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Blue Glow TV Awards: Ken Tucker

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 14:29:00 +0000

Ken Tucker is the TV critic at Entertainment Weekly.

Ken's top 5:

1. "Homeland" (Showtime)
2. "Breaking Bad" (AMC)
3. "Louie" (FX)
4. "Girls" (HBO)
5. "Mad Men" (AMC)

Special Categories:

1. What was the show of the year? "Homeland." Season 2 even more harrowing, far more romantic, a tad more frustrating than Season 1; not for a second do I doubt it was the most intriguing drama of the year.

2. What was the best scene? "Homeland's" "State of Independence": Brody’s sweat-inducing (from him, from me) moments spent transporting, chasing after and killing the tailor, interrupted by phone calls from his wife about where the hell he was/what the hell he was doing. The life of a spy rendered as the purest desperation and the most mundane domestic drama, simultaneously.

David Letterman

Tue, 20 Jul 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Given the irony that saturates his humor like blood in a sponge, it's fitting that the very title of this Salon People department makes something of a mockery of David Letterman at this stage of his life. After all, how many of you would agree, in 1999, that he has had a "brilliant career"? Looked at one way, Letterman has blown it. He lost out to Jay Leno in his quest to replace his hero, Johnny Carson, as host of "The Tonight Show," a failure documented in Bill Carter's 1994 book "The Late Shift," among whose many fascinating details was the fact that Letterman campaigned for the position by not campaigning for the position. It wasn't a matter of hubris, but rather the fact that it is simply not in Letterman's character to seek the favor of anyone, be it audience or network brass. (In Carter's book, Letterman assumed that even the execs he calls "weasels" would, through some combination of common sense and loyalty, give him the promotion he deserved.)

A gift for effrontery

Tue, 09 Feb 1999 20:21:00 +0000

Pauline Kael sounded like Pauline Kael right off the bat. When she was just starting out as a movie critic in the '50s, doing radio reviews of movies for the Berkeley, Calif., public radio station KPFA and writing program notes for the city's revival houses, she was already tossing off unpopular barbs ("I would like to suggest that the educated audience often uses 'art' films in much the same self-indulgent way as the mass audience uses the Hollywood 'product,' finding wish fulfillment in the form of cheap and easy congratulation on their sensitivities and liberalism") and she was already combative ("My dear anonymous letter writers," she said during one broadcast, "if you think it so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, and so many poets"). She was already looking at the big screen for the big picture ("If you hold the San Francisco Chronicle's review of 'Breathless' up to the light, you may see H-E-L-P shining through it.")