Media Musings

It’s not all that often when a post-Labor Day theatrical release carries as much potential impact as does PRACTICAL MAGIC 2, which makes its debut today to take advantage of those still sweltering from near-record heat (hand raised, limply) as well as to try and offset the expected Sunday decline that the first NFL weekend … Read more

How desperate are media reporters who believe they “know how their audience thinks” for clicks and engagement these days?  The return from scheduled summer vacations for two late night TV hosts both warranted breaking news coverage. For Jimmy Kimmel, who has turned his annual summer respite into an homage to the days where Johnny Carson … Read more

40 years ago today my life changed forever.  And, ultimately, so did a lot of yours, too. I had just taken the reins of the research department of 20th Century FOX Television, and I was beginning to devote my days (and nights) to copiously tracking our syndicated sitcoms, including the reboot of 9 TO 5 … Read more

The thermometer says otherwise, and Starbucks and Home Depot declared Halloween season open during August, but Labor Day weekend is to me still the actual end of the summer season.  For creatives–especially moviemakers–it’s the beginning of the long and arduous road to more significant seasons than fall–the next summer box office, to be sure, but … Read more

If I had a nickel for every outreach I’ve gotten from a one-time “feudal media” journalist now aligned with a digital platform asking for my “mere pennies a day” to support their continuing endeavors I might actually be able to afford more than a handful of them.  Between consolidation, AI and downright cheapness there are … Read more

My FX career was in hindsight shorter than a lot of others’ but it could have been way shorter than that had the kind of human resources policies that seem to be in vogue today been in place then. Shortly into my tenure, I was hauled into a daunting conference room where a prissy outside … Read more

Regular readers would be correct to observe that I’ve dedicated a disproportinate amount of musings to the foibles of S.W.A.T.  Guilty as charged.  It was a priority project when I was settling into my gig at Sony and getting it successfully renewed and sold was an ongoing battle pretty much through the end–and beyond.  It’s … Read more

The 90s were a great time for television.  Thanks to the outsized success of THE COSBY SHOW at a point when NBC and situation comedies were both in dire straits, the genre was resurrected and became prolific both in prime time and in rerun syndication.  There was an explosion of newly signed on and maturing … Read more

There’s only so much social media that even I can find the time to consume and engage with, and I’ll admit that my least visited platform is TikTok.  Not merely because I’m clearly not in its generational sweet spot, or the fact that one of the few videos I’ve uploaded was when my friend’s teenage … Read more