The 60th Annual Emmy Awards nominations have been announced, and as Gillian Reagan points out on our sister blog, Culture Czar, quality television purveyor HBO was shut out of the Best Drama category. There wasn't even a spot for The Wire, which finished its final season beneath an avalanche of critical praise.  read more »

That may not be such a shame according to Time's James Poniewozik, who writes, "Maybe it's more fitting that The Wire can go out with its purity of outrage and injustice intact. And at least an HBO-less drama category may be a little more interesting." HBO might've had a nomination in Mad Men had they not ]]> http://www.observer.com/2008/media/better-luck-next-year-hbo#comments Frank Rich HBO Mad Men The Wire Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:14:23 -0400 Matt Haber 72008 at http://www.observer.com http://www.observer.com/2008/lineup-may-28-2008-0

Now that HBO has hired Tina Brown and Frank Rich for consulting gigs, Felix Gillette wonders, "So what’s next?" He also notes, "the truly free-range journalist-consultant—one with a broad editorial mandate to roam here and there gnawing lustfully on some projects while trampling others willy-nilly—remains a rare and exotic beast."

Speaking of television, Doree Shafrir meets Bravo's Flipping Out host Jeff Lewis, "a deeply neurotic man who treats his staff like a dysfunctional family and has managed to turn his obsessive-compulsive disorder to his advantage."

John Koblin looks at this past week's New York Times Magazine and writes, "Sex sells, of course—but this was not Maxim. And women writers in Manhattan could be forgiven for a slightly sickly feeling as they regarded the images. This again?" Plus: Slicing the SATC Pie.  read more »

Over the past few weeks, HBO has announced a series of moves to stem the tide of speculation that the network is faltering. After canceling 12 Miles of Bad Road, a series starring Lily Tomlin, HBO announced deals with Oscar winners Alexander Payne (of Sideways and Election fame) to develop a dark comedy called Hung, about a man who divines power from his generous equipment; and Alan Ball, the creator of Six Feet Under, who is working on not one but two shows for the network.  read more »

Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily brings news that Frank Rich has been hired as a consultant for HBO.  read more »

Last night, The New York Times turned its lobby into a party space, complete with couches, at least three open bars and a band. Press was denied access, but as was most of the newsroom.

Except for those who were invited. A press release said that the building opened before a "glittering crowd" and here's who they consider glittering: Thomas Friedman was there, along with reporter Helene Cooper, Maureen Dowd, Baghdad bureau chief James Glanz, Beijing bureau chief Joseph Kahn and assistant business editor and columnist Gretchen Morgenson. They all spoke on a panel to a crowd that included Arthur Sulzberger, Bill Keller, Frank Rich, Ray Kelly and--if they made it, though the Media Mob never spotted them while peering through the glass of the lobby for about 45 minutes--Eliot Spitzer, Chuck Schumer and Michael Bloomberg.

In a move akin to firing Bobby Knight and replacing him with Woody Hayes, CBS Radio has at last settled on Don Imus's successor: Craig Carton.  read more »

Matthews's great virtue, and limitation, is that he's so street-smart. He has political understanding and shrewdness in his fingertips. And so he recognizes the continued effectiveness, politically, of Bush's idea: the way we fight terrorism is over there, not here, and aggressively and unilaterally; that will make America safer. It still works on the street. But Matthews is enough of a thinker to recognize the intellectual bankruptcy of those ideas, and to wonder at why the neocons and their fellow travelers (who have never shouldered a weapon, as he points out) are not now smoldering on the ashheap of history. Last week he said, in so many words, Someone has to come up with a better idea to counter that Bush idea. This is a great political challenge. It's one thing for any thinking person to know that Bush and the neolibs and John Podhoretz and David Frum got it wrong in Iraq and the Middle East, it's another to come up with a positive vision of limited American power that can be stated in a slogan and that has traction on the street—that people think will make them safer in an unsafe world. Matthews himself joined the Peace Corps in the 60s because of such a vision, put forward by JFK. Myself, I think the neorealists are doing the best thinking here, from Robert Pape to Stephen Walt to Anatol Lieven—along with the understanding that we win hearts and minds by offering a helping hand, the idea of Navy Secretary Winter. But someone smart and political has to imbibe the ideas and then regurgitate them into the tiny beaks of the general populace. Any takers?