Tuned InNews Media
It’s not as if cuts in newsrooms are exactly surprising news anymore. But one of the latest in a long line of newspaper downsizings has a life-imitates-art angle for Tuned In’s fans of The Wire: The Baltimore Sun is expected to cut 20 percent of its newsroom staff.
Watch your back, Gus Haynes.
Tuned In
The “Hire a Deadwood Vet” public-service campaign continues to bear fruit, as Timothy Olyphant, Deadwood’s Sheriff Bullock, joins the cast of Damages for next year’s season 2. Sez FX:
Olyphant’s character will become tangled in the life of Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne) as she deals with both her recent personal loss and the escalating
…
Tuned In
So Locke is dead. Or “dead.” Or… do we need to coin an adjective for the sort of dead-but-possibly-not, well-maybe-actually-dead-but-nonetheless-having-a-big-part-in-the-story state of being that is becoming common on Lost? Dëd, maybe?
In any case, we can all agree that the producers will not be foolish …
Tuned InUncategorized
The warning of U.S. Retro Secretary Anson Williams was a few years off, but it has finally come true: we have run out of past. Last night, VH1 aired I Love the New Millennium, one of its trademark specials wallowing in nostalgia for, um, a few years ago. Remember Jayson Blair? Remember McGriddles? Remember William Hung? Remember …
Last year the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art decided that its Takashi Murakami exhibition, now at the Brooklyn Museum, required a Louis Vuitton boutique within the show as an actual gallery, not just as a gift shop. This was supposed to illustrate the way that Murakami straddled the world of art and merchandising. Why they …
Tuned In
According to The Media and Society, you are Very Concerned about the Suddenly Pressing Topic of Teen Pregnancy. Perhaps you are concerned because of this. Or this. Or this. Or this. Or even this. Whatever the cause, it would take a very dull TV executive not to connect all these dots and see that …
Tuned In
I just realized that it is Wednesday morning and I haven’t mentioned the fact that NBC named Tom Brokaw as interim host of Meet the Press through the election. The explanation requires a confession: though I write about the media and follow politics more than is probably healthy, I’m not really a fan of the Sunday shows. Having to watch …
Tuned InUncategorized
The broadcast-industry project of turning Idiocracy into a documentary continued apace last night, as ABC debuted two very different twists on the concept of dressing up people in funny costumes and making them fall into crap. And both, in their own ways, were examples of how American TV takes a …
Earlier this week the Brits announced the choices for the next two projects to fill what they call The Fourth Plinth. That’s the pedestal in Trafalgar Square that’s given over to a different work of public sculpture every year or so. The next work to go there will be what you might call a bit of performance art, with the public as the …
Tuned In
Remember Rescue Me? FX must be a little worried that by the time Denis Leary’s fireman ensemble returns next year, you’ll have plain forgotten it. To that end, the channel debuts the first of a summer series of roughly five-minute Rescue Me minisodes tonight …
Tuned In
When CBS’s Swingtown started a few weeks ago, it was one of a handful of summer debuts I was actually looking forward to. Three weeks into its run, I think it’s a very good show. It’s also a bad show. And I’m not sure which side of the show will get the upper hand.
As was …
Tuned InUncategorized
You might think that the editors of Entertainment Weekly had already devised and published every pop culture special-list issue possible. But you would be wrong. In the current issue, Time’s sister publication unveils what they call the “New Classics”—a label that bravely manages to evoke New Coke and Classic …
Tuned InUncategorized
I didn’t get around to mentioning it earlier, but if you haven’t seen it yet, Alex Witchel has a lengthy cover story in the New York Times magazine on Mad Men and its writer-creator, Matthew Weiner. There are some mild spoilers—notably, one related to what year and time it is when season 2 debuts—but the piece is less interesting for …
