Section
TV
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“Heated Rivalry” Is the “Moby-Dick” of Canadian Gay Hockey Shows
The literary genre of contemporary MM romance realizes an imagined world that Melville was trying to write into being.
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Burns and Novick, Masters of False Balancing
When Karl Marlantes takes the screen during The Vietnam War, he says …
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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 …
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“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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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“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, YouTube. With so many options, it’s a bit exhausting when a show arrives demanding to be recognized as the next big thing. Westworld—the 1973 sci-fi…
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“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 …
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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 condemn its camera’s fixation with beautiful female bodies, from the protracted pornographic shots of naked victims to the voyeuristic return to the top button of Detective Superintendent Stella…
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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 character—a bike-riding marijuana dealer who makes house calls all over New York (though mainly Brooklyn), known only as “The Guy.” Each…
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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) …
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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. It was May, and thus also the cusp of wedding season, making SYTTD a particularly timely recommendation. I’d been beset by…
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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 directs—on the horizon, Shapiro has made a reluctant entry into the limelight on awards show red carpets, Paley Center panels, and other events for the…
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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 agents to outsmart our country every week, or that the FX network has produced a critical darling that is…
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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, there is another way to experience the libidinal thrill of the current political climate, for buried deep in Netflix’s catalog is an Italian series…
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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 Guantanamo-aspirant black-site detention facility, Homan Square, the city that has perfected machine politics, election fraud, felony embezzlement, and the pork that…
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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 that season 2’s “suitor” on the Bachelor-esque reality show-within-the-show is African American. To date, such a casting decision still hasn’t come to fruition in…
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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 for contemporary television viewing? Where the representative of televisual excess was previously the couch potato, a human-turned-tuber upon cathode-ray immersion, today’s TV-watching…
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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 popularity of his 1976 book Roots and its 1977 television miniseries adaptation. In Roots, Haley traces his ancestry back…
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“The People v. O. J. Simpson” as Historical Fiction
The location is wrong. The white Bronco is clearly weaving through traffic on the 710 South as it approaches its intersection with the 10, on the eastern border of El Sereno, just by the Cal State LA campus. In June 1994, O. J. Simpson and Al Cowlings would have had no reason to venture that…
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Virtual Roundtable on “Empire”
After it debuted last January on Fox, Empire quickly became one of the most talked-about shows on television. Its Shakespearean portrayal of family life, its stylized window onto the hip-hop industry, and its Timbaland-produced soundtrack helped it earn millions of passionate fans (and more than a few critics). To celebrate the premiere of season 2—which…
