Last fall, Rosie O’Donnell stormed onto the set of The View like a hurricane making landfall, swelling the ratings and becoming a constant publicity machine for the show after taking over from Meredith Vieira. But storms don’t blow forever, and at the top of this morning’s edition of The View, Hurricane Rosie announced that she’s leaving …

It’s Idol Gives Back week on American Idol, and my reviews are posted. The plan to leverage the show’s fan base (and advertisers) for charities in the U.S. and Africa is greatly appreciated. It’s also greatly weird, in the context of a show that is, most weeks, a tough-nosed, cruel-to-be-kind competition. There was a strange dissonance, …

It took a bit longer than predicted, but the Washington Post reports that the Federal Communications Commission will next week recommend that Congress start regulating TV violence (possibly even on cable), as it now does obscenity.

And so the fight to solve the apparently widespread problem of young children accidentally watching 24 and …

NBC Photo: Paul Drinkwater

So the good news: Linderman, now the head cheese at Primatech, wants to heal the world. The bad news: to accomplish that, I and a few million of my fellow New Yorkers need to be blown up. “.07 Percent,” the title of the episode, refers to the portion of the human population who need to die to achieve his goal: …

Just to show I’m a good sport, I thought I’d mention it’s TV Turnoff Week again. The good folks at TV Turnoff Network are inexhaustible, but I’m not, so here’s my case against TV Turnoff Week from last year, served up for you again like the Stamberg-family cranberry relish recipe NPR brings out every Thanksgiving. And here’s another …

HBO

Father’s Day came early on The Sopranos last night, and, typically, it was celebrated not with cards and neckties but with fisticuffs and Oedipal showdowns, actual and remembered. There was Tony, recalling his father’s salad days with Uncle Junior and Paulie Walnuts, and his current conflicted feelings toward “Uncle Paulie”; Uncle …

NBC Photo: Virginia Sherwood

TV criticism is half review, half prediction. On the one hand you’re assessing whether the episode(s) of a new series that you’ve seen are any good; on the other, you’re gauging whether the premise, characters, writing and voice can hold up in the long run. It’s a little like reviewing a wine by picking a …

In the current Time, some thoughts on the Web 2.0-ness of the Virginia Tech shooting and its aftermath. Half the length of my usual columns and thus, at least by that standard, twice as good.

In the essay I liken Cho’s Quicktime manifesto to a deranged parody of a MySpace page, by which I don’t mean that users of social-networking sites …