Results tagged “fallon”

There was some great TV on last night, with "Sons of Anarchy" continuing to get back on track after some silliness a couple weeks ago. On the more depressing side of things, "Frontline" continued to remind us that we are still riding a unicycle on the precipice of economic disaster. Look forward to more stark details from PBS as Margaret Warner, correspondent for "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer", is traveling in Pakistan with Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and will be reporting on the region tonight and all this week.

Finally Shark Week is back on Discovery - and it's about time because other than Shark Week and IFC's "Bollywood Hero" (on Thursday), this is one dead week of TV. --- This week the TCA gave it's annual "Program of the Year" award to "Battlestar Galactica", with HBO scoring more awards than any other network. [Hey TCA, ain't it about time you offered LAist membership? We write more about TV than a lot of your members do.]

The economy is claiming the viability of Hollywood's 2nd largest prop house, 20th Century Props. The company will be auctioning off its 93,000 items starting on July 28th, including pieces from the movies Cleopatra and Titanic, as well as the TV series "The X-Files" among many others.

The Emmys were announced this morning, and you can check out the complete list here. "30 Rock" came away with a record-breaking 22 nominations and "Mad Men" garnered the most nominations for a drama, with 16. Despite the Academy tinkering with the process, all the actor nominees are virtually the same as last year other than Jeremy Piven (finally) not making the list. Creative Arts Emmys will be presented on September 12th while the big primetime show will be on September 20th.

Farrah Fawcett passed away today in Los Angeles at age 62. Although she gained a lot of notoriety from her role on "Charlie's Angels", a hugely popular swimsuit poster, and a disoriented appearance on "The Late Show With David Letterman" in 1997, Fawcett was a truly gifted actress (rent Extremeties or The Apostle) - rest in peace Farrah.

We loved HBO's "Rome" and its Marc Anthony, James Purefoy, is playing the lead in NBC's "The Philanthropist" which premieres tonight. The series is getting major hype but we haven't received any screeners from NBC which makes us suspicious that the show isn't all its cracked up to be. Purefoy's involvement is enough to get us interested in the first episode - we know we can always switch over to "Gordon Ramsay's F Word" on BBC America if "The Philanthropist" falls short.

As we said a couple weeks ago, we went to France for a couple weeks where we didn't watch much French TV because, well, there really wasn't anything worth watching other than the French Open and Manchester United vs. Barcelona. Now our uneducated opinion has supporting proof: in 2008 only 13 of the top 100 scripted TV shows in France were actually French. American-produced TV programs took the biggest slice at 57. Who says we don't export anything?

Shows get their renewals due to their populaity right? Now there's a new tool for measuring the "online engagement" of TV viewers called the TV Fandex. The first week of Fandex measurement has shown that HBO's "True Blood" has the highest level of online engagement of any TV program, go figure. If the series stays as good as last night's episode, "True Blood" will rank very high for the rest of its season.

Weekend Edition Our thoughts are with the family of veteran newsman, Walter Cronkite, who is reportedly gravely ill. If you were a kid in the '70s, chances are that Cronkite is still the voice and face of the news to you. | The late night battle between Letterman and Conan is getting tighter. Conan still has a slight lead but this is rapidly closing and the two should achieve parity in the next few weeks but we're heading into summer which usually means viewers will spend a few less hours in front of the TV.

Thank you for the comments on yesterday's column - looks like Conan has created a winner with the new "Tonight Show".

The TV Junkie is back from two weeks in France where we didn't watch much of any TV but we're still addicted, so here we are. What we missed was the debut of the new "Tonight Show With Conan O'Brien" - tell us how you think Conan is doing in the earlier time slot - Comment Please! Speaking of "The Tonight Show", the exceptional Bill Burr will be appearing tonight as the first stand-up comedian to grace the new version of "The Tonight Show".

Memorial Day Weekend Edition The 2008-2009 season which ended this week has seen the networks' ratings collectively drop 16%. FOX remained on top for the 5th consecutive year but even they fell 13% in viewership, a fall attributed to not having the Super Bowl as well as "American Idol" sinking in viewership. Only CBS saw an increase in viewership (11%) which was fueled by the success of "The Mentalist".

