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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mq5lIwkupJU]
Over at Maclean’s, Jaime Weinman (a great, vastly knowledgeable critic you should be reading regularly) has an insightful post wrestling with the question of why Parks and Recreation has a vastly improved second season, but it didn’t result in improved ratings. He posits that the …
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When I wrote my print TIME feature on the end of Lost, one section I had to drop for space had to do with how much money ABC was asking for ads in the finale—reportedly $900,000 a pop—even though Lost was not close to the highest-rated program on TV. That fact points to something that has potential to shape the business, and thus …
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Test Pilot is a semiregular feature sharing my first impressions of the pilots for next fall’s shows. These aren’t reviews, since these pilots can be rewritten, recast and retooled before airing, and the shows that eventually get on the air can prove much better or worse. But, premature opinions are why God invented the Internet, so …
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Over the weekend, Survivor officially turned ten years old, having given us a decade of assorted and sundry competition reality shows (as well as the inspiration for Lost). Yesterday, on Survivor’s tenth birthday, the website Reality Blurred delivered quite a present: a leaked copy of the nine-page rule book given contestants on the …
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Brief spoilers for last night’s Breaking Bad coming up after the jump:
Tuned InRemembrance
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qUOrIJqCto]
Gary Coleman, best-known for his performance as a child actor as Arnold Jackson in Diff’rent Strokes, died today of a brain hemorrhage. He was 42.
Coleman will be remembered by people who grew up with his catchphrase (“Whatchoo talkin’ ’bout, Willis?”) and his portrayal of a spunky …
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Brief spoilers for FlashForward’s SeasonSeries finale coming up.
It is cheap and too easy, I realize, to cite FlashForward as a comparison point to Lost’s finale. If you believe Lost failed, then another show’s greater failings do not make it any better. But in the end, it’s still instructive. Having a plan from the beginning does not …
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Because of a mad rush of stuff at the end of last week and the beginning of this one, I didn’t manage end-of-season writeups on any of NBC’s Thursday comedies except The Office. Tuned Inlanders have asked about them since then, and thought I might as well post something an even week later. Briefly, then, and starting with Community …
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It was a hard night for any show that did not involve young people paired up with aging singers. But American Idol’s ratings, while still enviable, have been on the decline, so somebody had to have been watching something else. Perhaps it was you! Any Criminal Minds partisans in Tuned Inland? (Ah, Paget Brewster—how sad you still …
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In the Lost podcast I posted Tuesday, Maureen Ryan, Ryan McGee and I hashed over how our thoughts on the finale had evolved over a couple days. Before the finale aired, I had considered following up a few days after the finale with a second review.
I’m not going to do that, yet anyway. In part, I’m just burned out on Lost analysis for …
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Spoilers for the finale of 2010’s American Idol, after the jump:
Tuned InRemembrance
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCHIM-bGiTI]
Art Linkletter died today at age 97. Over his decades as an entertainer, he had many roles—radio host, TV host, celebrity endorser, comic, anti-drug crusader—but his best-known work came in TV and radio shows based on a simple idea: that ordinary people are tremendously …
TIME takes a look at some of the absolutely terrible films that have been cynically pitched at female audiences.
