Search Results for: TV

‘High Maintenance’ and the New TV Fantasy of New York

Longreads Pick

Isolation perfumes the show, and this is the thing about High Maintenance, with its obsessive verisimilitude, that actually feels the most accurate. It’s a truism that living around so many others can make you feel paradoxically lonely, yet there are entirely novel ways of being alone, together. There are new ones invented every day.

Published: Jan 30, 2020
Length: 15 minutes (3,918 words)

‘TV Has This Really Fraught Relationship with the Audience.’

Tom Kelley/Getty Images

Jonny Auping | Longreads | June 2019 | 20 minutes (5,447 words)

Until very recently in its relatively young life, television was considered to have the same creative merit as any other household appliance — perhaps less, since the device itself was referred to as the “Idiot Box” and “chewing gum for the eyes.” Having a passionate debate about television would have been like having a passionate debate about the microwave.

But in her new book, I Like to Watch, Emily Nussbaum, the New Yorker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning television critic, makes the same argument she’s been making, consciously and unconsciously, for 20 years: Television is worth thinking and talking about.

I Like to Watch is a collection of essays that Nussbaum has written, most of them originally for New York magazine and the New Yorker, about television shows that served as cultural touchstones in their time as well as short-lived programs that had more to say than anybody but their loyal fan bases ever realized.

Taken as one, Nussbaum’s essays represent her perspectives and experiences traveling through decades of TV shows that were intentionally and unintentionally commenting on the moments they were being created in. Her writing doesn’t necessarily demand that you take her point of view as much as it brings to focus how clearly you could form your own point of view through a deeper examination of the characters, plots, and themes of the shows you love. I Like to Watch is, fundamentally, an argument for television as art. Read more…

‘The Hills’ Made Reality TV What It Is. Now It’s Back.

Longreads Pick
Published: May 23, 2019
Length: 12 minutes (3,000 words)

The Pure Joy of HGTV’s ‘My Lottery Dream Home’

Longreads Pick
Source: Curbed
Published: Sep 21, 2018
Length: 7 minutes (1,856 words)

Dinosaurs: The Making of TV’s Saddest, Strangest Sitcom Finale

Longreads Pick
Source: Vulture
Published: Aug 7, 2018
Length: 4 minutes (1,173 words)

A Clarifying Dose of Reality (TV)

Longreads Pick
Source: Longreads
Published: Apr 6, 2018
Length: 9 minutes (2,320 words)

Reality TV, Why Do We Love You So?

Andrew/Sputnik via AP

Why does reality TV work so well? According to some TV producers, it’s because people don’t want to think, they want to turn off their minds and feel superior to people, and because artificially heightened emotion is a potent drug. To investigate this enduring genre, and examine his own role in the so-called train wreck of stars’ lives, Lucas Mann wrote a whole book about he and his wife’s shared love of reality TV, called Captive Audience. The Paris Review ran a portion of it. Just try to take your eyes off the screen.

The way these producers framed it, intellect and emotion were rendered entirely divergent—intellect was what a person should aspire to; emotion was the thing that the lazy settle for to avoid thinking. Every one of these emotion purveyors said they wished for a world that was better than the shit they professionally put into it, but you know what, the world is the fucking world. They discussed their own projects, the lives they wanted to commodify, with a strange mixture of pride, exhaustion, and scorn.

Cool guy, heartless guy told me I should write a book about reality stars of yore, the ones who knew nothing and were discarded by culture, husks of what they had once presented themselves to be. It would be grotesque, but it would be captivating; he would’ve pitched it as a show if licensing wouldn’t have been such a hassle. We imagined these discarded stars as a group: just as willing as ever, maybe more so. People don’t think about the damage; they just want to hear the shouts and see the squirming—everyone agreed upon that.

There was an undercurrent to the conversation, of course, that was about complicity, particularly as reminder clips ran across the screen, little teaser morsels of everything Trump said or tweeted, whom he had mocked, how he had lied. It all looked familiar—a closed-circuit loop of mania. As we watched, there were whistles and sharp inhalations. There were rueful headshakes, the mixing timbres of semiforced laughter. What a shit show, it was marveled. What a pageant. What a sham. What a spectacle.

Read the story

A Reckoning with Reality (TV)

Longreads Pick

Teen mothers, meth users, child abusers ─ reality TV is cast with people struggling with extreme challenges, so how complicit are viewers for fueling their trouble by treating it as entertainment? Lucas Mann investigates the genre and the love he and his wife share for reality TV.

Author: Lucas Mann
Published: Apr 2, 2018
Length: 16 minutes (4,131 words)

A Clarifying Dose of Reality (TV)

fox broadcasting

Valentina Valentini | Longreads | April 2018 | 9 minutes (2,320 words)

 

After 16 hours, 5 hot dogs, 2 nacho bowls, 3 sodas, and 20,000 people, I felt more like an idiot than an idol.

