Because Time Inc. reader surveys indicate the most-read blog posts are those which detail what a TV critic got in the mail that day, allow me to share: I finally got ABC’s fall-pilot mailing. Good? Bad? We shall see, but ABC runs away with the prize for Most Threatening Legal Warning of the 2006-07 season:

"The ABC legal team has asked

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Call me an idiot, call me naive, but perhaps alone among TV critics, I actually expected Tuesday Night Book Club would be good. The CBS reality series, which debuted last night, follows a set of Arizona housewives as they work out problems in their families and love lives and dish about them over cocktails and trash literature. Sex,

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Over the past few weeks, I’ve been getting DVD mailers of the broadcast networks’ new fall-series pilots. When ABC arrives, this week, I’ll have the full set of fall previews. Movie critics have the film-festival circuit. (Cannes! Venice! Toronto!) TV critics have the delivery guy. (DHL! UPS! FedEx!)

You’d think that this would

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Tonight, NBC debuts Windfall, a drama about a group of friends and strangers whose lives change after they split a $386 million winning lottery ticket. It’s an interesting premise–marriages are threatened, families feud, claims are challenged–and though it’s a little tepid and slow I might review it at more length in the regular

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Fans of HBO’s Shakespeare-with-Tourette’s Western have reason to rejoice, or at least to mourn a little less: Deadwood will not be fed to the pigs after the season 3, which starts Sunday. Not exactly. After weeks of confusion, in which the network seemed ready to let one of its highest-rated and most-praised remaining dramas die a season

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It’s appropriate that The Sopranos’ halfway-through-the-season finale should end at Christmas: it left so many shoes waiting to drop that they were like stockings hung by the chimney.

Consider the number of storylines raised early in the season left unresolved and in most cases barely moved forward. The young, gun-buying Arab

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"And to our top story this morning, which is Katie," said Matt Lauer, on Katie Couric’s last day of waking up America for NBC. On behalf of the Today show staff, let Tuned In just say how glad we all are that no one blew up the White House this morning. Boy, would it have been awkward putting that in the number two slot!

Fortunately, it

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Denis Leary’s firefighter dramedy Rescue Me returns for its third season tonight on FX, and while I recommend that you catch it for all the reasons I’ve written about before–Leary’s acid-dripping, self-destructive performance, the show’s treatment of machismo and self-deception and Irish Catholic guilt–another reason is that it has a

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SPOILER ALERT: If you don’t yet know what happens when you don’t press the "Execute" button in the hatch, press the "Back" button on your browser.

Jack, Kate and Sawyer captured by the Others. The hatch blown up. Locke and Eko possibly blown to smithereens. Michael and Walt on a boat. Sayid, Sun and Jin on another boat. Claire and

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In another sign of the deep, lightning-fast changes sweeping the news media, ABC today took the radical step of naming an old white man as sole anchor of World News Tonight. Charles Gibson–originally floated as a likely successor to Peter Jennings when Jennings died last year–got the job he was passed over for in December, when ABC

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SPOILER ALERT: This post reveals plot points from last night’s Sopranos, including the one you’re probably wondering about.

Nobody changes: this, if anything, is the relentless message of The Sopranos. For six seasons, the characters have conformed to their patterns, their upbringing and their form despite their best efforts: Carmela,

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The upfronts are over, the stars are jetting back to L.A., and the ad executives are dry-cleaning the spilled Campari off their party suits. The fall schedule annoucements found 5 or 6 networks—depending whom you count—in wildly different situations: NBC flailing, ABC feeling good but filling a lot of holes, Fox and CBS

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Everyone, if they live long enough, becomes their parents. For Fox, that moment came today, at its upfront at the Armory in Manhattan. It unveiled a schedule that promised stability and consistency, replacing only a few shows. It previewed two traditional sitcoms, one starring Brad Garrett, and boasted a Jerry Bruckheimer procedural.

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