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Time.com’s Richard Zoglin posted a tribute to the legendary host earlier today. People like Johnny Carson may have defined late-night TV, but Merv Griffin practically single-handedly made daytime and syndicated TV, not simply through his talk show but through his production empire, which was responsible, for starters, for Jeopardy! and …

Kirk Edwards/Showtime; Cliff Lipson/Showtime

This Sunday Monday, Showtime returns Weeds and introduces the David Duchovny comedy Californication. I first heard about Californication and couldn’t wait to see it; then I watched it and kind of didn’t want to review it. I really like Duchovny, not just because of The X-Files; he’s a good …

Mad Men Watch will be a little late today–have a deadline for the stone-tablet version of Time magazine. In the meantime, a little something to keep you unproductive at your own job. In my post on cable shows yesterday, I offhandedly trashed Mad Men’s opening title sequence, but I notice that its viewers on YouTube think more highly of …

Monty Brinton/ CBS

Test Pilot is a semiregular feature this summer sharing my first impressions of the pilots for next fall’s shows. These aren’t reviews, since these pilots may be rewritten, recast and reshot before airing, and end up much better or worse. But, premature opinions are why God invented the Internet, so let’s get on …

Adweek looks at the TV angle to News Corp’s acquisition of Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, specifically the possible synergies for Rupert Murdoch’s new Fox Business Network. (Link via Romenesko.) What synergies? After all, Dow Jones has a deal that binds its employees to contribute only to CNBC for years. Unless, you know, it …

AMC’s Mad Men. AMC

The New York Times’ Bill Carter rounds up the hot hot hot summer that basic cable TV has been having, with The Closer, Army Wives, Mad Men, Saving Grace, Damages and others becoming critical or commercial hits or both.

The summer-is-the-season-for-cable story is a bit of a perennial, but cable does seem to be hitting …

Just a couple weeks left of Lost summer school (I’m on vacation the last two weeks of August), so I thought I’d try a meta-question that’s kind of haunted the margins of the LDG, and, in fact, pretty much every discussion about Lost that anybody ever has:

Do the producers of Lost have the series planned out beginning to end? Or are they …

Last hurrah for the Knights. ABC/PATRICK HARBRON

It’s summer and that means the whiff of smoke in the air… charcoal, roasting marshmallows and–sniff? what’s that?–the acrid smell of the networks burning off their failed shows from the previous season. NBC has already torched Studio 60 over the summer and ABC did Traveler. Tonight, …

SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, watch Damages. And check your mail. Carefully.

So of course the week after I decide to do a Watch on Damages, the show serves up an episode that… well, I don’t have that much to say about. That’s maybe the peril of writing about a series that’s more plot- than character-driven; this episode …

Part 2 in Tuned In’s piggyback-on-Alice-Park’s-stories series: McDonald’s owns your child’s brain. If you saw Morgan Spurlock’s documentary Supersize Me, you probably remember the creepy scene in which Spurlock’s unscientific poll found that kids were more likely to recognize a picture of Ronald McDonald than one of Jesus Christ. Now …

A new study from the University of Washington has found that, shockingly, you cannot buy a future Ivy League acceptance for your child for the price of a $15.99 DVD. The researchers found that videos like those in the Baby Einstein series not only don’t advance language development, they may impede it. My colleague Alice Park has beat me …

A brief housekeeping note. For about a year now, I’ve been writing a pop-culture column called Culture Complex in the print edition of Time magazine. I know what you’re thinking: “The print version of Time? They stopped making that in, like, 1976, right?” No, really, there is one. I think they also put out an edition on 8-track.

Anyway, …

SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this, watch last night’s Big Love. Or I’ll spank you.

HBO photo: Lacey Terrell

So Bill is officially a jackass now, right? The irony of his video-poker deal is that he sees it as a means to eventually stop living a lie (having to deny being polygamists), but he can only achieve it by perpetrating another …