Tag
Television
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You Have Nothing to Lose But Your Supply Chains!
“Logistics,” warns Susan Zieger, “reveals how the illicit economy is the legitimate economy: the nature of free trade prevents the two from ever being separated.”
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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 …
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The Netflix Queen
“Royal watching of the House of Windsor in multiple media across the world never disappears from public view.”
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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 …
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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 …
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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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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 Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?, and an essay on Sally Mann’s extraordinary family photography. The Bingewatch: Mother Winona 9.15.2016 Sarah Kessler Since its release in mid-July, Stranger Things,…
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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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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 …
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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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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 road between Memphis, Tennessee, and Jackson, Mississippi. Meredith hoped to inspire black men to exercise their voting rights, or at least to join him in…
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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 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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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…
