They’re not just kids; they’re human shields. Doug Hyun / HBO

What’s more destructive to a relationship? Is it infidelity? Is it children? Or could it be… TiVo?

If TV, after all, is the perfect tool for conversation-avoidance for a troubled couple, then TiVo promises to raise the medium to new heights of efficient, commercial-free, …

Roberto D’Este/CBS

“Sugar is the new oil,” says rum-family scion Alex (Jimmy Smits) on CBS’s Cane. Which is a not so subtle way of trying to tell the viewer, “Cane is the new Dallas.”

It’s not, but let’s indulge them for a minute and continue the parallel. It’s also a rich-family saga, but in this case, the family is the Duques, a …

NBC Photo: Michael Yarish

Big round of new-series and returning-shows premieres last night (see below for the Heroes thread). I reviewed some yesterday; now it’s your turn. Did Chuck suck? Should Journeyman… um… returneyman? I don’t have any rhymes for The Big Bang Theory or How I Met Your Mother, but you get the point.

Also, feel …

SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t watched last night’s Heroes–hey! Stop drinking that coffee and look at me when I’m talking to you!

Paul Drinkwater / NBC

The downside to all that closure that Heroes bends over backwards to give you is that, once an arc ends, the show has to tap-dance pretty fast to set new stories in motion. Gotta get …

I would be remiss if I did not tell you that TV’s most awesomely weird children’s show (and not-children’s show), Nick Jr.’s Yo Gabba Gabba!, was airing new episodes this week.

And that–for those parents who are not ashamed of further obsessing over their kids’ obsessions–the show has a behind-the-scenes production blog.

And if I did …

Monty Brinton/CBS

We’ve waited four months for Barney to complete that adjective, and he does, on the season return of How I Met Your Mother. The episode itself is an average one at best–including a dull guest role by Mandy Moore as Ted’s rebound squeeze and a slightly better Enrique Iglesias turn as Robin’s–but there are promising …

NBC Photo: Mitch Haddad; Robert Voets/CBS; NBC Photo: David Moir

Why did Monday become nerd night on network TV? Maybe it’s because it’s far enough away from Sci Fi Channel’s Friday night programming block; maybe it’s because viewers need a refuge of programming with more testosterone than Monday Night Football yet less estrogen than Dancing …

U.S. National Archives and Records Administration / FOX

No new-series premieres from last night for you to postmortem (is that a verb?), although we did have the first night of The War. There will be no Ken Burns Watch here at Tuned In, partly because I’m not sure the documentary lends itself well to that, partly because I’ve already …

I was thinking the other day–fielding a pitch from the HD Weather Channel, which I did not know existed–that in writing about TV today, you have to make a lot of judgments about how your audience watches TV. Do they have (or care about HD)? Do they watch on a big screen or a tiny media player? What channels do they have access to?

And …

The last in the series. I’m not sure whether this qualifies as a scoop or not, but I don’t believe I’ve seen Burns say that he plans to make a Vietnam documentary elsewhere (not that I’ve scoured all the clips):

What kind of distance in time do you need from an event to feel comfortable making a documentary about it?

KB: I think what …

Did you conceive this project before–

KB & LN: –before 9/11.

KB: And most of the interviews were done–and I’m thinking particularly of Sam Hynes’ interview–before the invasion of Iraq. So that when he says, in the beginning of the film, “There’s no such thing as a good war, only necessary wars and just wars,” and then we call …