Results tagged “amc”

Weekend Notes: January Jones was host of "Saturday Night Live" and if Taylor Swift "nailed" her hosting duties a week ago then Jones did at least as good of a job. The key difference was the writing and the writing was definitely better for the November 7th show. Could it have been a better show? Yes, but not from anything January Jones could have done. It was so painfully obvious that the show had no idea what to do with her - most of her sketches were variations on her "Mad Men" role and most weren't very good. After an hour and a half, we still don't know if Jones is a good comedic actress, c'mon "SNL".

Weekend Edition Programming of note this weekend: "Saturday Night Live" has an odd choice for host this week: January Jones, aka Betty Draper from AMC's "Mad Men". She has a part in the obnoxiously overpromoted comedy Pirate Radio but does that make her funny? We're going to watch to find out if this turns out to be a brilliant gamble. Musical guest is the eager-to-participate-in-any-sponsorship-opportunity aka "whores", the Black Eyed Peas.

Weekend Edition

Weekend Edition The world watches an empty balloon that could be part of a stunt to get a reality show, hmmm, that makes us think that this particularly family could easily head down the "Jon & Kate Plus 8" route - and whoops, TLC is now suing Jon Gosselin. Unless there is some kind of massive intervention, nothing will end well for anyone in that family.

GO TO THE BOTTOM OF THE POST FOR "THE OFFICE" BEHIND-THE-SCENES VIDEO

George Carlin might (finally) get an Emmy if Academy voters give him props for "George Carlin: The Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize." C'mon, give an old man a break!

Weekend Edition What we can't ignore, even if we wanted to, is this Sunday's season premiere of "Mad Men" on AMC at 10pm. The "Mad Men" hype machine has been in overdrive for over a month with Banana Republic promotions, avatar generators, Esquire pictorials, Wall Street Journal profiles, Jon Hamm et al appearances on Conan/Fallon/etc. and tonight cast members of "Mad Men" will make a (doubtless hilarious and self-deprecating) appearance on E!'s "The Soup" at 10pm. We're going to be watching the premiere on Sunday - watch for the trending topic on Twitter fo sho. We also thank Jah there is no programming conflict between "True Blood" and "Mad Men".

The TV Junkie is away (back on June 8th) but we'll give you some highlights of what to watch this week, another update will be posted next week: Other than Al Pacino slated to play Dr. Kevorkian in an HBO pic, the other big highlight is that this is the final week of "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno" - catch it while you can. Wednesday: 8:00pm Season premiere of "Wipeout" (ABC) 9:00pm Series premiere of Mike Judge's "The Goode Family" (ABC)

Hasbro and the Discovery Channel(??) are forming a children's TV network together to launch sometime next year. I'm hoping to see the "MythBusters" guys blow up some My Little Ponys. --- In the kinda old news category, Disney has now bought 30% of Hulu which means ABC shows like "Lost" will now be available on the web network.

Weekend Edition

Weekend EditionLast night the TV Junkie was very fortunate to be invited to the taping of "The Soup" which will air on E! tonight at 10pm. It was a fantastic experience made all the more special by a great special guest and some hilarious shenanigans. Charming and kind host Joel McHale and executive producers KP Anderson and Edward Boyd (very fun men in their own right) gave us a few minutes for a video piece that will be posted later tonight. "The Soup" has always been a weekly gem and to see it being put together before one's eyes was an amazing experience. We're so fortunate to have this team at E! process and present a week's worth of TV and pop culture for us with just the right perspective of smart and biting humor. Watch it tonight, it's even better than usual.

Unless you are a basketball or baseball fan, this weekend's options are kind of slim - feel free to sift through our picks - what are you going to watch? If it's not on our list, let us know and we'll talk about it.

Tonight is all about the final episode of "ER" and/or how to avoid it. NBC is pretty much devoting all of its prime time programming to "ER", what with retrospectives, and the two-hour finale. We admit that we used to watch "ER" about 10 years ago because we had a girlfriend that was an "ER" addict, kind of like the way one becomes a vegetarian because one's significant other is a vegetarian. At some point though, the show jumped the shark - was it the multiple helicopter crashes? The myriad of fatal diseases stalking their way through the staff? The constant replenishment of characters so that the "young" part of a "young doctors in love" soap opera could still fit the definition?

Tonight marks the end of "Battlestar Galactica", for about 20 years until the geeks of the future resurrect it like they did the now-campy 1970s version. Some have complained that this final season swung the show onto a science-fiction track that was too science-fiction-y but the show had to return to its roots, its core, before wandering off into the cosmos.

