Monthly Archives: January 2011

There are rally beards, and strike beards and holiday beards. And the beard grown by Conan O’Brien, the lanky talk show host with the cascading pompadour, was one that first marked his ugly parting from NBC. “I grew a beard because I hate shaving,” he told visiting reporters on the set of his TBS show. [...]

Gregarious “So You Think You Can Dance” judge Mary Murphy will be back as permanent judge this season. But she won’t be doing much of her signature screams. Murphy, recovering from throat cancer that kept her from the show in part last season, will be laying off the shrieks that accompanied her call for the [...]

Here’s something that never happens: A show that has closed shop and been off the air for two years suddenly returns, by popular demand. “The Game,” which played three seasons on The CW and played in sporadic cable reruns since then, is back with a fourth season full of new episodes starting tonight on BET. [...]

The heyday of the African-American family sitcom didn’t die with UPN, it’s simply moved to cable. In addition to TBS where “Tyler Perry’s House of Payne” begat “Meet the Browns” and “Are We There Yet?” there are two new African-American sitcoms premiering this week on cable. TV One debuts a new sitcom “Love That Girl!” [...]

It may be one of the signature seconds of “Laugh-In,” the influential and insurrectionist 1960s sketch humor: Nixon saying the hot catch phrase of the day, immediately before the 1968 President election: “Sock It to Me?” Up until then, politicians didn’t cross paths with TV variety shows. But Nixon was a friend of show producer [...]

The least expected member of a new comedy series may be Carrie Brownstein, the former member of Sleater-Kinney and sometime rock journalist who combines with Fred Armisen of “Saturday Night Live” (and director Jonathan Krisel to make “Porlandia,” which starts on IFC this month. “It wasn’t something that I thought of doing when I was [...]

Jeff Bridges, who made dozens of movies, and won a handful of Oscar nominations, snared his first Academy Award last year for “Crazy Heart” and is in theaters this season with two films, “Tron: Legacy,” a sequel to the 1982 film in which he also starred, and the Coen Brothers acclaimed current “True Grit.” But [...]

It was New Year’s Day, when she was watching the new network that bore her name that it struck her. “I fully started to grasp what it means to have a network,” Oprah Winfrey says. “I had a moment thinking about this journey and not just in terms of this past couple of years.” Instead [...]

“Being on the air for
the past 25 years, I’ve learned a lot about myself,” Oprah Winfrey says. “You learn from what worked and
 what didn’t work. And I made the big mistake about, oh, 
10 or 12 years ago of calling what we were doing on
 television ‘Change Your Life TV.’ ” Critics immediately began [...]