Linda Holmes

One of the stranger aspects of press tour is the stuff. Labeled with names of shows and networks, it comes in two basic forms.

The first is the desk stuff. That's the stuff that is either at your desk when you come to a panel or handed out while you're ...

For the next couple of weeks, I'm out in California covering the Television Critics Association press tour. Not familiar? Here's an introduction.

Day 1 of summer press tour began with hammering and ended with a giant Christmas tree.

Let's back up.

We started Tuesday with a presentation from ...

Updated at 11:20 a.m. ET

Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was sentenced Wednesday to 10 years in prison for bribery, money laundering and other crimes.

He was convicted Feb. 12 of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and kickbacks. The indictment included 21 counts.

As ...

It's that time again.

For the next couple of weeks, I'll be writing from the Television Critics Association Press Tour, where a couple hundred critics convene in a giant hotel ballroom to question producers, writers, network executives, actors, and sometimes other folks about what's coming up on TV. It can ...

Stephen Thompson and I are joined this week by our blog siblings Gene Demby and Kat Chow of NPR's Code Switch, which always puts us in an upbeat and playful mood. Fittingly, we take a couple of listener questions this week about youth and play.

First, is it ...

Making a documentary about Roger Ebert is, in some ways, a little like opening a new restaurant to honor the memory of Julia Child. It's likely to feel like a venture but also a ritual; part work and part wake; thoughtful and raucous; grieving and grateful.

So, as it happens, ...

I've always been the shrugging type when it comes to lots of things that Facebook does that make people crazy. They change the layout, they mess with the feed — even making you noodle with your privacy settings has always seemed to me like the craven doing of business, and ...

Writer-director David Wain is at the center of a loose comedy collective that's been working together (and cross-pollinating with other similar unofficial collectives) since The State, which was the name of both the original comedy troupe and the MTV sketch comedy show they held down from 1993 to 1995. The ...

First, a huge thank-you to everyone who came to our live show this past week, and especially to our many special guests who helped us out on stage. We had a great time, and you'll be hearing the two shows we taped that night in a couple of weeks.

But ...

What used to be Silverdocs, the week-long documentary festival in downtown Silver Spring, Md., is now AFI DOCS, a four-day festival split between Silver Spring and a variety of D.C. venues. There's a fuller explanation of the festival's change and history in a piece Andrew Lapin recently wrote for ...

This week, the recent opening of 22 Jump Street — among many others — gets us talking about the buddy film. Not just the buddy-cop movie, but the buddy-frat movie, the depressingly rare female-buddy movie, and whatever else they come up with to create what Glen calls "the background noise ...

[This piece about the first season of the TV show Fargo will discuss events that took place on the first season of the TV show Fargo.]

The biggest difference between the movie Fargo and the TV show Fargo (which ended its first season Tuesday night) is the devil. One of ...

Despite watching a great deal of television — highbrow, lowbrow, middlebrow — I don't watch Game of Thrones. I have never been a fantasy fan, I can't tolerate extensive world-building without nodding off, I don't gravitate toward stories about epic wars, and I'm not particularly drawn by either nudity or ...

On Thursday night, Christopher Walken told Jon Stewart that he's from Queens, and where he grew up, it's common for police officers to send their kids to tap school. You'll hear the story at the 5:40 mark.

This story sounded awfully familiar, despite how shocked and delighted Jon Stewart seemed. ...

If you're looking for a movie to see this weekend, may we recommend a movie you may not have seen last weekend?

After a brief breakdown of the Tony Awards (which underwhelmed us a bit — see what you think of the Music Man bit), the panel — ...

Let us begin this Friday with some unabashed joy: the Australian show Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, adored by many a fan of glamorous lady detectives, smoldering fellows, sexual freedom and fantastic outfits, will return for a third series, according to the show's Facebook page.

As star Essie Davis ...

The Tony Awards are usually the best awards show of the year to watch, but they are also the worst to experience on social media, simply because so much of what you encounter is theater people who are exasperated with every single thing that happens. (It often feels like the ...

This week's show brings back our friend Petra Mayer of NPR Books. Like me, Petra is fresh off a trip to Book Expo America (a/k/a BEA, FYI), where we both heard about a whole lot of new books. We'll mention some of the titles (though in many cases we haven't ...

The first ever BookCon, planned as an extension of the mega trade show Book Expo America by the same people who do Comic-Con, took place last weekend. It was headlined by, among other things, a robust diversity debate that bloomed on social media around the hashtag #WeNeedDiverseBooks. But it ...

First of all: LIVE SHOW TICKETS! (On sale June 2 — that's a week from this coming Monday — at noon Eastern.)

Just wanted to put that up there; we'll get back to it.

This week takes me, Stephen, Glen and our friend Matt Thompson to Godzilla, which ...