We tend to forget because it comes in the middle of Oscar-handicapping season, but the Golden Globes honors TV shows too. I’ll leave it to my movie colleagues to pick over the film nominees (except to say: Bobby? Wha? Are they sure they didn’t mean Best Comedy, Unintentional?). But the TV nods left a critic unfortunately little to grouse
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On NBC’s Heroes, the character Zach (Thomas Dekker)–the best friend of indestructible cheerleader Claire–was not supposed to be one of the superpowered characters. It turns out, however, that he has the amazing power to transform himself from a gay teenager to a straight one. According to gay-news website afterelton.com, that’s
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VINCE BUCCI / GETTY
Prince performs during the American Idol Season 5 Finale in Hollywood in May, 2006.
CBS’s announcement that Prince will be the musical headliner of the upcoming Super Bowl is a step forward for the show’s musical interest (following on the last two, even older-and-less-relevant choices, The Rolling Stones and Paul
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One of the pleasures of the first season of Sleeper Cell, Showtime’s terrorism drama, was that it didn’t rely on as many TV contrivances as shows like 24–superhuman agents, miraculous computer hacks, women chased by cougars. It showed the fight against terrorism, and terrorism itself, as human enterprises with flaws and foibles. …
From my sometime nemeses at the Parents Television Council comes word that NBC, like Saul on the road to Damascus, may have had a change of heart in its dealings with the Bible-oriented cartoon VeggieTales. As I wrote earlier, NBC had been editing out overtly religious messages from the cartoon when broadcasting it as part of its
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In my Culture Complex column this week, Matt Lauer puts on his Cronkite costume. What NBC’s declaration of civil war vis-a-vis the fighting in Iraq means (that the momentum is against the White House in its Long War of Semantics) and doesn’t mean (that the media has suddenly decided to brave up and call ’em like it sees ’em, even if that
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The Big Red Car will, sadly, be toot-toot-chugga-chugging without Greg Page. The 34-year-old lead singer for the Australian kids’-music supergroup The Wiggles (anyone who refers to them as "the children’s Beatles" underestimates The Wiggles’ popularity) announced that he would quit performing with the group because of illness. The
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Last night, the godfathers of the American sitcom The Office babysat the kid, as Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, creators and writers of the British version, guest-wrote an episode of the remake. We owe them a thank-you–not for showing us Americans how it’s done, but for demonstrating that, in its third season, the American version
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It’s been several months since Rosie O’Donnell took over The View and the vanishing form of Star Jones headed for the hills, and it appears we can stop worrying. Despite the danger posed by getting a competent, funny, well-loved talk-show host to join the panel, The View continues to be the out-of-control celebrity train-wreck gala that
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One more post about the racist who keeps on giving: in my column this week I discussed how, after Michael Richards’ onstage meltdown, one of the first pressing questions was, How will this affect the DVD sales? Well, according to the good folks at TMZ.com, who first posted the Richards video, we have our answer. The site–in turn citing
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Only tangentially TV-related, but in the spirit of yesterday’s post, about how homophobia is more pop-culturally acceptable than various forms of racism:
The LA Times reports that Universal’s $42.5 million deal to make Sascha Baron Cohen’s followup to Borat is threatened by many factors, among them that since Borat was so successful, …
In my Culture Complex column in Time this week, what will hopefully be–but don’t bet on it–my last word on Michael Richardsgate. Namely, with so many figures exploding into racism lately (George Allen, Mel Gibson, Richards, etc.) maybe the question is not what it says about them but what it says about us. If politicians and
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This one’s just for the other people who have to work today. The rest of you, go off somewhere and stuff yourselves with turkey-cranberry sandwiches or buy one of those 12-packs of Xbox 360s that Sam’s Club has on sale or whatnot.
For my working people, whiling away the time on Tuned In on your boss’s dime, a Leftover Day TV Tip: HBO
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