We also can't believe that on June 24th MTV's "Real World" will return for it's 22nd season. Has anything remarkable happened in the last 17 seasons? Oh wait, this season is essentially an episode for Cancun.

NBC has announced that the first guests on "The Tonight Show With Conan O'Brien" will be Will Ferrell and Pearl Jam. | We were pleased that AMC's "Breaking Bad" won at Monday's Peabody Awards ceremony but we weren't happy to read that "Saturday Night Live"'s Lorne Michaels is considering a "MacGruber" movie. "MacGruber" is funny for the 20 second segments it has on "SNL" but it doesn't have legs beyond that.

Tonight is the two-hour season finale of "24" (haters can move on please). We're already looking forward to season 7 which will supposedly occur in New York City and will be the "most realistic" season yet. How is that even [snark] possible? We admit we have shamelessly been wasting a ton of hours on the "24 - Special Ops" iPhone game. A recent high point for us was the chance to see a Janeane Garofalo performance where she read some of her "Janis Gold vs. Chloe O'Brien" dialogue.

One of the things we really liked about "Fringe" was the fact that the commercials were limited - a segment would end with an announcement of "Fringe will be back in 60 seconds" and sure enough, the show would be back on, we even timed it. FOX did this by charging advertisers more for each break and then limiting the breaks. The experiment is over and "Fringe" will now be as riddled with commercials as any other show.

New Web Series: Fans of stand-up comedy will enjoy "ROFL" which starts today and will be updated weekly with hand-picked tidbits of comedy from around the country. The show gets posted to Revision3 internet TV.

The CW announced Monday night that they would be giving back control of Sunday programming to their affiliate stations. It's been over a year and a half since The CW launched a new program for Sunday nights, "Life Is Wild", which was very short-lived. It appears that the network can't fund a couple hours of competitive TV on Sundays and that the affiliates can make more money hawking reruns of long-dead series rather than original programming from The CW.

Today we sadly note the passing of the always hilarious Dom DeLuise, who died at age 75 in Santa Monica last night. DeLuise was primarily known for his roles in movies like the Cannonball Run franchise with Burt Reynolds, as well as several of Mel Brooks' fillms, particularly Blazing Saddles and History of the World Part I. DeLuise actually got his start in TV on staples like "The Munsters"

Unless you are a Chicago Bulls or Boston Celtics fan (yeah!) this weekend's TV was kind of boring other than Sunday's "Breaking Bad" on AMC, which was excellent as usual. We wonder why the premiere of season 2 of "Ashes to Ashes" was pulled off of BBC America - it was a highlight for Saturday and pretty much the only alternative to basketball.

Weekend Edition

The TV Junkie Plan: "SoCal Connected", "Parks and Recreation", "The Office", "30 Rock", "Southland", Kimmel, Fallon.

The TV Junkie Plan: "Better Off Ted", "Lost" (maybe), "MythBusters" (if not "Lost"), "South Park", "Reno 911!", Letterman, Fallon.

The TV Junkie Plan: "Chuck", "24", "Doing Da Vinci", Letterman, Fallon

The TV Junkie Plan: "Better Off Ted", "Lost", "South Park", "Reno 911!", Leno, Fallon

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's season finale of "Damages" promises to be a nail-biter - we know where we'll be at 10pm. As it approaches, we wonder how there could possibly a third season after this, but that's the result of great writing. Unfortunately it's conflicting with the season premiere of "Reno 911!" but we take solace in the fact that it airs again later, because we're cheap that way.

We love comedians Jim Gaffigan and Jamie Kaler so therefore we just kind of have to like TBS' "My Boys" which has its season premiere tonight. While the show isn't any less funny than any of the big network shows, Jim Gaffigan's bits are the highlight of every episode - we wish TBS would build a show around him as the lead, c'mon already.

Our friends over at BBC America's "Top Gear" have really done it - they have achieved unprecedented success with "Project Sipster": the creation of a car that gets 84mpg , goes from 0-60mph in 7 seconds, and whose cost was to be $7000 or less. You can see more in this video. Suck it Tesla and watch "Top Gear" on BBC America tonight at 8pm.