There’s nothing a man likes better than sitting down in an easy chair with a cold brewski and spending a night with the Lifetime network. That, at least, was the message, slightly exaggerated, from that channel’s presentation at the TCA tour this afternoon. Producer Mark Gordon, fielding a question from my colleague Aaron Barnhart,
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ESPN’s presentations–the funny promotional ads, the energy, the explosive graphics–are almost enough to make me wish I actually cared about sports. Even the opening panel in ESPN’s morning, about NASCAR–which I should have identified with having survived the slog up the 110 to Pasadena list night–didn’t quite do the trick for me,
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PASADENA — Oooh! I love bylines! Makes me feel all reporter-y!
People who say that being a TV critic involves nothing more than sitting on your can and pretending to care about TV shows don’t know what they’re talking about. Sometimes it involves sitting on your can and pretending to care about the people in TV shows. This week is the
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I’m traveling today to California on vitally important TV-critic business. That means I’ve been spending time on research, such as studying up on the new Transportation Security Administration rules to see if they allow me to bring an In-N-Out burger on a plane as a carry-on for the return trip. Don’t you judge me.
So I haven’t taken …
The Apple announcement of its iPhone came today, and was characteristically heralded by TV news with the fanfare reserved for terror alerts and cellphone video of dead dictators or live celebrities. (I’ll leave it to my pal Lev Grossman to explain the details, but apparently you can speak to people on it, even if they are not physically
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Last night on How I Met Your Mother, the five main characters reminisced about how they each lost their virginity. The capper was a fake reminiscence by Barney (Neal Patrick Harris) that lifted the details from the movie Dirty Dancing, which the show cleverly depicted by replaying the "Love Is Strange" scene from the movie, with Harris’
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Pity the poor white person. Held back to a mere 99% of Senate seats and claiming only three of five American Idol crowns, nowhere are we more oppressed than in the hip-hop world, where we must be content with the occasional token like Vanilla Ice or Eminem, occasionally leavened by the self-effacing white minstrelsy of a Weird Al
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The brilliant-for-a-while teen soap The O.C. is officially departing after four seasons in February. I’m sad that the show, better than Beverly Hills 90210 or Dawson’s Creek, didn’t manage to last as long as either. I’m also glad, as the show proved the rule that no high-school drama should last longer than it takes to get through high
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A funny thing happened to my pick for best new fall show of 2006. It, uh, didn’t air in fall 2006. The suits at ABC decided to hold The Knights of Prosperity until January. The network said it held the show to give a promising series a launch time amid less new competition, but you could see how they might have thought that the show was,
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Oh, did I mention I was going on vacation? I could have sworn I had put up a post mentioning that I was going to be gone last week. Apologies to everyone who counted on Tuned In as a refuge from your alcohol-fueled, resentment-filled, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf family holiday get-togethers.
Today Tuned In returns to its regular
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Every year, my top 10 TV list is something of a misnomer. The first five, six or seven shows are usually pretty obvious and come to me more or less immediately. Beyond that, you have essentially a fifteen-way tie for eighth place. Below, in alphabetical order, is my next-10 list: shows that could just as well have been in one of the
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All three cable networks just carried live coverage of the press conference in which Miss USA Tara Conner was spared from losing her crown by pageant honcho Donald Trump, in exchange for agreeing to enter rehab. And I just have to say, thank God they finally ended the war in Iraq so we can afford to divert ourselves with light stories
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Amid all the hubbub in a certain newsmagazine over digital democracy, sousveillance and user-generated-media empires, let us take a moment to remember those who toiled at the old-fashioned, quaint task of making expensive entertainments, under contract to giant corporations, for millions of people to watch passively, while being paid a
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