In retrospect, watching all nine seasons of the original Dynasty (ABC, 1981–89) was a strange choice. I was looking for something escapist, a wormhole to a ...
Tag: Television
On Our Nightstands: July 2018
At Public Books, our editorial staff and contributors are hard at work to provide readers with thought-provoking articles. But when the workday is done, what is ...
Can Zombies Have It All?
Sheila Hammond (Drew Barrymore) spews gallons of vomit all over the new plush carpeting. She’s a real estate agent in the Desperate Housewives–esque suburbs of Santa Clarita, California, and she’s ...
The Netflix Queen
“What a marvelous way of looking at the history of modern Britain,” enthused the socialist historian Raphael Samuel when fellow historian Ben Pimlott told him in the 1990s that he was writing a ...
Soderbergh’s “Mosaic”: The Future of TV?
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Keyword of the Week: Mothers
It’s Mother’s Day on Sunday! If you know a mom who loves to read, send her this week’s Public Bookshelf. It features four of our favorite PB articles about motherhood, including a review of Alison ...
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 ...
On Our Nightstands: January 2017
Here’s a peek into the mind of the new Public Books. With this edition of On Our Nightstands, we are delighted to introduce our section editors ...
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 ...
A Black Power Method
A half-century ago this week, “Black Power” entered America’s mass consciousness. In early June 1966, James Meredith launched his “March Against Fear,” a one-man demonstration down the 220 miles of ...
Jamie Hector of “The Wire” on Acting and Activism
Back in April, Public Books co-sponsored a conference organized by The Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University about the legacy of The Wire. The critically revered HBO series feels ...