I’m on vacation even as I write this. The things I do for you people! I got episode 4 of Mad Men before leaving but didn’t have time to write a full-fledged Watch, so think of these as starting points, then fledge them yourselves:
* So after all the discussion of That Scene last week, we have Don shoving Betty in mid-argument. Does …
For those Tuned Inlanders interested in the business-and-ratings side of TV, Nielsen has launched a new blog with regularly updated ratings and other stats on media and branding. Nielsen keeps a lot of their research proprietary, of course, but for media numbers junkies, it’s a nice all-on-one-page general resource.
The …
SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, crack open a bag of Utz—may I recommend The Crab Chip—and watch Mad Men.
One of the most important and least-remarked-on transitions in life is the death of a parent. While it doesn’t get noted the way other developmental milestones do—puberty, graduation, parenthood, etc.—losing a parent is recognizing that you are ultimately responsible for yourself, and as much or more as those other landmarks, …
I haven’t been spending much time picking apart campaign ads in this election, because I know enough about what I don’t know about that I don’t want to pretend to be factcheck.org. But in his newest ad, John McCain has come into Tuned In’s house, as the kids say, attacking Barack Obama on pop culture.
Again, I’ll leave the analysis of …
What do you get for $25 million? For AMC and Mad Men, about a million pairs of eyeballs. The season 2 premiere of the much-lauded-by-critics, not-as-much-watched-by-people drama drew about 1.9 million viewers. That’s not much by broadcast network standards—or even by TNT network standards—but it’s more than double the show’s average …
The notion that the media is biased in favor of Barack Obama has become an article of faith—at least among those people who have run campaigns against Barack Obama. Now there’s a new study that finds a definite Obama slant in campaign coverage—the other way.
A study of the first six weeks of the general-election campaign by the …
As long as we’re on the subject of advertising this morning, there’s an interesting ad review by Seth Stevenson in Slate for a Scion XB spot, which asks whether it takes the Volkswagen “Think Small” strategy—turn a product’s weakness into an asset—too far. The weakness in this case is that the car looks like a box, or, more …
SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, finish your Valentine’s Day shopping and watch the season two premiere of Mad Men.
Because Mad Men‘s Matthew Weiner wrote for The Sopranos, the comparisons between the two shows tend to get overdone. But the opening …
When Barack Obama absconded to the Middle East and Europe, taking America’s entire broadcast network-news industry with him, one question was whether he would get an unbalanced amount of coverage compared with John McCain, or an unbalanced amount of scrutiny. As Katie Couric got the first crack at an overseas interview last night on …
At least one chain of local TV stations has found a solution for the nobody-wants-to-pay-for-journalism-anymore conundrum: product placements on the local news. The Meredith Corporation has struck a deal that has placed cups of McDonald’s iced coffee on the anchor desks at its Las Vegas affiliate; McDeals are in place at several other …
In the news today, more media coverage of media coverage that has not actually happened yet: namely, the jockeying among TV news anchors and star reporters to follow Barack Obama on his upcoming trip overseas. (The precise details, including times and some locations, are apparently being kept under wraps for security reasons.) Some media …
A blog post about a newspaper column about a TV network publicity department’s treatment of newspaper reporters: if this post were any more inside baseball, it would be made of solid cork. But for those of you interested in the sausage-making end of the TV-news business—or who just like seeing two media giants throw down—David Carr’s …
