Finishing up a magazine story on deadline today, so I’ll leave to you to dissect a Sunday night of TV that pitted two big live events against each other: the NBA final and the Tony Awards. The latter delivered a big night for The Book of Mormon, perhaps giving more reason for fans to see South Park’s midseason finale as a sign that …
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Game of Thrones Watch: The Unkindest Cut
SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, sit down with your awkwardly uncomfortable fifteen-year-old bride and watch last night’s Game of Thrones.
Well, damn.
I mean, if you read this blog regularly, you know I’ve read the books Game of Thrones is based on. I knew that the ending of last night’s episode was coming this season. …
Checking In On: The Killing
What does it say about a TV series when its best episode to date is also, by far, its least representative?
It’s not necessarily a bad sign. In some shows, it’s an indication that there is a difference between what makes a great single hour of TV and what makes a great several years of TV. An example I often cite is “Pine Barrens,” …
Dead Tree Alert: The Twimmolation of Anthony Weiner
I’m writing on deadline for next week’s print TIME magazine, so in lieu of a fresh blog post right now, here’s the thing I wrote for this week’s print version of TIME, a.k.a., “My last thing I am writing about Anthony Weiner, I promise, I think.”
My recent column places Weiner in the recent but already storied history of celebrity …
South Park Watch: The Tao of Poo
Spoilers for the midseason finale of South Park below:
So I just cried at the ending of a South Park episode that involved, among other things, a piece of poop pooping on another piece of poop. One more item off the bucket list!
“You’re Getting Old” was one of those episodes that managed to combine the many different things lesser …
The Walking Dead Comes Lumbering Back
Normally, I’m loath to publish “first look” photos and videos on this blog, because it’s not much more than free buzz-building for a TV network. On the other hand, it’s been a bit of a contentious week here, what with all the Washington scandal and arguments over politics and history.
So, to lighten the mood, here is a picture of some …
Explain It To Me: The Voice
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 …
NBC Keeps Olympics, Will Air Them (Sort of?) Live
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, …
The Morning After: Finding Bobby Fischer
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 …
Palin Fans Try to Rewrite History (or at Least Wikipedia) on Paul Revere
[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 …
New TV Critics' Awards Spread the Love in Inaugural Nominations
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 …
Checking in on Treme: Present at the Re-Creation
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 …
TV Weekend: Teen Wolf
[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 …