Tag: tv

The Americans shows us one way to write a female antihero.

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

Golden Age antiheroes and the nasty women who humanized them.

Countless women have been mistreated ever since sex became common on our screens. Hollywood’s newfound awareness of intimacy choreography can help change things.

It’s clear we love the Dead Girl, enough to rehash and reproduce her story, to kill her again and again. But not enough to see a pattern.

What one of TV’s longest-running reality shows says about race and our relationship with the police.

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

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.

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

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 […]

Over at Noisey, Lisa Mrock has written a wonderfully personal requiem for a short-lived TV channel called the International Music Feed. The music video-based television network in question only existed for three years (from 2005 to 2008), but it made quite an impact during its brief tenure: In an age where hardly anything is original, the International Music […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.

“Yes, I’ve heard every horrible event in almost everyone’s life I’ve met,” confesses Arturo Interian, the network’s vice president of original movies who started at Lifetime in 2001 and still gets idea pitches from strangers. “I’ll put it this way: People will tell you about some physical ailment they’ve had and it’s very awkward to say, ‘Well, you know, I’m sorry about your terrible limp. But it’s not really a movie.’ ”

Dawson suggests these shows are more closely related to sporting events than scripted dramas. In the case of Survivor, viewers get an experience similar to televised sports, Papacharissi explains: “You can root for your favorite castaway like you do for your favorite team, and vicariously experience her triumphs and setbacks from episode to episode.”

The sound stage for Orange, where we proudly employ what has to be at least 64% of lesbians in the New York City metro area, is not a place where you can shy away from women or sexuality. And if you’re trying to, Lea Delaria (Big Boo) will nip it in the bud by inviting you […]

At PopMatters, Anita Felicelli discusses why TV shows get ruined when they’re written and produced with their fans in mind rather than for their own sake as pieces of creative work: We know that television writers read fan responses on Twitter, that some of them read blogs and speculation. They know what fans want because […]

“As Rhys was watching down the final cut, he noticed two errors: one shot slipped into the cut without being ‘un-squeezed’ and another repositioned shot had lost its repo. We all know that these kinds of errors happen all the time, but they rarely happen when you are literally gun-to-the-head, minutes away from a live […]