justify. The show fascinates me and, especially in this past season, frustrates me. It can be transcendent and self-indulgent, emotionally true and utterly ridiculous, inventive and repetitive. Often within the same scene!
There are …
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In this week’s TIME, I have a feature on Louis CK, whose amazing, idiosyncratic comedy Louie returns to FX next Thursday. The piece looks at the unusual financial and creative deal that he has for the show, and how that allows him to make a show that’s a more individual vision than just about anything on TV outside, say, South …
Tuned InNews Media
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The Anthony Weiner twimmolation saga ended today with all the dignity began with: a heckler (Benjy Bronk from The Howard Stern Show) shouting his resignation speech down, cable-news anchors saying the word “sexting” repeatedly and Weiner saying he would step down “most importantly, so …
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It is almost too easy to be horrified and sanctimonious toward TLC’s Toddlers and Tiaras, which had its season 6 debut last night. But you know, sometimes the easy thing is the right thing.
The first new episode of the network’s highly successful child-pageant horrorshow was …
