TheWrap.com reports HBO’s new drama “Looking” had a "limp debut," with “not many people ‘looking’ at it on their TV screen. The new HBO comedy-drama had a paltry 338,000 viewers at 10:30 p.m. on Sunday.”
Meanwhile, the Matthew McConnaughey-Woody Harrelson drama “True Detective” (Sundays at 9 pm) averaged 1.7 million viewers in its second week.
James Poniewozik
By Tim Graham | January 24, 2014 | 8:59 PM EST
By Tim Graham | November 12, 2013 | 3:05 PM EST
MSNBC isn’t the only network with an under-30 host. CNN has hired 28-year-old New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter to host its Sunday media show Reliable Sources. Stelter has guest-hosted a few times already since longtime host Howard Kurtz left for Fox News.
Earlier this year, Stelter's book Top of the Morning came out, about the network morning shows, including a takedown of the "general meanness" on the set of NBC's Today. Time's James Poniewozik adds he'll be leaving the Times, not working at both media outlets:
By Randy Hall | September 12, 2013 | 9:33 AM EDT
One of the worst things a reviewer can say about a television program is that "it has potential,” which usually means the show's not utilizing much of it. That situation was played out on Monday, when the Cable News Network brought back “Crossfire,” a conservative-liberal debate program that had been in television limbo for eight years.
Despite a newsworthy discussion topic -- the fate of Syria, where chemical weapons may have been used by the government on rebels -- and two well-known hosts, GOP former House speaker Newt Gingrich and Stephanie Cutter, deputy manager of President Barack Obama's re-election campaign, critics were not impressed by the first edition of the 30-minute weeknight series.
By Ken Shepherd | August 28, 2013 | 4:33 PM EDT
While honoring Bradley Manning's wish to be identified as a woman and called "Chelsea," Time magazine writer James Poniewozik wants to know exactly when did Bradley become Chelsea, posing various grammatical issues raised by journalists accepting Manning's self-delusion about his gender.
"Since she’s a longtime figure in the news, in a case involving her actions years previous, how do you refer to her history? Did Bradley leak information to Wikileaks, or did Chelsea? (Or Breanna?) Did she serve in Iraq or did he?" Poniewozik wondered in an August 18 Tune In Time.com blog post, adding, "The answer goes to the question, still fuzzily defined, of what philosophy and definitions we’re using when referring to the growing number of transgender persons":
By Tim Graham | October 19, 2011 | 6:47 AM EDT
In this week's edition of Time (dated October 24), TV writer James Poniewozik championed class warfare in several new TV shows, like the CBS sitcom Two Broke Girls. "[A]fter the 2008 meltdown and the TARP bailouts, after Wall Street bonuses rebounded while mortgages stayed underwater, do Americans still hear class warfare as if it's a bad thing?" He suggested viewers are up for "at least some spirited class fisticuffs."
From there, Poniewozik, like other liberals, launched into an attack on CNN's Erin Burnett for touring the Occupy Wall Street protests with a sneer instead of the usual worshipful media template. (See ABC's Dan Harris championing the yoga area and the grandmother's cookies from Idaho.) TV was of course too slow to start promoting these leftists:
By Brent Bozell | October 8, 2011 | 8:31 AM EDT
NBC president Robert Greenblatt was really committed to the new drama “The Playboy Club” just weeks ago. “What it has going for it is a recognizable brand that's automatically going to draw attention to it, good or bad," he said. "It's the right kind of thing for us to try." They tried it. Three episodes later, NBC made it the first canceled series of the season. Trains have rarely wrecked as ingloriously as this one.
By the third episode, NBC could barely muster 3 million viewers, while ABC (“Castle”) and CBS (“Hawaii Five-O”) were both over 11 million. This show had flop sweat all over it. Entertainment Weekly wrote after the cancellation announcement that “The move is no surprise and, indeed, was expected months before the show premiered.” So why on Earth did NBC work so hard to promote this show and its pornographic brand?
All Left: NPR Publicizes Gay-Bert-and-Ernie Petition Lightly With Jokes from Lesbian Comedian, Time TV Critic
By Tim Graham | August 13, 2011 | 10:02 PM EDT Openly lesbian NPR arts reporter Neda Ulaby was given the assignment of making light news out of the gay-activism petition to get the Muppet characters Ernie and Bert married on "Sesame Street" on Friday night's All Things Considered. Her only sources for comment were a lesbian comedian and a liberal Time magazine TV critic.
She did not interview the petition's author Lair Scott, who proclaimed: “I started this Change.org petition because I believe we need more media representation of gay and lesbian people in children’s programming,” said Scott. “There are currently no LGBT characters on Sesame Street, nor in any children’s television program.”
