The Office is not a great show anymore, but last night’s cold open was a kind of sweet, sidelong way of looking at what a long history we have with it by now.
Tuned InTelevision
Videos
Tuned InTelevision
Tuned InTelevision
The Lagging Economic Indicator of TV Shows
Is the U.S. economy in a recovery? I am not the guy to ask. I’m not an economics or a business expert. I read the same jobs-report news that you do and I know we’ve had a couple good ones lately. But I don’t know if the jobs being created are very good, if anyone’s standard of living is increasing, or if it’s sustainable. I don’t know if …
Bully: A Hard Documentary, but Does It Deserve to Be Rated R?
Tuned InTelevision
SXSW Watch: The Transmedia of Top Chef
One of the TV buzzwords I’ve been hearing this year at South by Southwest is “transmedia.” Which, you may be surprised to find, is not a reference to RuPaul’s Drag Race. It’s the new term of art for using various other media platforms to create entertainment associated with a show, and one of the more aggressive networks at it has been …
SimCity Returns: Maxis Calls PC Game ‘Rebirth of Franchise’
SimCity! It’s back! Or wait, did it ever really leave?
Tuned InNews Media
CNN Poaches Palin From Fox (For a Few Minutes)
CNN deployed its resources across the country for yesterday’s Super Tuesday primaries and caucuses, as far as the vast state of Alaska, to which it sent a single camera crew. And of all Alaska’s cities and towns from which to cover Alaska’s Republican caucus, it happened to pick Wasilla, because of—oh, no particular reason, right? As …
Watch Another Trailer for Men in Black 3
Or, further proof that Will Smith keeps a painting of himself locked in an attic somewhere. Though it’s been a decade since Smith and Tommy Lee Jones starred in Men in Black II, the former Fresh Prince doesn’t look a day over however old he was in 2003. Which is perhaps why he’s still able to convincingly deliver lines like, “You know, I …
Watch a New Game of Thrones Season 2 Trailer
Spring is coming, and with it the resumption of HBO’s hit series Game of Thrones. The second trailer for Season 2 begins, as the first, with the oily-voiced narration of Varys, the eunuch Master of Secrets at the heart of most …
Tuned InNews Media
Limbaugh and the Imus Effect: Has Rush’s Mouth Written a Check His Sponsors Won’t Cash?
Rush Limbaugh‘s repeated, ugly insults last week against Sandra Fluke — a Georgetown law student who testified in favor of insurance coverage of contraception — were terrible on plenty of levels. They were sick: the idea of …
Tuned InRemembrance
RIP Davy Jones, The Monkees’ Daydreamboat
I wasn’t born when The Monkees went on the air, so I don’t recall Davy Jones as my first teen idol. But he was probably my first image of what a teen idol was, thanks to his appearance in the ’70s Brady Bunch episode, “Getting Davy Jones,” in which superfan Marcia Brady overpromises that she can get the pop star to perform at her school …
Tuned InNews Media
Election Watch: Hell Fails to Break Loose in Michigan
That sound you heard after 10 pm ET last night? It was the sound of all hell not breaking loose in the Republican primary. Mitt Romney was declared the winner of the Michigan primary, sparing us–or depriving us, depending on your tastes–a weeklong (at least) orgy of speculation on the political shows of whether Romney was in a …
Tuned InTelevision
Lou Dobbs Vs. Kids’ Movies: Does Children’s Morality Have a Well-Known Liberal Bias?
It’s got to be challenging right now to be a conservative pundit looking for things to scare the audience about, in the current moment of culture-war one-upmanship. I mean, once Rick Santorum has gotten to the point of warning against college education as a scheme of liberal indoctrination, where do you go from there?
For Lou Dobbs, …
Tuned InTelevision
What Do We Want from the Oscars?
It’s not a rhetorical question. I actually want to know.