Search Results for: TV

The Business of Too Much TV

Longreads Pick

Today, there are more great shows on television than ever before. This age of Peak TV is reshaping the television industry — and affecting the work of everyone, from actors and writers to showrunners and crew members.

Source: www.vulture.com
Published: May 18, 2016
Length: 40 minutes (10,114 words)

Is Friends Still the Most Popular Show on TV?

Longreads Pick

Why do so many 20-somethings want to stream a 20-year-old sitcom?

Published: Mar 27, 2016
Length: 13 minutes (3,251 words)

The Strange, Crazy Afterlife of a Reality TV Star

Longreads Pick

In 2009, Tareq Salahi and his then-wife Michaele crashed a White House dinner. Then his life crashed.

Source: Washingtonian
Published: Feb 1, 2016
Length: 11 minutes (2,903 words)

Siri Hustvedt on Knausgaard’s ‘Feminine Text’ and the Gendering of Literature

A few years ago, novelist Siri Hustvedt interviewed fellow Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard in public. Toward the end, she asked why, in thousands of pages filled with hundreds of mentions of writers, he’d mentioned only one woman writer, Julia Kristeva. “No competition,” he said without much thought.

This stunning comment from a man whose six-volume autobiographical opus, My Struggle, treads in territory long considered the unserious domain of women writers–deeply emotional self-examination and domestic ennui–provoked Hustvedt’s curiosity about the gendering of literature. At Lithub, she presents a deep examination of gender bias among readers and writers alike, and asks what bearing an author’s sex has on the writing itself.

When I look back at the “no competition” remark, I suppose I should be offended or righteously indignant, but that is not at all how I feel. What I feel is compassion and pity for a person who made a remark, no doubt in earnest, which is nevertheless truly silly. Thousands of pages of self-examination apparently did not bring him to enlightenment about the “woman” in himself. “It’s still in me.” It is not enough to notice that a feminine text by a man and a feminine text by a woman are received differently or to call attention to numbers that represent sexual inequality in the world of letters. It is absolutely essential that men and women become fully conscious of what is at stake, that it is blazingly clear to every single one of us who cares about the novel that there is something at once pernicious and silly at work in our reading habits, that the fate of literary works cannot be decided by a no-competition clause appended to a spurious homo-social contract written under the aegis of fear, that such a clause is nothing short of “insane.”

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Locks and Lore: Siri Hustvedt on the Cultural and Literary Significance of Hair

Photo by Eila Hadssen

I began the fifth grade with long hair, but at some point in the middle of the year I chopped it into what was then called a pixie cut. When I returned to school newly shorn, I was informed that the boy I liked, a boy who had supposedly liked me back, had withdrawn his affection. It had been swept away and discarded at the hairdresser’s along with my silky locks. I recall thinking that my former admirer was a superficial twit, but perhaps he had succumbed to a Goldilocks fantasy. He would not be the last male personage in my life to fixate on feminine blondness and its myriad associations in our culture, including abstract qualities such as purity, innocence, stupidity, childishness, and sexual allure embodied by multiple figures—the goddesses Sif and Freya and the Valkyries of Norse mythology, the multitudes of fair maidens in fairy tales, numerous heroines in Victorian novels and melodramas, and cinematic bombshells, such as Harlow and Monroe (both of whom I love to watch onscreen). The infantile and dumb connotations of blond may explain why I have often dreamed of a buzz cut. The fairy-tale and mythological creatures so dear to me as a child may explain why I have had short hair as an adult but never that short and did not turn myself into a brunette or redhead. A part of me must hesitate to shear myself of all blond, feminine meanings, as if next to no hair would mean severing a connection to an earlier self.

-From “Notes Toward a Theory of Hair,” an essay in The New Republic by writer Siri Hustvedt on hair and its gender associations through history, excerpted from Me, My Hair, and I, a new anthology edited by Elizabeth Benedict.

