Can this insane campaign ad help keep Herman Cain from inadvertently getting himself nominated?
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The Morning After: The Fast Food and the Furious
Quick spoilers for last night’s return of South Park below:
Some last-minute deadlines prevent me from giving the longer writeup I was hoping to “Ass Burgers,” which resolved the sort-of-cliffhanger from the midseason finale. I found a lot to like in the episode, like the topical spoof of vaccine paranoia. (Even the semi-insensitive …
Women Watch TV Like This, But Men Watch TV Like This
Over at ThinkProgress, critic Alyssa Rosenberg (whom you should be reading if you aren’t already), has a thought-provoking post on all the new fall shows with female stars, and whether or not those shows are actually speaking to a female audience. “This was supposed to be a great fall for women on television, but several weeks in, it …
RIP Steve Jobs: He Let Us Inside the Media
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWqj6OQQOHA]
I spend most of any waking weekday inside Steve Jobs’ idea.
I wake up to an alarm clock set by my iPhone, which is docked to it. I get up and go for a run, listening to my iPod Nano on shuffle. Back home I get dressed, listening to NPR (iPhone app). Breakfast time and I read the …
TV Tonight: George Harrison: Living in the Material World
Elsewhere at time.com, TIME film critic Richard Corliss reviews Martin Scorsese’s George Harrison documentary, George Harrison: Living in the Material World, which airs in two parts on HBO tonight and tomorrow:
The “quiet Beatle” — the one who told an interviewer, “I’m even more normal than normal people” — was also the nicest
…
It's All About the D'Oh: Is This the Way The Simpsons Should End?
The TV news-o-sphere has been buzzing for the last day or so about reports that Fox has threatened to stop producing new episodes of The Simpsons if its voice actors do not accept a substantial—as in, nearly by half—pay cut. Considering that the show has been one of TV’s biggest successes since it began life as a cave painting at …
A.C. Nielsen, Godfather of TV Ratings, Dead at 92
Some might say that TV is too much a business of bean counters, but Arthur C. Nielsen, Jr., who died Monday, was perhaps the most culturally influential bean counter of them all. Because, after all, the beans whose counting he revolutionized were all of us.
TV is a commercial business, and shows (excepting public TV) are on the air …
Glee Watch: Gotta Dance!
In my review that posted earlier this morning, I neglected to mention one of the biggest reasons to root for the success of American Horror Story. It could give Ryan Murphy a full-time distraction, so that the new team of writers can get Glee under control, free from the need to throw in more and more insanity to fend off the boredom …
TV Tonight: American Horror Story
Friends, I am not here today to argue that American Horror Story is, if I may use a critical-theory term, “good.” At least if one judges it by such factors as coherence, consistency or plausibility of characters’ motivations. The new series (FX, Wednesdays) comes from producers Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk. Like their current show, …
The Rabbit Done Died: NBC Kills Playboy Club, Adds Brian Williams
As the 2011-12 TV season begins its third week, it has claimed its first victim: NBC’s The Playboy Club, whose ratings plunged as low as its necklines, has been cancelled.
Playboy was one of the most hyped new fall shows this year, though the attention was hardly all positive; Gloria Steinem, some local affiliates and groups like the …
Elsewhere on Time.com: Dancing Every Week
As I like to say, there’s one thing you have to give TV credit for: there’s a lot of TV on it. Too much for me to review, or even acknowledge, as one man with one blog. But if you have not noticed, my colleagues at Time.com’s NewsFeed have been beefing up their weekly TV coverage lately, today’s example being Melissa Locker’s recap of …
The Morning After: Return Flight?
Busy, busy, busy! As I mentioned in my Homeland post the other day, Sunday is quite the crowded viewing/blogging night for me right now, what with Breaking Bad wrapping up, Boardwalk Empire back in the regular rotation, and The Good Wife, Homeland and The Amazing Race, among other shows, competing for DVR space and time. In the …
Arrested Development to Definitely Possibly Happen Again
As surely as there is always money in the banana stand, there is always eternal optimism—encouraged by remarks by Arrested Development principals every half year or so—that the cast members of the show will reunite again and make the much-rumored Arrested Development movie. Sunday at the New Yorker Festival in New York City, …