From the Wish-I-Had-Thought-of-It department, Newsday’s Verne Gay has a great post paralleling the troubles of NBC with those of its advertiser and former My Own Worst Enemy product-placer, General Motors.

There are so many ways you can go with this. I probably would have been much more glib: overinvested in a product line that was …

While chronicling my week in TiVo-service hell last week, there’s one thing I didn’t point out: I actually probably got better service than the average customer would have in the same situation. The average customer—as opposed to a TV critic—wouldn’t have had contact numbers at TiVo to call to get technical support after a morning …

I don’t think I’m one of those bitter critics who hates everything on TV. But in 2008, I sometimes felt like one, especially as it came time to compile my top-10 lists for the end of the year. This was the toughest year I can remember to fill out a list, and I can only partly blame this situation on the strike. Yes, there was less new …

In addition to a suspect can of energy drink, TNT sent several episodes of its new heist show, Leverage, starring Timothy Hutton. I will confess that I did not get through all of them: once it was clear that it was basically Hu$tle with a moral streak (right down to the by-now-standard Get Shorty style soundtrack), I didn’t see the …

Though I suspect a lot of people will be declaring—as we get into year-end roundup and critic’s-list season—that this was 30 Rock’s year, really what it has been is Tina Fey’s year. She’s on the cover of Vanity Fair, she was the showbiz star of the election with her Palin impersonation and she’s a pop-cultural obsession of the …

On the first night of HBO’s House of Saddam miniseries, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein is being shown a prototype of a monument being built to him, a pair of arms bearing crossed swords. It’s very small, Saddam says. The flustered demonstrator explains, nervously and cautiously, that it’s just a model. Saddam laughs. “I was …

SPOILER ALERT: Actually, I don’t think anything in the post below constitutes a spoiler of last night’s Office, but if you’re leery of that sort of thing, skip it. 

A year or so ago, I traded e-mails with my fellow time.com blogger Lisa Cullen, of Work in Progress. I don’t remember the original subject, but she asked, in her usual overly modest style, whether there were all that many people you could interest in reading a blog about work, as opposed to, say, politics.

Are you kidding?, I told her. …

When I saw that the cable guy who arrived to service the Cablecards in my TiVo was carrying a souped-up iPhone that he had custom-hacked himself, I knew everything would be all right. (To recap: I’d been without cable service since Friday, when my HD TiVo died; follow the long boring story backwards from here.) And sure enough, within a …

In lieu of my Tuned In column this week, I have a piece accompanying Bill Saporito’s cover story on the auto industry. As Time’s resident Michigan native (well, one of a few), I wrote what I might think of as the second in my Bob Seger series—looking at what it does to the culture of a state and a region when the decline of its …

For those of you who missed it, Time.com honcho, music critic and occasional Guitar Hero band member Josh Tyrangiel has a review of last night’s Grammy nominations spectacle on CBS. Your thoughts on the show, the noms—or Katee Sackhoff’s guest turn on Law & Order—welcomed. Was it an honor just to watch the nominations?

My TiVo may be on life support, but the DVD player still works, and midseason TV is starting to come in fast and furious. Among the screeners I’ve received is a little show by some guy who did something about vampires once. You don’t want to hear anything about it yet, do you? I didn’t think so. Ignore me as I write more after the …

My replacement TiVo finally arrived Tuesday night, with promises that getting it running would be as simple as popping out the Cablecards from the old box, putting them in the new one and re-setting up the box.

I knew it wasn’t going to be that easy, and I was right. I installed the Cablecards at nine a.m. Numerous conference calls, …