***

Walking down the steps to Qualcomm Stadium’s field level, I wondered how I’d gotten there. Four days prior I was tuned into my go-to San Diego radio show, “AJ’s Playhouse” on 99.3 FM, when they plugged upcoming American Idol auditions. I cursed aloud to no one, because two years earlier — as an even younger and more attention-hungry woman — I’d promised myself that if they ever came to the city I was living in I would audition.

Ten years later, as a supposedly mature 34-year-old, seeking 15 minutes of fame is very low on my list of priorities, far below items like “find a great yoga studio” and “figure out which hair dye covers grays best.”

But back in 2008, there I was on that Saturday morning. I arrived at 9 on the dot to stand in line, eager. It took two hours — just to register.

***

I met sleek Barry and cherubic Rory while waiting in that godforsaken first line. (If only I had known what was to come.) They were a couple from Hillcrest, the epicenter of San Diego’s LGBTQ scene, hopping with gay bars and the city’s annual Pride Parade. Barry was auditioning, and Rory was there for support. I’d come alone, so my two new besties were a welcome addition to a morning crowded with narcissists. (Not including us, of course.)

Lacking for distractions in line — these were the days before cell-phones-as-mobile-entertainment-centers — we formulated theories about how it was all going to go down. Would we meet Paula and Randy? Would Simon deign to set foot in a stadium if he weren’t the halftime entertainment? Would it be filmed? Who were the crazies going to be? You know, the ones whose auditions are so ridiculous that they get aired for that reason alone.

We were excited — in retrospect, naïve is more like it — and never imagined the cattle call that was to unfold over the next 24 hours. The mastery of producing a show like this is to never let them see the wizard. But we were the wizards — all 20,000 of us, hundreds of thousands if you add up the people for all the other cities — and in my case, the wizard was a beaten-down twentysomething, mascara mixing with sweat, hopes of stardom ripped out of her sticky-with-junk-food hands.

Two years earlier — as an even younger and more attention-hungry woman — I’d promised myself that if American Idol ever came to the city I was living in I would audition.

After (finally) successfully registering, we decided to meet at Barry’s house at 3:30 a.m. — yes, a.m. — the next day to head to the stadium. I was glad to have joined up as Three Amigos and thankful that Barry and Rory were so welcoming to a near stranger. The rules explicitly said no camping, so we were confident there wouldn’t be too big of a crowd by 4 in the morning.

There were 5,000 people.

Someone with a loud bullhorn told us we’d be shuffled in by 8 a.m. They didn’t use the term shuffle, but I assure you, we were shuffled. And it wasn’t until 9 that the line — a disorganized mass, 20 bodies wide, each only centimeters from the next — began to trundle forward. Some cheered as the prospect of getting into the stadium became a possibility. The sound of those whoops coincided with the moment when excitement began to bleed out and embarrassment began to creep in.

Forty-five minutes and 50 feet later, we were at the front of the line. They were letting groups of about 100 through the side gate to the outer ring of the stadium, making us duck under a rope. Oh the horror of it. It felt like the start of the Boston Marathon, except these competitors were caked in makeup, some balanced on heels, some carrying pillows and curling irons and banjos; some with big hair and some with greasy faces. One person had even brought their own music stand. And as the cameras closed in on the overtly gregarious ones — answering our question from earlier as to whether or not this would be filmed — I wanted to be peppy like them and give a gorgeous smile for the camera. But the sinking feeling that I was a cow being prodded along just made me want to give the finger instead.

Read more…

David Chang’s ‘Ugly Delicious’ Pushes Food TV in the Right Direction

David Chang with South Philly Barbacoa's Cristina Martinez in 'Ugly Delicious.'

There’s no denying that David Chang’s new Netflix docuseries, “Ugly Delicious”, is aesthetically gorgeous. The show’s underlying concept—”ugly” food like tacos, barbecue, and fried rice all have intrinsic values that surpass its creation born out of necessity and a lowly legacy—is a sui generis angle for a well-worn genre that has long shifted to food porn rather that pursuing and examining the cultural and geopolitical value that food possesses.

In a recent interview with Grub Street, “Top Chef” judge and chef Tom Colicchio mentioned the rise of “unfussy” food on the program’s 15th season: “The chefs were doing more, I wouldn’t say rustic, but a much more conventional style of food.” Translation: This shift isn’t occurring in a vacuum.

As the New Yorker‘s Helen Rosner explains in her review of the eight-part series, “What makes “Ugly Delicious” compelling, ultimately, is Chang’s commitment to rejecting purity and piety within food culture…In food culture, particularly American food culture, the concept of authenticity is wielded like a hammer…[and] the problem with such rigid categorizations, according to “Ugly Delicious,” is, for one thing, creative stagnation.”

This certainly makes for a thoroughly interesting viewing experience; before I realized it, I had binge-watched four episodes. This sort of programming is also refreshing—Chang has subverted a genre. For a generation that has been bred on the gluttony of glossy networks and competitive cooking, “Ugly Delicious” throws up a middle finger, and instead asked questions that are relevant to how we should be thinking about food (and not just consuming for its sheer shock value). Read more…