Tuned In
Also in this week’s print TIME, I recommend the long-overdue complete series set of The State, which I worshipped on MTV when it started airing in the early ’90s. I had plans to expand on my brief Short List review for the blog. Ah, sweet foolish dreams! Other blog topics, screeners to screen, and print-magazine work demand otherwise, …
Tuned In
My Tuned In column in the print TIME this week is, unsurprisingly, about the media welter around Michael Jackson. It is, to be honest, basically an amalgamation of my two posts earlier this week about the news coverage of his death and about the memorial ceremony (which, among other things, responded to his media treatment), so if …
Tuned InUncategorized
In the issue of TIME that came out last Friday and that was not about Michael Jackson’s Death, I have a column about the rash of primetime medical shows breaking out (rash? medical? get it?), and how they reflect the health care debate going on in Washington. If you’ll journey back with me to 1994, you’ll recall that the last time …
Tuned In
One of the wonderful things about working in the magazine business is that every now and then you work on a “long-lead” project; which is to say, something that you do well in advance, and then forget that you have ever written, until, as happened this morning, it gets published.
For a Time International package looking back at …
Tuned InUncategorized
Elsewhere in this week’s TIME, I review Showtime’s Nurse Jackie, with Edie Falco, which debuts Monday. I like it, a lot, and you can read why here.
A brief note on the headline. The original headline was “Our Bitter Angels,” which plays off the whole angel of mercy / fallen angel contrast I set up in the lede (and which the …
Tuned InUncategorized
My column in the print TIME magazine looks at the late-night changeover that I’ve been writing about all this week, as a sign of changing eras—not just in the hosts’ sensibilities but in the medium itself:
It may just be coincidence, but The Tonight Show somehow seems to know when America is going through a generational moment.
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Tuned In
Elsewhere at time.com, our editors have posted our summer arts preview, the (shorter) print version of which ran earlier in TIME, the magazine object. Caveat emptor: the TV entries are about new shows I’m looking forward to or curious about—not shows that I have actually seen, so it’s more a “what could be good” list than a “what’s …
Tuned In
My column in this week’s TIME, which went to press in the middle of the upfronts, looks at how TV, both broadcast and cable, is adapting its programming to the recession and otherwise fumbling towards a grip on the zeitgeist this year:
If you’ve been watching HGTV in the past few years, you may have become seduced by its lavish
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Tuned In
You may not believe this, but I planned my latest print column, on the fecund families of cable’s we-have-a-jillion-kids reality shows, well before the latest explosion over Jon & Kate Plus 8’s Jon Gosselin’s female “friend”:
The downsizing of fictional TV families left a gap that cable has happily filled. But where the Bradys et
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Tuned InUncategorized
Because of scheduling considerations in the print TIME, my review of the Glee pilot—debuting after American Idol’s final sing-off May 19—is in the issue on newsstands today.
I like the pilot. A lot. I have been referencing and tweeting abut Glee so often since seeing it that I am probably in danger of overhyping it, so let …
Tuned In
If my employer is going to go through the trouble of creating an enormous promotional franchise like the TIME 100, I’ll be damned if I’m not going to get at least a blog post out of it.
The list is up. I should say up front that I had little to do with choosing it, other than throwing in my picks for the massive initial list of …
Tuned In
In the issue of TIME that went on newsstands Friday, I have a page on the biggest—arguably the only—network-TV hit of the 2008-09 season:
We all know by now the problems with major-network TV. There are too many other channels, other media, other diversions. The audience has been sliced and diced into confetti, and it is no longer
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Tuned InNews Media
My Tuned In column this week peers into the hour of extra-strength apocalyptic demagogue-a-tainment that is Fox News’ Glenn Beck show:
On March 23, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner unveiled the Obama Administration’s toxic-bank-assets plan. The stock markets cheered the news, sending the Dow up 497 points.
This meant one thing:
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