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Cheney on Fox: The Buckshot Stops Here

Tonight on national TV, Vice President Dick Cheney announced that, in the accidental shooting of his hunting pal Harry Whittington, the buck stopped with him. Sometimes, though, it takes three or four days for the buck to make it to its stop. (Maybe its plane was routed through LaGuardia during Sunday’s blizzard.) So it was that Cheney …

Live from Turin—Sorry, Torino—It's NBC

The broadcast of the 2006 Winter Olympics, NBC reminded us from the get-go of the Opening Ceremonies, was going to be a triumph of technology. Hundreds of hours of coverage, all broadcast in HDTV for the first time! (The wonders of which will not be relayed to you by your correspondent, who watches a 20-inch box purchased sometime around

Live from Turin—Sorry, Torino—It's NBC

The broadcast of the 2006 Winter Olympics, NBC reminded us from the get-go of the Opening Ceremonies, was going to be a triumph of technology. Hundreds of hours of coverage, all broadcast in HDTV for the first time! (The wonders of which will not be relayed to you by your correspondent, who watches a 20-inch box purchased sometime around

Arrested Development Gets Torched

Tonight, Fox airs its last four episodes of the Emmy-award-winning sitcom Arrested Development at 8 p.m. E.T. Barring the still — possible intervention of another network (most likely Showtime), they could be the last ever for this acerbic series about a wildly dysfunctional, wealthy real-estate family.

I’ve written enough on

A Brown and Bubbly Evening: The Best and Worst of Super Bowl Ads

Pop quiz: You’ve just placed an ad at Super Bowl XL.
When it’s done, you want the viewers to associate your product with (a)
a cavity search; (b) Leonard Nimoy; (c) being "brown and bubbly."

If you answered "any of the above," you should be
directing a corporate ad budget. These were the dubious messages of (a)
a Sierra Mist spot, (b)

We Report, You Disrobe

It’s a truism among media-critic types that Fox News Channel is the "conservative" cable outlet. But every now and then, FNC airs something that makes you hit the TiVo rewind and pause buttons, repeatedly. Take this morning, on Fox News Live, when anchor Jon Scott did a hard-hitting interview with two models, in cleavage-baring halter

Survivor: New! Improved! Now with More Immunity!

In recent seasons of Survivor, it’s become a ritual to see what new twist the producers would introduce into the game: bringing back former players, splitting the groups into multiple tribes, hiding immunity idols in the wilderness. In Survivor: Exile Island, Mark Burnett and crew have created a season with more twists than a challah

A Less Bold Speech, In Hopes of a Less Interesting Year

In the State of the Union address tonight, President George W. Bush said that America was "addicted to oil." He called for new teacher-training initiatives, congratulated new Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito and called on the country to compete vigorously with economic rivals like China and India.

Guess what? I wrote that whole

An Anchor Becomes News, and the Blast Echoes

Speaking to The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz recently, ABC’s Bob Woodruff talked about the fact that he planned to continue to report from the field as coanchor of World News Tonight. "The great danger is to overemphasize the story simply because the anchor is there," Woodruff told Kurtz.

The anchor became the story yesterday when

Oprah Clarifies Her Position: Truth, Good. Embarrassing Oprah, Very Bad

Note to self: never, ever, embarrass Oprah Winfrey. The most powerful woman in daytime television and publishing brought James Frey on her show today, after he was caught having fabricated parts of A Million Little Pieces, the memoir she had selected for her book club, and subjected him to a public flogging. No, scratch that. Flogging is

Lostwatch: Flashback to the Future

SPOILER ALERT: This post discusses last night’s episode of Lost; if you Tivoed or taped it, you may want to watch it first — and, you know, stop clicking on links with the title Lost in them in the meantime.

It was a slow night at Lostwatch headquarters, as the show devoted an episode to the character we care least about on the

If You Can't Beat 'Em…: The WB, UPN Merge

Lorelai Gilmore, meet Chris Rock. Superman, this is your new neighbor, Smackdown!  The Big Four’s two baby-sibling networks, UPN and The WB, today announced plans to combine into a single supersib, The CW, to launch in September. (The WB is owned by TIME’s parent company, Time Warner; UPN, by CBS Corp.)

The new "fifth network," to be

The West Wing: Time for the Republican to Win One

In politics,
you dump bad news at the weekend, and that was what NBC did with the expected
announcement that The West Wing will end after this season. The quality of the
often-sanctimonious drama has actually improved inversely with its ratings, the
show was invigorated by the campaign between Arnold Vinick (Alan Alda) and Matt
Santos

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