Tag: television

What if a TV antihero and his wife were partners instead of rivals?

Golden Age antiheroes and the nasty women who humanized them.

A complicated racial anxiety rests at the heart of American entertainment.

How a hard-not-to-love show glosses over the powers that produced its makeover subjects.

Carmen Maria Machado discusses the nuances of “benevolent sexism,” who gets to define the #MeToo movement, and how it should progress.

The true story of the exact moment in the mid-Nineties when reality television morphed from its best self to its worst.

Never underestimate the insidious, destructive power of gaslighting, especially public gaslighting.

A try-out for American Idol put Valentina Valentini permanently off fame-seeking.

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in arts and culture writing.

How do you talk about a weekly TV show that defies narrative order?

An oral history of “Ally McBeal” from the show’s cast and creators, 20 years after its debut.

This was the year ‘The Bachelorette’ tried to take on race. Things did not go well.

The cult show returned this week. Here, three writers reflect on David Lynch’s effect on their lives.

Kent Russell loves hockey. A lot. I don’t, but Russell’s writing about the game is utterly engrossing

Growing up in the fundamentalist Christian “Quiverfull” movement, Hännah Ettinger saw her own story in Atwood’s vision.

Caroline Framke shadowed the crew of FX’s Cold War spy drama The Americans during the production of season four episode “Clark’s Place” and explained how the show was made.

“One element that survived the entire duration of the show is the set of mixed media pieces covered with things you might find in a pair of pants.”

I don’t remember consciously watching Buffy—it feels like I absorbed it by osmosis. It’s not perfect, but it is wonderful.

Talking late-night television, retirement, and putting comedy in service of our nation, with the great David Letterman.

Helen Hollyman spent a lot of time plumbing the depths of America’s leading purveyor of Donkey Sauce™ to produce this in-depth profile of the man behind the sunglasses, Guy Fieri. But what did she really learn?

Lacey Rose gives the cast and creators of Girls — from Lena Dunham to Judd Apatow and Jenni Konner — the full oral-history treatment.

Her iconic main character inspired millions, but some argued the show needed to go even farther.

The internal battles and the decisions Jon Stewart made after taking over The Daily Show from Craig Kilborn.

These longreads explore some of HGTV’s most popular home and lifestyle shows, from House Hunters to Fixer Upper.

After the binge-watching comes the binge-reading.

Writing for The New Republic, Jacqui Shine recently looked at the long, strange history of the Disney-owned television network ABC Family, which will be renamed “Freeform” in January 2016. The network may feature progressive content like The Fosters, which has garnered GLAAD awards and acclaim for its portrayal of an interracial, same-sex couple, but its also had difficulty shaking its conservative […]

NPR’s Linda Holmes, on whether pooh-poohing television makes any sense in a changing digital media landscape.

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 — […]

This whitewashing of Jewishness out of pop culture is an old, old story, and it isn’t specific to camp movies; it’s true of plenty of other Hollywood representations of American teens, too. The Czech Jew who wrote the novel that was the basis for Gidget (1959) was inspired by his own surfing daughter, Kathy Kohner, who went on […]

John Crutchfield’s “Toward an Aesthetics of Failure” explains why he still loves the out-of-fashion western despite repetitive plots, one-dimension characters, and shoddy filmmaking — and why you should, too.