SPOILER ALERT: This post reveals plot points from last night’s Sopranos, including the one you’re probably wondering about.
Nobody changes: this, if anything, is the relentless message of The Sopranos. For six seasons, the characters have conformed to their patterns, their upbringing and their form despite their best efforts: Carmela,
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The upfronts are over, the stars are jetting back to L.A., and the ad executives are dry-cleaning the spilled Campari off their party suits. The fall schedule annoucements found 5 or 6 networks—depending whom you count—in wildly different situations: NBC flailing, ABC feeling good but filling a lot of holes, Fox and CBS
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Everyone, if they live long enough, becomes their parents. For Fox, that moment came today, at its upfront at the Armory in Manhattan. It unveiled a schedule that promised stability and consistency, replacing only a few shows. It previewed two traditional sitcoms, one starring Brad Garrett, and boasted a Jerry Bruckheimer procedural.
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At Madison Square Garden this morning, the brand-new CW network unveiled it’s slogan, Free to Be… Around half the actors and producers at The WB and UPN are Free to Be this morning, after their shows were canceled in the merge: Free to Be updating their resumes, getting new head shots, organizing their sock drawers.
The CW only
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SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t watched Lost yet, you have no business within 100 feet of a computer.
So we finally saw Walt and learned what happened at the Others’ camp with Michael. Some of it was obvious (the Others are interested in Walt’s abilities and have been testing him), some less so (turns out Michael was actually telling the
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CBS is the Tevye of TV networks: Tradition! Tradition! It’s CBS that gives you 60 Minutes, old-school crime procedurals, old-fashioned sitcoms, shot with three cameras in front of a studio audience, that actually stay on the air from season to season. For every Survivor, there’s an NCIS–uncool, meat-and-potatoes programs that heartland
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Today at the Hilton Theater in New York City, executives of MyNetworkTV announced their exciting, provocative, all-high-definition new fall schedule of shows. Undoubtedly the first thing you want to know about the exciting, provocative, all-high-definition fall schedule of MyNetworkTV is… what the squank is MyNetworkTV? Whose
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ANDREW ECCLES / ABC
The upfronts are a song and dance routine. At ABC’s presentation at Lincoln Center today, for instance, network execs noted that while ABC is not actually the number one network, they are the number one network in "upscale audiences," however they define the term. (Said Jimmy Kimmel during a mid-upfront monologue:
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You would think, with all the buzz surrounding its big marquee dramas, that ABC would not have much work to do in drawing up a new schedule. But ABC’s lineup is a little like a Central American oligarchy: there is a tiny elite, a vast underclass and not much in between. Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy and Lost live in mansions atop
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COURTESY NBC
How do you know a network is in bad shape? When it starts telling you how much the TV critics love it. Kicking off NBC’s upfront presentation at Radio City Music Hall, when a more robust network might have trumpeted its ratings and demographics and glossy magazine covers, was a clip reel of scenes from its boutique comedy…
You’re a once-powerful, now struggling TV network, one of whose many, many problems is a late-night comedy show, still pulling in viewers but widely regarded as mediocre for most of the past decade or two. What’s the solution? More of it! Twice–no, three times as much!
To be fair, Saturday Night Live is still capable of
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You’re a once-powerful, now struggling TV network, one of whose many, many problems is a late-night comedy show, still pulling in viewers but widely regarded as mediocre for most of the past decade or two. What’s the solution? More of it! Twice–no, three times as much!
To be fair, Saturday Night Live is still capable of
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Tuned In will be spending this week at the upfronts — the week, once every year, when the broadcast networks rent out Manhattan venues like Radio City Music Hall and Lincoln Center to unveil their fall schedules to their advertisers. There are musical numbers, skits and plenty of song-and-dance, at least the variety that involves
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