Emily St. James is a writer and critic whose work has appeared in Vox, The A.V. Club, and the New York Times. She is the co-creator of the podcast Arden and a writer on the TV series Yellowjackets.
Let me submit a proposition to you: the problem with the 22-episode season isn't the number of episodes; it's the relative timidity of the networks that still traffic in such large numbers of episodes, which are wary of trying to create artistic TV. (Or, corollary, the
At the recent TCM Classic Film Festival (which I talked about in the last newsletter), I ended up taking in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, thanks to missing another screening. I hadn't seen the film since college, when I had confirmed it to be one
I actually completely forgot I requested press credentials for the TCM Classic Movie Festival. (I'm also just now realizing that is actually the "Turner Classic Movies Classic Movie Festival.") When I abruptly realized it yesterday, after a long-ass week, in which I slept and wrote too
When I interviewed him recently in connection to The Girlfriend Experience, Steven Soderbergh said something that struck me as true of almost all of the arts. (Please go read that interview. I genuinely believe it's one of the best things I've ever done, and, like, nobody
When I left my office today, it was out the back way, and I almost immediately ran into a teenager I mistook for a homeless person. He was pacing in this endless loop, occasionally stopping to look up the sidewalk, eyes wide with fright. He was dressed sort of grungily,
The thing that happens when you're a critic is people accuse you of being biased. The most recent prominent example, for instance, is the theory that critics gave Batman v. Superman poor reviews because they were being paid off by Marvel. (If that were the case, I would
There's been a lot of criticism of AMC's Fear the Walking Dead this season. Some of it is completely fair, like how the series continues to be a little slow-moving. Some of it is understandable, but rooted in personal preference, like the arguments over whether the
I'm not a good fan. This is, I think, on the face of things, probably not what most of you would expect. Maybe? I'm still most famous among some readers for writing really gushing, over the top Community reviews, which absolutely read like the ravings of
The good people at the Captain America: Civil War screening said "no reviews until Wednesday, April 13," and "you can tweet, but only vague stuff," and "no spoilers." But they don't know about this newsletter, right? So that's it. I&
Since moving to Vox, I've slowly but surely started making my way into movie screenings. It's been fun, especially as it reminds me of the early days of my TV criticism career, when I had to beg and cajole lots of networks into giving me the
Please stop saying the words "laugh track." Look. I know I'm not going to get you to stop doing this. The public has grabbed hold of this phrase as a way of describing something that needs a description (that something being the laughter punctuating jokes in
(On Friday, we rank things, why not?) All in the Family has the most spinoffs in TV history, assuming we count the one-season '90s show 704 Hauser, which spun off not the original show's characters, but the house they lived in. I have decided it counts, which