The New Canon
This week, Dear Television — Jane Hu, Lili Loofbourow, Phillip Maciak, and new addition Anne Helen Petersen — will be addressing Netflix. We have little interest in rehashing the arguments that the...
View ArticleThe Exquisite Repulsion of “American Horror Story”: An Essay on Abjection
Dear Television, An African-American albino. A 200 year old woman who looks 45. A vagina that destroys all that enters it. A MINOTAUR. This is the stuff of abjection, and American Horror Story: Coven...
View ArticleYou Won’t Read This Review of “Masters of Sex”: The Problem of Episodic...
I WANT TO TALK with you about Masters of Sex. I want to talk about Michael Sheen’s acting, Lizzy Caplan’s costuming, and the friction between its serial and series elements. I want to tell you that the...
View ArticleThere Will Be Peplum: On the Television Uniform
Dear Television, WHEN I WAS YOUNG, my favorite show was Star Trek: The Next Generation. There are many reasons for this love, but chief among them was the uniforms. I loved how legible they were: how...
View ArticleIn Praise of Quitting
Dear Television, I’VE QUIT ONE JOB, I’ve quit two sports, I quit one (very ill-advised) diet. I finish all my books and once I start an article, I can’t stop reading it. But I quit television shows all...
View ArticleGood, Giving, and Game: Towards a Theory of SNL Hosting
Dear Television, WHEN PHIL FIRST emailed to ask if we wanted to cover this week’s Saturday Night Live, he was not optimistic: “It’s a new one, but it’s with WhoGivesAShitJoshHutcherson.” (It was also...
View ArticleHow to Make a Music Video About Nothing: Ke$ha, Pitbull, &“Timber”
Dear Television, WE WATCH MUSIC VIDEOS for three overarching and often related reasons: hotness, dancing, and story. You might not like to admit to the first one, but the amount of hotness in videos...
View ArticleThe Christmas Movie: A Hate/Need Relationship
Dear Television, HERE’S THE THING no one wants to admit about televised Christmas movies: they’re all horrible. Don’t get me wrong, there are beautiful moments in every Christmas movie: when Kevin rigs...
View ArticleTruthers and Darers
WHEN I WAS A KID, every girl I know played Truth or Dare. It’s a girl sleepover rite of passage, after all, which is part of the reason that, in the second episode of Girls Season Three (released in...
View ArticleThe McConnaissance: An Alternate Reading
Dear Television, IN EPISODE TWO of HBO’s stunning new series True Detective, the laconic Rust Cohle, played by Matthew McConaughey, spends a significant amount of car time with his partner, Martin Hart...
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