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Reality TV and the Rise of Celebrity-CEOs

Sometimes it seems like everyone’s selling something. They’re selling their jewelry. They’re selling their book, selling their snack line, their natural cosmetics, their Etsy shop and blog and, ultimately, themselves. In The New Yorker‘s 2015 Style Issue, Lizzie Widdicombe writes about Bethenny Frankel, who turned her slot on The Real Housewives of New York City into an opportunity to sell her cocktail brand for $120 million dollars. Widdicombe examines Frankel and other “celebreneurs” who leverage visibility and idolatry to build their own commercial empire.

Frankel’s twin vocations are, in some sense, the same. “I’m a marketer,” she told me, explaining her role in business and in television. “I know how to communicate to people, and I think that’s what marketing really is.” It’s also an apt definition of celebrity. In 1944, the German sociologist Leo Löwenthal coined the phrase “idols of consumption” to describe the burgeoning celebrity culture. With their clear skin and fabulous wardrobes, stars give us something to aspire to─and an excuse to buy stuff we don’t really need.

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The Rise and Fall of the Last TV Channel That Cared About Music

Longreads Pick

A requiem for the International Music Feed, a short-lived TV channel that had the distinction of being the last American music video network to play music videos 24/7.

Author: Lisa Mrock
Source: Vice Magazine
Published: Sep 15, 2015
Length: 8 minutes (2,113 words)

Starring in Japanese Reality TV

Photo by Karl Baron, via Flickr

Nagging questions and doubts remain. Have we somehow prostituted ourselves for the vicarious entertainment of television viewers? Has the private language, the intimate currency of our happy household, been debased by making it public? I had thought it would be ‘fun.’ I was wrong. But somehow it has felt like an education of sorts — perhaps in self-knowledge — however involuntarily acquired, however unwelcome the conclusions.

My husband and I, for example, have been forced to confront difficulties in our marriage. Under the pressure of Y-san’s gentle but probing, seemingly innocuous questions, a fine tracery of cracks mars the pleasant facade: how often do my husband and I actually talk? When was the last time we went out on a date, just the two of us? Do we gladly contemplate living together for the rest of our lives?

Professor Wendy Jones Nakanishi writing in Kyoto Journal about her family’s experience being filmed for a Japanese reality TV show. The show looks at the life of a foreigner in Japan.

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John Waters on TV, Bad Taste and Going Undercover

When I’m not frantically blogging for Longreads, I can be found with the writers of The Last Hurrah, a free comedy show in Frederick, MD (hosted by my boyfriend–disclaimer!) In honor of John Waters’ newest book, Carsick, the Last Hurrah team created a video of their attempts to “hitchhike” to Baltimore, Waters’ hometown. Kevin uploaded the video; it got a few hits. Then, silence. Last week, he received an email from an address he didn’t recognize. Guess who? John Waters sent us a video response. His hitchhiking sign says “The Last Hurrah.” That’s us! A weirdo comedy crew from a random Maryland city! We couldn’t believe it, and we still can’t, and all of these events have inspired me to (re)visit the not-so-underground filmmaker’s work. Luckily, Guernica published a new interview with The People’s Pervert just last week:

Guernica: You mentioned in your new book, Carsick, that you wouldn’t make a movie for under ten million now.

John Waters: It’s not that I wouldn’t—it’s that I couldn’t. Because what they want is movie stars. I’m not going to go ask movie stars to work for nothing. I’ve made nineteen movies, I have three homes, what am I going to say to them? “I don’t have any money”? And I’m not going to beg in public. To me, you know, I’ve made all these movies, they’re out there, they’re easy to get. Maybe I’m not going to make another movie. It isn’t the end of the world. It’s not like I haven’t spoken. I think it’s very easy to get my films; I think I was understood right from the beginning. And my books do great. So as long as I have a way to tell you another story—and I’m working on a TV project right now that I’m not allowed to talk about—but maybe it’ll be on TV. TV’s better today—there’s just way more people. So, who knows what’s going to happen? I always have a way to tell stories. That’s the only thing I can pass on: always have a backup career that is equally as important to you. Nothing lasts forever.

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How TV Sex Got Real

Longreads Pick

The idea that the sex we see depicted on television should look or feel anything like what goes on in our own bedrooms is a very recent development. Eliana Dockterman looks at how TV sex got real.

Source: Time Magazine
Published: May 12, 2015
Length: 14 minutes (3,718 words)