Tuned InNews Media
With a political sex scandal all over the headlines, at some point the time comes for the argument—well worth having—about whether it should be in the headlines at all. In Salon, Glenn Greenwald makes the impassioned argument that the Anthony Weiner case is none of our business, and that it’s a sad comment on journalists’ …
Tuned InUncategorized
One reality of being a TV critic is that you have to be a generalist; you may know a lot about a lot of TV shows, but you will never know as much about any particular TV show as its biggest fans do. There’s simply so much TV that—unlike, say, a movie critic, who can reasonably watch every major release a year—you have to take it in …
Tuned InUncategorized
NBC, which has had every Olympics the last two decades save 1994, has kept the games through 2020, despite competition from Fox and ESPN. Unlike its rival bidders, NBC had not promised to air the games live (and has in past years insisted on saving events for primetime on tape-delay). But after winning the bid today in Lausanne, …
Tuned InUncategorized
There are many different roles chess has played in popular culture: source of excitement, metaphor for conflict, cause of (or at least form of expression for) madness (e.g., Nabokov’s The Defense). Last night’s HBO documentary, Bobby Fischer Against the World, involved all of those, and was both an empathetic biography and fascinating …
Tuned InNews Media
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmYT_hKOCT4]
In the most shocking political press conference since the last time a some dude was forced to hold a press conference admitting a sexual transgression, New York Rep. Anthony Weiner took to a podium this afternoon to vindicate every joke made about his surname for the last week.
It …
Tuned InTuned In
That thing that people kept saying would happen has happened: Katie Couric, formerly of NBC’s Today Show and CBS’s evening news, will host a syndicated talk show for ABC starting in fall 2012. Having left the morning and washed out of the evening, it’s now up to Couric (and her former producer Jeff Zucker, will work with her again) to …
Tuned InUncategorized
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oS4C7bvHv2w]
This weekend, Tuned In Jr., who is studying Boston and the American Revolution in school, mentioned that he was getting a “locked” error message while trying to load a Wikipedia page on Paul Revere. I know! As a father and a journalist, I should know better than to let my son use …
Tuned InUncategorized
The Broadcast Television Critics Association has announced the nominees for its first Critics Choice Television Awards, to be aired June 20 on Reelz, which you may know from the Kennedys miniseries or from various movie reruns. True to its name the group recognized a number of, well, critical favorites like Community, Fringe, Louie and …
Tuned InTuned In
SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, invite your father’s bannermen over and watch last night’s Game of Thrones.
“The Pointy End” is the first episode of Game of Thrones (and the only one this season) written by George R. R. Martin, author of the A Song of Ice and Fire source novels. In that saga, Martin responds to several …
Tuned InUncategorized
General second-season spoilers for Treme below:
I haven’t been blogging about Treme much this second season, partly because I’m cutting back on weekly reviews at Tuned In, but partly because the show offers both too much and too little to talk about. On the one hand, the show still takes its time, and—with exceptions like LaDonna’s …
Tuned InRemembrance
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7JINQIdomE]
James Arness, who for 20 years personified the upright Western lawman as Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke, has died of natural causes at age 88. I’ll be honest: Gunsmoke was before my time as a TV viewer, and is enough outside my taste as a critic that I never watched it much as an adult. But …
Tuned InUncategorized
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQvPcd7UCPc]
Say what you will about what MTV: it is a channel that has always known what it is, even if “what it is” changes every three years or so. In its early years, there was a distinct idea of what an MTV video looked like. There was, with Beavis and Butt-Head and Daria and experiments like …
Tuned InUncategorized
[vodpod id=Video.10188731&w=425&h=350&fv=autoPlay%3Dfalse]
The Daily Show is not live TV, so when Jon Stewart responded Wednesday to Anthony Weiner’s inability to identify “with certitude” whether a certain Twitter photo was of his own crotch, Stewart noted that the show had not had time to generate a full segment. The show made up for …
