NPR’s Linda Holmes, on whether pooh-poohing television makes any sense in a changing digital media landscape.
television
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Starring in Japanese Reality TV
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 — […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
‘Gidget,’ John Hughes, and the Whitewashing of Jewishness in Pop Culture
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 […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Go West, Young Man!
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.
Posted inNonfiction, Quote Posts, Quotes
The Rise of ‘True Detective’ Creator Nic Pizzolatto
Rich Cohen in Vanity Fair, on the rise of True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto in Hollywood, the evolution of television writer as auteur, and the HBO crime drama’s second iteration set in Southern California.
Posted inNonfiction, Quote Posts, Quotes
The Challenges of Translating Seinfeld for a German Audience
At The Verge, Jennifer Armstrong, the author of the upcoming book Seinfeldia: The Secret World of the Show About Nothing That Changed Everything, describes Sabine Sebastian’s translation and production of all 180 Seinfeld episodes for German television.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
‘Arrested Development’ Creator Mitch Hurwitz on His First Encounter with Michael Cera
“Michael Cera, I had seen him in a pilot and I reached out through the casting director, like, ‘there was this kid in this pilot, can you please try to track him down.’ Two weeks went by, and we’d seen all these — you know, kid actors in Hollywood, a lot of them come up […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How a ’12 Angry Men’ Parody Emerged from Amy Schumer’s Writing Room
Each episode of Inside Amy Schumer usually contains a number of sketches, but last week the entire show was composed of a single extremely ambitious sketch. Bryan Moylan recently profiled Jessi Klein, the show’s head writer and co-executive producer of the show in New York Magazine. In the excerpt below, Moylan provides context for how the much-talked-about episode came together: Tuesday night’s […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Subverting Female Archetypes with the Clones of ‘Orphan Black’
In its subject matter, “Orphan Black” broods on the nature-nurture debate in human biology, but in its execution, the show cleverly extends the same question to matters of genre. What does the exact same woman look like if you grow her in the petri dish of “Desperate Housewives” or on a horror-film set in Eastern […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
All Comedy Will Be Canceled: How the BBC Prepares for the Eventual Death of the Queen
The last death of a Monarch was in 1952, and the BBC stopped all comedy for a set period of mourning after the announcement was made. The Daily Mail reports that the BBC plans to do the same again today, cancelling all comedy until after the funeral.