Television

In re O’Reilly, Part Three

Featured image At the end of my post about Bill O’Reilly’s dismissal, I wrote: I very much doubt that the decision to fire O’Reilly was driven by the facts of his conduct. In all likelihood, it was driven by sponsor reaction. In other words, it was the product of corporate America — spineless and liberal as ever — and left-wing groups that exploit these weaknesses. The link for “left-wing groups” was to »

In re O’Reilly, Part Two

Featured image Fox News has fired Bill O’Reilly. It stated: “After a thorough and careful review of the allegations, the company and Bill O’Reilly have agreed that Bill O’Reilly will not be returning to the Fox News Channel.” The unnamed “allegations” are of improper sexual comments and/or behavior and retaliation against at least one woman who says she rejected a sexual advance. It seems very likely that O’Reilly made inappropriate remarks over »

In re Bill O’Reilly

Featured image Bill O’Reilly reportedly is fighting for his television life because a woman, Wendy Walsh, claims the talk show host asked her to come to his hotel room and, when she declined, he retaliated by dropping her as a regular guest on his show and reneging on an alleged promise to help her land her own show on Fox News. Walsh has not raised this claim in a court of law, »

Is ESPN unraveling?

Featured image I don’t know, but it’s certainly hurting. Clay Travis reports: Two years ago ESPN cut several hundred behind the scenes jobs to save hundreds of millions of dollars in yearly costs. Since that time ESPN’s subscriber losses have accelerated, averaging over three million lost subscribers a year. Now new jobs cuts are coming, only this time you’re likely to know some of the casualties — different sources [say] that ESPN »

NFL ratings are down. Why?

Featured image The National Football League’s television ratings have declined significantly this season. After four weeks, the NFL’s ratings are down 11 percent across FOX, CBS, NBC and ESPN. And the Thursday night game that kicked off Week Five experienced a 17 percent drop in viewership compared to the corresponding game last season. The biggest hit is on prime time. On Sunday afternoon’s, the traditional NFL slot, the decline is only around »

Read more, watch ESPN less [Updated]

Featured image John Skipper is the President of ESPN, Inc. The Washington Post adoringly paints him as one-time Southern hippie who studied literature, wanted to write the Great American novel, and enjoys late night “high level sophisticated conversations about American literature, Faulkner’s place in it, [and] the influence of alcohol and race. . . .” You probably know the type. In a commencement address at the University of Central Florida, Skipper bemoaned »

A Republic, if we can keep our TV shows

Featured image When Scotland was getting set to vote on whether to leave Great Britain, “stay” supporters raised the specter that an exit might mean loss of access to popular BBC television series. The “leave” movement took pains to assure Scots they would still be able to watch such shows as EastEnders, Doctor Who, and Strictly Come Dancing. Scotland voted to stay, so we never found out whether an independent Scotland would »

A Rare Foray Into Culture Criticism

Featured image I can put up with just about any Game of Thrones sub-plot, as long as the show eventually gets back to Tyrion Lannister and Daenerys Targaryen. But the current Arya Stark misery, with no name or no face or whatever it is–no eyesight, for sure–needlessly and stupidly sidelines one of the program’s best characters. The story is boring, repetitious and as far as I can tell, going nowhere. We don’t »

Mad Men signs off with class and aplomb

Featured image The final episode of Mad Men, the long running hit cable show, aired last night. If you haven’t seen it but plan to, read no further. Mad Men is an overrated show, but that’s mainly because no television show could be as good as gushing liberals deem it. Why do liberals love Mad Men so? I think it’s because it tells them that America in the early 1960s was not »

Heh: House of Bricks, Indeed

Featured image Everyone waiting to binge-watch the next installment of House of Cards next week ought to satisfy himself in the meantime with this four-minute Sesame Street parody.  (I didn’t know Sesame Street was still on, and for the record, in my opinion the original British House of Cards from 25 years ago was better, and when is someone going to make the American version of Yes, Prime Minister?  What’s that you »

Do Jews have a future in France?

Featured image Ten years ago, on the one and only occasion I met Bat Ye’or, I told her that my wife’s cousin and her family of six, living in a Paris suburb with a large, increasingly hostile Muslim population, should seriously consider leaving France. Bat Ye’or strongly disagreed with me, arguing that French Jews should stay and fight. The family did stay and it did fight — literally in the case of »

Paris Suspects Identified, One With Terrorist History [Updated]

Featured image One of the three terrorists believed to have carried out this morning’s attack on Charlie Hebdo has turned himself into the police, while authorities apparently are closing in on the other two, reportedly in Reims: The youngest suspect in today’s deadly attack at a satirical newspaper’s office in Paris has turned himself in, French police said, while the other two are “on the loose, armed and dangerous.” Officials identified the »

ISIS’s rise was known for more than a year to anyone paying attention

Featured image Yesterday came word, through a former Pentagon official, that President Obama received detailed and specific intelligence about the rise of ISIS via the President’s Daily Brief for at least a year before the group took large swaths of territory beginning in June 2014. The former official told Fox News that the data was strong, and “granular” in detail. He added that a policy maker “could not come away with any »

The Americans: Check It Out!

Featured image A couple of weeks ago Scott linked to an article in the Wall Street Journal about the top television shows of 2013 in our Picks. My wife followed the link and learned about a series neither of us had heard of, called The Americans. She thought it sounded intriguing–it’s about Soviet spies living under cover in the U.S. during the 1980s–so we bought Episode 1 and watched it. Then we »

Another Totally Frivolous Pop Culture Post

Featured image So a week or so ago on my post on “Jay Leno For President,” I noticed that frequent Power Line commenter David Hill’s FB identification reads: “Works at Veridian Dynamics.”  No way!  This is almost as good as spotting the Fred Hirsch Social Limits to Growth reference on The Big Bang Theory.  Better Off Ted (the home of Veridian Dynamics) was one of my favorite short-lived shows (not as short-lived as »

A random “Mad Men” thought

Featured image Irving Kristol said that a neoconservative is “a liberal who was mugged by reality.” If so, then Abe Drexler — the lefty new-journalist in “Mad Men” — must have gone on to become one of Kristol’s prime neocon disciples. »

Live from pump 16, Burbank

Featured image I learn via Twitter that the video below featured this past Wednesday on the Tonight Show has gone viral. BuzzFeed explains: “Pumpcast News” is a Tonight Show sketch in which actor Tim Stack, posing as the anchor of a (fake) news show aired at gas station pumps, starts to talk directly to the unsuspecting gas station patrons. While usually the intention of the sketch is to frighten and shock normal »