Serialized gem / siren song Tales of the City drew many folks to SF. Well, it brought us here, anyway. And the character of Mary Ann Singleton acted as a temporary stand-in until many of us arrived. To wit: Mary Ann Singleton was twenty-five years old when she saw San Francisco for the first time. She came to the city alone for an eight-day vacation. On the fifth night, she drank three Irish coffees......

Some local PBS affiliate stations will be re-airing two San Francisco-centric episodes of "American Experience" this weekend. The first, and best, is Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple. Through interviews with former members and survivors of the Jim Jones cult, along with loads of archival footage, you get an eerie portrait of a good idea gone bad. In hindsight, it's hard to imagine how anyone could have fallen under the spell of......

arlyck, following-sean, pov, pbs...

There were a lot of locals in the world of reality TV this week! "America's Got Talent" included an audition from an East Bay music teacher named Michael Strelo-Smith. He had an OK voice, but he was kind of boring. He swears he can sing anything and everything, but so far we are unimpressed. "Last Comic Standing" continued its trend of finding comedians who have been around for years, and presenting them as new......

Green is the new black. And it's taking over your television set. Two "green TV" programs are set to air in the coming weeks, and both focus on making your home more "sustainable." Tonight at 8 p.m., YourTV20 (yes, it's YOURS) airs an episode of their quarterly program "Your Green Life" called "Eco-Home." Learn how to reduce your carbon footprint, without even leaving your house! Turn of those lights when you aren't in that......

We have never seen the filming of any TV show before. Not a sitcom, not a talk show, not even a public access show. The only thing close to seeing something filmed live was one of those PBS pledge breaks and who really cares about them? All of this means that we were pretty excited to see the filming of Conan's first night in San Francisco. ...

Last week's winner, the Bay Guardian. Tim Redmond handicaps the SF mayor's race (they're becoming disenchanted with Matt Gonzalez?). It's the all Chris Daly news section: Chris on the How Weird Street Faire, Chris on campaign finance reform, Chris and the ethics commission. Why didn't they also ask Chris for a quote on the Mission street cleaning proposal? Cover article: "Where do stolen bikes go? Can they find their way home? Back to the open......

A few years back, we were flipping the channels, and we ended up on a program on PBS. We recognized Michael Tilson-Thomas and at first, we were thinking, hey, it’s our MTT, what is he up to? We stayed a while for the local angle, as we would have had we caught, say, the Warriors on ESPN, or Gavin on a Sunday morning political show, or SFist Jer on Check Please!. But then we......

May has come upon us, and in the TV world that can only mean one thing: Sweeps! Many shows will be gearing up for season and series finales, but we're not really interested in any of that right now. Instead, we're psyched about PBS's entry into the sweeps machine, "Texas Ranch House," which premieres tonight at 8 p.m. with a two-hour episode. "Texas Ranch House" is another entry into PBS's reality-TV-that's-good-for-you, a kind of......

Monday's world premiere of the locally shot and produced documentary Runners High was an exuberant and charged affair. Many of the subjects of this documentary revolving around one season with Students Run Oakland, (an athletic mentoring program that trains Oakland public high school students for the mental and physical demands of a marathon) were in the Kabuki's Theater One (Note to the SFIFF staff: what is the deal keeping the balcony closed until people......

Faithful readers, you've probably noticed that this SFist watches the same types of movies over and over again: Is it a documentary about something weird and/or in San Francisco? Gosh, who could SFist possibly get to watch that? So we figured we'd mix it up a little bit and go watch something a little less provincial for a change -- which is how we ended up at the 9:00 p.m. screening of the Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela at the SFIFF. First of all, the audience for a historical and personal documentary about South Africans in exile from 1960-1990 as apartheid was being dismantled is very different from the usual scruffians we see at our wacky movies about, say, the history of the Mission hipster told through burritos used as puppets -- there were a lot of earnest expressions on faces, internationalist people carrying Global Exchange backpacks, and in the audience, we ran into a friend from New York who's devoted her life to public interest law. Boy, we're usually pretty shallow in our movie picks, aren't we? Filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris told the audience that the documentary itself is a eulogy to his stepfather, who fled South Africa with a group of 11 friends and helped found the African National Congress, and an attempt to tell his story and to resolve posthumously the sometimes-strained nature of their relationship. His stepfather's story is pretty amazing (he fled, mostly by foot, from South Africa to Tanzania, and then emigrated to the Bronx). We started out dubious about the premise, and even more dubious about the dramatic "reenactments," but as the movie progressed, it all of a sudden didn't really matter. It's a great story. We wish there'd been a little more information about modern African history (the movie presumes a fair amount of knowledge) and we also got the sense that Harris was pulling some punches about the conflicts between him and his stepfather, but that's all pretty minor stuff. 12 Disciples plays again tonight at 6:30 at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, and it'll also be airing on PBS in September. ...

