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Which TV Viewers Should Count?
It’s a common and understandable myth that TV shows stay on the air by getting as many viewers as possible. They don’t. In commercial television, shows stay on the air by making money, something...
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X-Factor to Bring the Pepsi (Literally) to Idol's Coke
When Fox signed up Simon Cowell to produce The X-Factor singing competition after leaving American Idol, it was perhaps not the ideal situation—how Idol will survive Cowell’s loss remains to be...
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eTrade Baby Curses Jets Once More
I can sometimes take the pulse of the Universal TV Watching Mind by noticing when there’s a sudden spike on traffic for a year-old post on my blog. Judging by this morning’s logs, a bunch of people are...
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The Morning After: Second Skins
The MTV drama Skins is shedding advertisers faster than its cast shed shirts in their publicity photos. The past week, when controversy over the show’s sex-and-drugs content was compounded by purported...
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The Morning After: Super Bowl Ads, the Light and the Dark Side
Thanks for my kindly masters, this was the first year in several that I did not work through the Super Bowl and into overtime reviewing every single ad for time.com—I divvied up the game with...
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Groupon: We Meant to Do That
So as I wrote this morning, Groupon seems to have alienated much of the football-watching world with its commercial last night, which began as a seemingly earnest plea about the plight of Tibet and...
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Pardon the Interruption: PBS Planning Ad Breaks Within Shows
The major difference between PBS and commercial broadcasters used to be, well, commercials. For-profit TV relied on ads, PBS didn’t. OK, maybe it had sponsors, but nothing so crass as commercials....
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The Morning After: Am I Blue?
Last night in Los Angeles, my fellow TV critics who have already arrived at the TCA press tour attended a party thrown by the Playboy Channel at Hugh Hefner’s mansion. I sat in Brooklyn and watched...
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Robo-James' Time Machine: They Were Still the One
It’s almost fall, which means that promos for new fall shows are starting to reach a crescendo. But one thing that we’ve lost amid all the multimedia advertising is what used to be a network staple:...
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Plenty of Chances to Meet Fox’s New Girl
Fox is deeply convinced that you will love Zooey Deschanel this fall in its comedy New Girl. But if you are not thus persuaded yet, then by God, Fox is going to help you learn to love her by any means...
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Campaign Video: Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em for Herman Cain
Can this insane campaign ad help keep Herman Cain from inadvertently getting himself nominated?
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The Best and Worst Super Bowl Commercials of 2012
Animals, beer, women in bikinis—all the things that one would expect from Super Bowl commercials were present. TIME grades the Super Bowl XLVI ads
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Madonna, Clint and the Rest of Super Bowl XLVI Halftime
I went into last night’s Madonna Super Bowl halftime show expecting to hate it: yet another performer whose appeal can charitably be described as “nostalgic” (see The Rolling Stones, The Who, etc.)...
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Dead Tree Alert: Law & Order: DVR; or, Confessions of an Ad-Skipping Thief
Rather than say, "How can we figure out a strategy to give consumers this technology they clearly want?" the networks' answer is, "How can we squash this convenient technology forever?"
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Disney Nixes Junk-Food Ads Aimed at Kids. Can Good Health Be Good Business?
Usually, rejecting ads for anything—tobacco, liquor, candy—is framed as the business giving something up, for altruistic or p.r. reasons. Here, Disney is suggesting that it can instead be a way of...
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You Might See A Pro-Pot Super Bowl Commercial
Earlier this summer, Intuit — the software company behind Quicken and Quickbooks — announced a brilliant marketing move. Rather than spend approximately $4 million on its own 30-second Super Bowl...
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Anchorman’s Ron Burgundy Films 70 Ads for Dodge Durango
In his hit 2004 movie Anchorman, the bombastic newsman Ron Burgundy, played by Will Ferrell, drove a gold, early-70s Pontiac Catalina (kudos to the reader who can tell us the actual model year). But...
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Go Ahead, Quote My Tweet
Movie critics are used to being blurbed in ads, but not like this. New York Times movie critic A.O. Scott opened the newspaper he writes for Saturday to find a full-page ad for the movie Inside Llewyn...
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