Features, reviews, interviews, and lists about television, covering the latest as well historical topics.
Despite its flaws, Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989 is a meticulously detailed study of conflict and hauntingly foreshadows the current moment.
Star Wars: Rebels‘ blue-skinned Thrawn is a fictional echo of what America needs in these times: cultural intelligence, emotional control, and long-term thinking.
Star Trek: Enterprise offers a rare dramatization of a process that is often condensed in fictional universes: the messy, contested, exhilarating journey from tutelage to independence.
This is the story of television’s first funny families and how they pioneered America’s most enduring form of entertainment, the sitcom, only to watch it slip through their fingers like sand.
The sitcom is a creation of spare parts salvaged from dying vaudeville and thriving radio welded together by performers who understood the power of physical shtick and the intimacy of invisible theatre.
The violent martial arts series Warrior is supposedly a remake of Kung Fu, which conveys a strong and peaceful masculinity we sorely need in these times.
For Crying Out Loud: How Louie Anderson’s televised therapy sessions created the saddest, funniest cartoon of the 1990s.
In this attention economy, where shock pays dividends and subtlety is a liability, the stripper is a cultural archetype, the influencer a high priest of exposure.
Sitcoms Corner Gas and Trailer Park Boys form a double helix of Canadian self-image: the mask and the mirror.
While there is a lot to laugh about in The Righteous Gemstones, its serious critique of televangelism is hard to ignore.
Netflix drama Rotten Legacy explores the often contradictory and haunting lessons in morality our children inherit.
A parade of high-thread-count nihilism, the Jon Hamm-led Your Friends and Neighbors isn’t a sorely needed critique of the American elite; it’s a product of them.