Before the screening of the documentary, They Chose China, Director Shuibo Wang stood in front of the audience and declared that San Francisco was his favorite city in North America. That already predisposed the largely gray-haired audience to feel kindly towards the director but then he further ingratiated himself by saying, "I have never experienced a festival like this. It is very very warm. This is a very sweet experience." Wang, whose previous documentary......

SFist commeters pose for before and aftershocks when the mayor commemorates a 1906 earthquake...at 4:30 in the morning. A hot tip on the Chronicle vending machines comes in and the SFist war correspondent risks life and limb to post this dispatch from the frontlines. Houstonist announces their new Cops spinoff "World's Funniest Tazer Videos" and the possible cancellation of their pervs' "World's Grossest Bathroom Videos" and PBS trains cams on cows at, uhg, Mootube. Also,......

We really got a kick out of reading everyone's TiVo (or plain old TV) top tens last week. The presence of "Lost" and "Arrested Development" on many of the lists was pleasing, while the avid devotion to "Dancing With the Stars" continues to perplex some of us at SFist. Perhaps we'll tune in to Fox's rip-off "Skating with Celebrities" next week instead, as it seems to have even more comedic potential (Todd Bridges on......

The Year 2005 has finally come to an end, and none too soon. It kind of blew. We have higher hopes for 2006. But even though the calendar may say 2006, and even though vacation is officially over, you'd never know it by watching TV. This is another week where the reruns outnumber the new episodes. Come next week, that will no longer be the case, but we're hard-pressed to really find anything to......

Last week has left us a little exhausted. There was a lot of TV to sample, and precious little time. But we're glad to learn that the cancellation bug has begun to spread, and some of these new shows will meet the fate they, in many cases, rightly deserve, (we're talking to you, "Head Cases.") But it's not over yet: There are even more season premieres coming our way this week! But first, the......

SFist is fine without cable, really we are. We're on the eight-at-a-time plan with Netflix, so we know we'll get to see all the good stuff when it comes out on DVD. Anyway, SFist Rain's TV column is better than being there. We're fine with the networks, PBS, and Univision. We're fine, that is, until someone starts talking about, like, "Law and Order: Shoplifting Diversion Program" or something. For cable-free SFists do not receive......

While it's always fun to snark on the Religious Right, lately it's just been too darn easy. After taking on Sponge Bob and "No Name Calling Week," those whacky Bible-thumpers are at it again, this time with yet another cartoon (do they watch anything else?) In this case, the upsetting thing is a cartoon airing on PBS, a cartoon about a cute little bunny named Buster. Postcards From Buster is about Buster's adventures travelling to......

SFist is sure there are some important, good-for-you TV shows airing sometime this week. Probably on PBS. And we wish them and their viewers all the best. But we can't let a certain trio of trashy TV shows go unnoticed, so allow us to forgo the healthy and head straight for the dessert table this week. Hello VH-1's "celebreality" line-up! The fourth season of The Surreal Life premiered Sunday with a bang, and much......

SFist has been so busy listening that we have barely found time to read. But remember, nothing is a better accompaniment to your favorite Quannum tracks than a book reserved from the San Francisco Public Library. And a close second would be those books purchased from our local independent bookstores. SFist Emily needed a break from studying this week. Luckily one of her roommates had the vaccous antidote for her over worked brain: He's Just......

SFist contributor and virtual TV pundit Rain Jokinen offers her Bay-area-centric TV picks of the week We'll make this simple: Vote. And then go watch some TV. Your best bet for local coverage of election results and local ballot measures is probably KRON Channel 4. Their official coverage starts at 4:30pm. You can watch election coverage on the networks tonight, and hope for another breakdown from Dan Rather, or you can hold out until 10:00pm......

New SFist contributor and longtime virtual TV pundit Rain Jokinen offers her Bay-area-centric TV picks of the week, for your viewing pleasure. We at SFist love the City. But did you know we love it so much that when we aren't outside exploring and enjoying it, we are inside exploring and enjoying it on TV? Hell, sometimes we even prefer the TV version. It's only on those Streets of San Francisco reruns (Sundays at 10:00pm......