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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 …
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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 …
The good news first. Well, at least it’s potentially good news. Jane Lynch is the host of the next primetime Emmy awards! Yes, I liked Neil Patrick Harris too, but apparently he can’t host everything all the time and he was good enough to endorse Lynch on Twitter and he has a point. Lynch is personable, she’s a good stage performer, …
Test Pilot is a semiregular feature sharing my first impressions of the pilots for next season’s shows. These aren’t reviews, since these pilots can be rewritten, recast and retooled before airing, and the shows that eventually get on the air can prove much better or worse. But premature opinions are why God invented the Internet, so …
In an unexpected move, The New York Times announced this morning that Bill Keller, executive editor since 2003, would be stepping down to write full-time, and will be replaced in September by longtime deputy Jill Abramson.
I tend not to blog much here about personnel changes in print journalism—those being of interest mainly to, well, …
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Was Anthony Weiner framed, or did he self-twimmolate? Was it his package or was it hackage? We don’t know, and after a round of TV-news interviews yesterday, we may be even farther from knowing.
The controversy over the Twitter photo of a tumescent man in undies posted to …
Public Policy Polling recently conducted a survey of Republican voters in early caucus state Iowa. In it, they placed former Utah governor Jon Huntsman‘s support at one.
Not number one. Not 1%. One guy polled says he would vote for Huntsman. Meanwhile, former Godfather’s Pizza CEO and Tea Party darling Herman Cain came in tied for …
In my column last week on the “manxiety” trend in the new fall shows, I singled out TNT’s Men of a Certain Age as one example of a series taking a subtle, non-insulting look at what it means to be a man. Focusing on three guys pushing 50—played by Scott Bakula, Andre Braugher and Ray Romano—it focuses on the trio’s wrestling with …
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The major difference between PBS and commercial broadcasters used to be, well, commercials. For-profit TV relied on ads, PBS didn’t. OK, maybe it had sponsors, but nothing so crass as commercials. Then, OK, maybe it had “enhanced” sponsor messages, which looked a lot like commercials …
Test Pilot is a semiregular feature sharing my first impressions of the pilots for next season’s shows. These aren’t reviews, since these pilots can be rewritten, recast and retooled before airing, and the shows that eventually get on the air can prove much better or worse. But premature opinions are why God invented the Internet, so …
The show that I (and some other critics) named as the best TV show of 2010, Breaking Bad, has finally got a return date for its fourth season on AMC, July 17. I visited the set earlier this year and will have more to write before the season debut; in the meantime, I will spoil exactly nothing about what you’ll see when it returns. But if …
If there’s one formula for distinguishing a Bravo competition-reality show vs. those of other networks it is: Creation vs. performance. (This category, mind you, does not apply to the Real Housewives series, et al., which are about their own kind of performance.) Top Chef, Top Design, Work of Art and, once upon a time, Project Runway …
SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, ask your butcher for a nice venison roast for dinner and watch last night’s Game of Thrones.
Like a battering ram in a siege, Game of Thrones took a while to roll into place. But now that it’s in motion, its momentum gets more undeniable week by week. And “You Win or You Die” was the …
