DAVID BIANCULLI

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VOTE: TV Worth Reading?
November 1, 2010  | By Diane Werts
 
tv guide good wife cover.jpg.png

TV Guide used to be the bible for tube fans. But in recent years, this once-savvy news magazine has increasingly become more of a trendoid gossip mag, packed with fashion photos and way! too many! exclamation points!

So it'll be interesting to see the outcome of TV Guide's current vote to let fans choose its Dec. 13 cover subject. (Voting ends Nov. 1.)

The choices won't exactly inspire discerning viewers. They're all popcorn shows, bordering on cult items, and they're all from (very carefully all of) the broadcast networks: Bones, Castle, Chuck, How I Met Your Mother, Smallville, Supernatural.

I could carp that nothing as edgy as Dexter or even House is included -- except that those shows have already been TV Guide cover subjects in recent weeks. This viewer vote seems like a sop to fans who feel their crowdpleasing faves don't get no respect. Early December is traditionally a TV dead zone of post-sweeps repeats and viewer apathy anyway.

But it never hurts to chime in when asked what you watch and love. So go for it here.

 

3 Comments

 

Patrick said:

I never missed a week of TV Guide from September 1967 on, either from a subscription or buying it on a newsstand. Even while traveling, I always picked up a copy someplace. But, when the magazine became a clone of "People" or "Us" magazines, and it dropped the local listings (sometime in November 2005) my long relationship with the "Guide" ended. And, I don't miss it at all.

jan said:

I continue to subscribe, but with more and more 2-in-1 issues (which means half the coverage in many areas), and the enormous amount of airbrushing that makes people hard to identify, I'm more and more unhappy with it.

[Diane here: You nailed that one, Jan. It's much more a giddy fashion-and-gossip mag than the true TV magazine we all once loved. So sad to see.]

Joe said:

It really cracks me up when TV Guide brags they now have expanded tv listings in their publication. DUH. You are supposedly a guide for television viewers. I have to check the cover when reading articles inside to make sure I'm not reading Entertainment Weekly by mistake. And those tv listings. A one word description does not a tv guide make. I got a super cheap one year subscription - otherwise I'd drop it and never go back.

 
 
 
 
 
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