Quick spoilers for last night’s American Idol selection for finalists:
Last night on American Idol‘s two-hour[!] results episode—the reason DVR fast-forward buttons were invented—America and the judges’ panel winnowed down 24 semifinalists to …
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Dead Tree Alert: Anthony Bourdain's Guilty Pleasure
Surprise: My column in the redesigned culture section of TIME this week is not about Charlie Sheen! The other day I posted briefly about the season-debut Haiti episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations. For the column I screened more of the upcoming episodes and spoke to Bourdain about how his show uses food as a medium to explore …
Game of Thrones' Creator Adding Book to Series
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When HBO announced that it was picking up the fantasy series Game of Thrones, many fans of the source books rejoiced—but with a caveat. The book series, George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire was planned as a seven-book series (it started as a trilogy, then grew), but Martin …
The Morning After: Troubadours
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It’s easy to engage an audience by making TV shows about music they love. This has been a truism for PBS for many a pledge-drive season now, so it’s no surprise the network would air a show like last night’s American Experience Masters, …
Top Chef Watch: Family Style
Quick spoilers for last night’s Top Chef coming up:
So before you all decide that I’m a heartless bastard, let me stipulate that last night’s “Give Me Your Huddled Masses” episode of Top Chef touched me in all the ways it intended to. I did indeed get verklempt at Michael’s memory of his grandmother’s gnocchi (a much-needed …
Idol Watch: My Top Five Women (Or So)
It was American Idol‘s turn to show off its dozen female semifinalists last night, and the ladies were… shiny. Arrayed in a sea of glitter and riding waves of curls (among men and women alike, this seems to be the Season of Hair on Idol), the women tried to sing their way into America’s top five. My choices for the five of the …
The Good Wife Watch: Forget It, Alicia. It's China.
Quick spoilers for last night’s The Good Wife coming up:
The Morning After: The Best Show That I Wasn't Watching
I was eager for NBC’s Parenthood when it debuted last season, but I found that it settled into a temperate zone: good and well-performed enough to be unobjectionable, but not absorbing enough that I felt compelled to keep up with it. Critic-triage took hold and I lost the thread of the show going into the second season. On the …
Idol Watch: My Top Five Guys (Or So)
American Idol entered the semifinals last night, as the twelve remaining guys battled for five (non-wild-card) spots in the final and the new judging panel strutted its stuff for a primetime voting audience for the first time this season. After the jump, my top five picks (based only on last night’s performances) and one wild …
House Watch: Everybody Lies!
Over at sister blog Healthland, TIME’s John Cloud has returned to the House Watch, where he finds the medical procedural turning to an old favorite theme: lies, and the patients who tell them:
The episode opens with a man named Bert scrubbing a floor drenched in blood. His wife calls, and he tells the show’s first lie. Bert says he’s in
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Charlie Sheen Has a Friend in Piers
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After an absence from TV interviews of several hours, Charlie Sheen went on CNN last night to favor Piers Morgan with a last-minute, live hourlong interview. And if you were concerned that Morgan would do the same kind of softball interviews that his predecessor Larry King did, this one proved …
The Morning After: Discomfort Food
Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations returned on Travel Channel last night with a moving, sometimes discomfiting visit to post-earthquake Haiti. I’ve always liked No Reservations, not just for Bourdain’s foulmouthed sense of humor but because it approaches food and travel as more than entertainments. It starts from the premise that what …
Interview With the Warlock: Charlie Sheen Puts On Another Show
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Did Charlie Sheen hire Rod Blagojevich’s media handler? Over the past week, as you’re well aware, Sheen self-immolated, lambasting CBS and Two and a Half Men creator Chuck Lorre for putting his sitcom on hiatus for the actor to get …