By Tim Graham | October 30, 2010 | 9:09 AM EDT
One of the biggest liberal-media promoters of the Jon Stewart-Stephen Colbert rally is Time TV writer James Poniewozik. His piece in the Time magazine leading up to the event was syrupy (starting with the heroic artwork). The headline was “Can These Guys Be Serious? Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert want to restore reason to public life.” Time highlighted this sentence: "The rally is based on the essence of Stewart's and Colbert's comedy: the defense of rationality in an irrational age."
Poniewozik knows their shows are liberal. Time didn't highlight his admission that "Both hosts are liberal." Even the left-leaning Pew Reseach Center found in study three months of Stewart shows in 2007 that Stewart's humor targeted Republicans more than three times as often as Democrats.
But Poniewozik has the been the main cheerleader of the viewpoint that Jon and Steve can be comedians and leftists at the same time, satirical figures and protest leaders. In fact, as many liberals have proclaimed, Poniewozik thinks this takes them to a whole new plateau of relevance: "In other words, two comedians are taking it upon themselves to say America is making itself look ridiculous. They're taking a risk in doing it. Idealism can be the death of funny, which is why, as Stewart himself has put it, comedians 'don't lead a lot of marches.' But the very attempt demonstrates that the cable comedy hosts have become the most relevant voices in late-night TV."
By Lachlan Markay | March 29, 2010 | 1:22 PM EDT 
With the recently announced end of Fox's hit series "24," many liberal pundits are parading the show as a false depiction of the notion that "torture works." Contrary to their accusations, the Jack Bauer interrogation methods bear exactly zero resemblance to any actual interrogation techniques used by American military, law enforcement, or intelligence agents.
"On '24,' torture saves lives," the New York Times's Brian Stelter writes, disapprovingly. James Poniewozik, writing on a Time Magazine blog, attributes the show's supposed approval of harsh interrogations to the "conservative politics of co-creator Joel Surnow."
Any American who has serious doubts that our military and intelligence officials would allow interrogators to, say, directly threaten the lives of a terrorist's family (let alone inflict tremendous physical pain) to elicit information has a better grasp of interrogation techniques -- and the integrity of our men and women in uniform -- than most of the liberal media.
With the recently announced end of Fox's hit series "24," many liberal pundits are parading the show as a false depiction of the notion that "torture works." Contrary to their accusations, the Jack Bauer interrogation methods bear exactly zero resemblance to any actual interrogation techniques used by American military, law enforcement, or intelligence agents."On '24,' torture saves lives," the New York Times's Brian Stelter writes, disapprovingly. James Poniewozik, writing on a Time Magazine blog, attributes the show's supposed approval of harsh interrogations to the "conservative politics of co-creator Joel Surnow."
Any American who has serious doubts that our military and intelligence officials would allow interrogators to, say, directly threaten the lives of a terrorist's family (let alone inflict tremendous physical pain) to elicit information has a better grasp of interrogation techniques -- and the integrity of our men and women in uniform -- than most of the liberal media.
By Tim Graham | January 7, 2010 | 10:51 PM EST
Time TV writer James Poniewozik wrote on his blog Tuned In on Wednesday that he was impressed that Brit Hume wasn’t backing down on his Tiger Woods remarks, but he really wasn’t accepting Hume’s claim that talking about Jesus is much more controversial than talking about Buddha:
By Tim Graham | November 8, 2009 | 5:53 PM EST
The latest Pew poll found people see Fox News as conservative, but Time media writer James Poniewozik noted large numbers also thought the major networks were liberal. That must mean it’s time to assert the media has a "moderate bias." This is defined, as liberals usual define it, as pretending conservative idiocy isn’t idiocy:
Time TV Writer (and Obama Voter) Scorns MSNBC for 'Blatantly Triumphalist' and 'Bludgeoningly Hortatory' Ads and Anchors
By Tim Graham | January 16, 2009 | 2:32 PM EST 
Time TV writer and blogger James Poniewozik raised eyebrows when he reported that although he voted for Barack Obama, MSNBC's gleeful Obama coverage makes him sympathetic to Americans whose legs are not so thrilled. He disdained their "blatantly triumphalist" promos as worse than Fox News, and suggested MSNBC is wildly inconsistent for first suggesting that Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann aren’t objective enough to anchor major political events like the conventions, but then decide they’re just fine for anchoring their hero Obama's inauguration:
...MSNBC has decided it's OK to relax and let its pro-Bama freak flag fly. As if to confirm every "real vs. fake America" stereotype Sarah Palin and company perpetrated during the campaign, MSNBC's inauguration coverage will even run in Starbucks in New York, San Francisco and Seattle. (Seriously: did David Brooks think up that promotion?) On one of its incessantly running Inauguration Day promos, a narrator gushes, "When a new President inspires the nation, one day Americans will ask: where were you when Barack Obama became President?"
Besides the confusing timeline of that sentence, there's something almost bludgeoningly hortatory about it. Mind you, I voted for Barack Obama enthusiastically, in the primaries and the general election--and yet hearing stuff like this (Obama = The Moon Landing) I can empathize with the people who didn't.