What’s coming out of the idiot box.
The inexorable march of the Marvel Cinematic Universe* goes on, and its latest manifestation is the Netflix series Luke Cage. Debuting earlier this month, it stars Mike Colter as the black Harlem-based action hero, based on the bruising ’70s comic book creation and brought to life by Cheo Hodari Coker. Luke …
High-concept sit-coms are hard to pull off. Setting a half-hour, joke-heavy TV show in anything but an ordinary setting requires an awful lot of heavy lifting: not only do you have to spend a lot of time and effort on stuff like sets and costumes, but you also need to …
Two of the most frequently encountered modalities in the modern world of television comedy share a common weakness: the way the negative personalities of the main characters tend to get in the way of the laughs. Comedies centered around protagonists with mental illness can succeed, and the genre has produced …
When Donald Glover was making the rounds to publicize the first season of Atlanta, the new FX series he created, produced, wrote, and stars in, he made a comment that has come to be the log line for the series: he claimed he wanted to make a show about what it’s like …
This week, I recorded my third appearance on Just One More Thing, a podcast about Columbo hosted by my friends Jon Morris and RJ White. I was the first guest the show ever had, and despite that, Jon and RJ were kind enough to have me back. It’s been a pleasure …
Some people prefer fiction, they will tell you, because it is infinitely malleable. While history must only tell us what is known, fiction can tell us what is merely imagined, and it can do it in any order; only fiction, some have argued, can tell a truly complete story, because …
Netflix’s new sci-fi thriller Stranger Things is one of those shows that it’s almost impossible to talk about for all the wrong reasons. A critical and popular success, any chance of talking about it on its actual merits has already been buried under an avalanche of thinkpieces, listicles, clickbait articles, and animated …
There are, in the vast field of toil we call the entertainment industry, people who have a tremendous amount of ability, but never get quite the right project. They are often possessed of a very singular talent, one that can’t easily be plugged into a generic formula, and as a result …
Better Call Saul might have seemed like it was born with the television equivalent of a silver spoon in its mouth. Afforded every advantage by the AMC network, and bringing with it a built-in audience from Breaking Bad, one of the most successful and acclaimed cable dramas of all time, it …
Preacher was a comic of its time, and that time was the 1990s. To put it another way, Preacher was a comic of the time when many of its biggest fans — fans who are now television-watching adults, and, for that matter, television-criticism-writing adults — were in their 20s. Which is all …
A TAXONOMY OF REALITY PROGRAMMING COMPETITIVE SHOWS: * People compete to win money > People compete to win the right to continue being on television * People compete in a performing talent show > People compete in a performing talent show with or against celebrities * People compete in a …
The arrest and trial of O.J. Simpson for the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown, and her friend Ron Goldman, didn’t just fit the bill of ‘Trial of the Century’ as well as anything that’s ever happened. It was an event of seismic cultural significance, a slow-moving disaster that was …
I have been fascinated with religious cults since before I even knew what they were. I was barely old enough to understand what was happening at Jonestown, Guyana, when the greatest mass slaughter of American citizens to date took place under the auspices of a lunatic named Jim Jones, but …
Much as the leads of Netflix’s series Love have mixed feelings upon meeting — it’s really not so much what you would call a ‘meet cute’ as a ‘meet indifferent and slightly hostile’ — I had mixed feelings about the series itself. This was largely due to its pedigree. Love‘s creators are …
HBO can afford disasters. Since they don’t run on a pure ratings model, but depend for their business on a sustainable production roster and critical goodwill, the fact that their new and star-studded series, Vinyl, is attracting far fewer eyeballs than shows that got canceled far more quickly doesn’t really matter that …
