The term "scrambled signals" is about to take on new meaning. CBS is announcing today that it has discovered a new medium to advertise its fall schedule on: your breakfast. Namely, millions of chicken eggs, on which it plans to stencil numerous corny promos for its shows. (To wit: "Crack the Case on CBS," for CSI.)
The technology
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NBC, the nowhere-to-go-but-up network, has a little bit of hope for the fall season. The broadcaster may be fourth in the ratings, but as of this moment, it is first in, um, "buzz." A report by Brandimensions, a branding and market research company, shows that it has three of the top five buzzed-about new fall shows, as measured by
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The Emmys have found their white knight. Tom O’Neil, the awards expert who blogs at Gold Derby under the auspices of latimes.com, says that critics who have lambasted the Emmys for rewarding old-fashioned, unadventurous programming and familiar faces don’t get how the Emmys work. Series and performers, he notes, submit individual
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Several weeks ago, I wrote a review of HBO’s new sitcom, Lucky Louie, which got yanked at the last minute from the print edition of Time, to make room for so-called breaking news. (Apparently they blew up some guy in Iraq. Priorities, people, priorities!) In it, I argued that the laugh-track comedy, dissonantly conventional except for
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FRAZER HARRISON / GETTY
Julia Louis-Dreyfus after the announcement of the nominees for the 58th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards, Thursday, in Hollywood, California.
This was the year the Emmy nominations were going to be different. Thanks to a new voting process–in which panels of specialist judges picked the nominees from shortlists of
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WARNING: Contains children, personal anecdotes, borderline insufferable cuteness
One perk of living in New York City is that, being in the nation’s capital of media, you regularly have the choice between seeing the mediated and the actual versions of events at the same time. If there’s a blizzard on the east coast, I can turn on my TV
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The ever-vigilant Parents’ Television Council today registered its disgust with the maybe-rape scene in last week’s Rescue Me. From the press release:
“News Corp. and FX have stooped to a new low by airing this highly offensive and sickening episode of Rescue Me. Is this what FX considers to be entertainment – that rape is
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Every once in a while, even the omniscient, panopticon-like gaze of The Professional Television Watcher misses something. Last year, for instance, I didn’t review FX’s It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, which lacuna, being the standup guy that I am, I will blame on the fact that the early episodes were not that great. But as the season
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No sooner had Rosie O’Donnell been named to replace Meredith Vieira on The View then we started licking our chops in anticipation of the showdown: Rosie vs. Star Jones Reynolds, whose almost-instantaneous weight loss these past few months Rosie had charged publicly was the result of secret gastric-bypass surgery. We started counting the
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Last Tuesday, the antihero of Rescue Me may have gotten a little too anti for a lot of the show’s viewers. Firefighter Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary), arguing with his estranged wife (who is now dating his brother) over dividing their assets, hits her, throws her down on a couch, tears her clothes open, then—this is where it gets
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CRAIG FUJII/AP FILE
Aaron Spelling poses with the actresses from Charlie’s Angels in 1992
TV producer Aaron Spelling, who died Friday at age 83 of complications from a stroke, spent his adult life reaping the rewards of, and the punishments for, knowing exactly what people want. He produced more than 3,000 hours of TV—a world
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Like the accidentally-frozen pizza-delivery guy who is its hero, Futurama has been revived in another era by technology. Only in this case, the technology is DVD and cable, not cryogenics. The undersung Matt Groening cartoon, cancelled by Fox in 2003, will air 13 new episodes on Comedy Central starting in 2008, after having enjoyed
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Say this for Connie Chung: She has made any future TV network think twice about cancelling her shows. What MSNBC got for killing her minimally-rated talk show with husband Maury Povich, "Weekends with Maury and Connie," was nearly three minutes of Lynchian weirdness as the former CBS and CNN anchor stood on a grand piano and belted out a
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