The TV highlight of the week occurred last night with the appearance of CNBC's Jim Cramer on "The Daily Show". Jon Stewart trotted out several video clips of Cramer pontificating about how to game and mislead the markets and how rewarding it is to do so. A lot of footage was cut in order to fit the show's 1/2-hour format so if you missed the airing and/or want to see the entire interview, you can get it all at "The Daily Show".

Sunday @ 10pm features the return of AMC's incredible series, "Breaking Bad", with Bryan Cranston (pictured, right) as Walt White, the terminally-ill high school science teacher-turned meth cooker. We've been eagerly waiting for this show to resume and AMC has done a great job whetting our appetite with their sneak webisodes and other promos. Since the other stuff we like to watch on Sunday's @ 10pm are available on-demand, this is one of our prime picks of the weekend.

2008 was a year where TV saw viewership decline for at least the 8th straight year. We saw even more film stars make their way to basic cable (USA, TNT, TBS, FX, etc.) to star in their own series and we saw the big three networks make even more forays into the realm of cheap reality TV at the expense of scripted programs.

Senator Barack Obama's Wednesday night appearance on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" scored the show's biggest audience ever. Let's see what tonight's appearance by Alaska Governor Sarah Palin does for ABC's "20/20" as well as tomorrow night's Senator John McCain cameo effect on NBC's "Saturday Night Live".

It's a Jon Hamm/"Mad Men" weekend: on Saturday, the man who plays Don Draper will be hosting "Saturday Night Live" and Sunday brings us the season finale of the mult-Emmy-winning show from AMC. Both are a must watch.

If you're not heading home to hit the bottle hard after this week, more power to you. I'm not sure what solace TV will provide this weekend, what with "The Starter Wife", that, despite all the heavy hype, looks less than funny.

The incredible Louis CK debuts his one hour special "Chewed Up" on Showtime Saturday night at 11pm. Yes, last weekend we told you to check out Chris Rock's special and this one is even better. Louis CK writes a lot of Rock's material, and has written for Letterman, Conan, "SNL", and created his own (critically acclaimed but short-lived) show on HBO "Lucky Louie".

If McCain shows up for tonight's debate, make sure you have some friends over, plenty of beer, and make a drinking game out of the evening via these guidelines from Howcast. Chances are you will be plowed by 8pm.

Recession? What recession? NBC reportedly has almost sold out of ad spots for the 2009 Super Bowl and are selling the spots at prices at least 11% higher than last year.

Evanglelical totem, Sarah Palin, drew over 37 million viewers on Wednesday night, according to a report in the New York Times. This number is just shy of Obama’s record-setting 38.4 million viewers from last week's acceptance speech, dwarfed Joseph Biden's 13 million, and probably eclipsed John S. McCain's as well. Superstar or freakshow?

This weekend concludes NBC's broadcast of the XXIX Summer Olympics which has had some very enjoyable moments, not necessarily enjoyable because of NBC, but it's not like we had a lot of choice. Who knows what moments we missed in the countless events that were not broadcast, who knows what sports would have piqued the interest of Americans, if only they had exposure to them.

OK, just a couple more days to go of overexposure to Michael Phelps. Yes, he's amazing but do we need profiles of him every single night? Interesting how these profiles gloss over his 2004 DUI conviction. We know what he eats, we know how his dog snores, but we don't hear about his DUI, or his broken wrist, and other setbacks he's had over the last few years - facts which only make his story a bit more interesting but don't get the exposure as decided by NBC bigwigs.

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past year, you should know that the Olympics start this weekend. Tonight the enormous super-choreographed extravaganza known as the Opening Ceremonies will take hours of your life away from you. Over the next couple weeks, TV Junkie will show what's on Prime Time as well as any events that should be highlighted depending upon how the games go.

Shark Week winds down - I'm almost all sharked out anyways, plus the TV Junkie will be heading for a week's vacation at the beach so he was getting a little freaked out.

This weekend presents a dilemma. The big deal this weekend is the season premiere of "Mad Men" on Sunday at 10:00pm but this puts it in conflict with HBO's excellent "Generation Kill" which runs until 10:30pm but it repeats again at Midnight so that's probably the way out of this mess.

The Screen Actors Guild has officially rejected the June 30th offer from the studios. Cited among the reasons for the rejection was the fact that the major studios and networks have invested large amounts of money and/or have inked deals to distribute their content online or via video-on-demand but the contract offered actors does not account for this increased distribution. Considering that the contract would be for four years, to be locked out of that revenue was considered unreasonable.