It’s hard to work your way through a good whodunit without getting the urge to play detective. Solving a fictional crime demands attentive reading, watching, or ...
TV
Editor: Sarah Kessler
Past Editor: Liz Maynes-Aminzade
Zombie Guts and Border Walls
In Season 2 of the zombie apocalypse show Fear the Walking Dead, Nick, a gringo junkie from Los Angeles, survives separation from his family by slathering himself with zombie guts and walking ...
Burns and Novick, Masters of False Balancing
When Karl Marlantes takes the screen during The Vietnam War, he says ...
11 TV Shows Professors Are Watching This Summer
The academic year has wound to a definitive close, the Handmaid’s Tale hype has died down, and those of the professorial persuasion now have less than two blissful months remaining ...
“Master of None” and Everyone
Both for its first season and its new, more ingenious, more graceful second season, Master of None has become one of the most lauded shows in our era of ...
The Bingewatch: #Resist
After November’s election, I only wanted to watch normporn. Craving fallible yet manicured characters whose gaffes—provoked by pain mired in class privilege—always culminated in tear-jerking ...
The Bingewatch: We’re All Fired
Liberal grief in the wake of Trump’s election has occasioned binges galore: binge-drinking, binge-eating, binge-weed-smoking, and not least ...
“Westworld” and the Dawn of Baroque TV
Part of the thrill of our New Golden Age of Television has been discovering incredible shows in places one wouldn’t have previously thought to look: streaming services, formerly niche channels ...
“The Night Of” and the Didactic Procedural
Within a few minutes of starting the HBO mini-series The Night Of, any experienced television viewer knows that they are embarking on a crime procedural. The show’s credit ...
Of Men, Monsters, and “The Fall”
Misogynistic torture porn? Or the most feminist show on television? The jury is divided on The Fall, Allan Cubitt’s take on the now prevalent female-detective-hunts-serial-killer drama. Critics ...
HBO Gets High (Maintenance)
The new season of High Maintenance premieres on HBO tonight. For those who don’t know it, the series was created by Katja Blichfeld and her husband, Ben Sinclair, who also stars as the main ...
The Bingewatch: Mother Winona
Since its release last July, Stranger Things has been praised as an “original,” “meticulous” homage to the Great Men of 1980s popular culture (Carpenter, King, Lucas, Spielberg) ...
The Bingewatch: It’s Never Just a Dress
My ongoing love affair with TLC’s Say Yes to the Dress began about two months ago, when a close friend prescribed the long-running reality show as a remedy for my encroaching PhD graduation anxiety ...
Virtual Roundtable on “UnREAL”
Leading up to the launch of its second season this week, Sarah Gertrude Shapiro and Marti Noxon’s UnREAL has garnered both critical acclaim and scintillating buzz, especially since it was revealed ...
Chicago Law
Baltimore has The Wire, Newark, The Sopranos, and for seven seasons Chicago has had The Good Wife. The city with North America’s highest number of annual civilian deaths by cop and its very own ...
From Berlusconismo to Trumpismo
With America’s national neuroses thrust into collective view by the ongoing election season, the lure of long-form TV is more powerful than ever. Fortunately for the soul that abhors primary numbers ...
Perestroika Blues
Now nearing the end of its fourth season, The Americans is a confounding success. It’s hard to figure out which of its triumphs is the most unlikely: that it has millions of Americans rooting for KGB ...
Antiheroic Feminism: An Interview with “UnREAL” Co-creator Sarah Gertrude Shapiro
Sarah Gertrude Shapiro is a difficult person to pin down. With the second season premiere of UnREAL—the Peabody-award-winning series for which she not only writes and produces, but now also ...
Roots 2.0
“In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage—to know who we are and where we have come from.”1 Alex Haley penned these words in an attempt to account for the extraordinary ...
The Bingewatch: “Love” Angeles
Despite today’s abundance of “quality television” programming, TV has yet to fully shed its reputation as a degraded medium. Why else would the binge have taken hold as a (if not the) prime metaphor ...
