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.
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
What's the first TV show with a gay lead character? Lots of people will say Ellen, because in the hue and cry around that show featuring its protagonist's coming out, most media outlets reported that Ellen would be the first gay protagonist of a network TV
The People vs. O.J. Simpson (the first installment of FX's new limited series American Crime Story) is doing something I'm incredibly impressed by, something I'm not entirely sure I've ever seen pulled off to this degree before. Marcia Clark and Christopher
The death of David Bowie in January hit me very slowly, in waves. I was sad about it at first, but mostly because so many people I knew were sad, too. See, I never knew Bowie in the way I knew other artists of his generation. When I was a
First rule of criticism (or any opinion writing): If you have the words "in my opinion" in there somewhere, cut them out. Heck, if you have the words "I think" in there, cut them out, 999 times out of 1,000. The exception, generally, is if
In case you haven't noticed, I'm a slight workaholic. I like to think I come by it honestly. My father loved to work, and if there's one thing he drilled into my brain, it's "If a job is worth doing, it&
(On Friday, we rank things, why not?) In the process of coming up with this list, I realized something: I have seen far more shows on Broadway than I actually thought I had (though I didn't have to rank the listless performance of Les Mis that I saw,
(How young we all were!) The sixth season of The Walking Dead is finally showing the slightest signs of viewer fatigue with the program. The ratings are down, just a little bit, and you can sort of see where the show will end somewhere around season 10 or 11, as
It was Fargo's 20th anniversary today! Happy 20th anniversary, Fargo! As with every time there's a major pop culture anniversary, there were a ton of pieces that were basically the same piece, over and over again. (Here was mine. At least I quoted from other people!
I don't know if you noticed this, but a couple of weeks ago, Outsiders charted the biggest rating ever for an original series on WGN America. The second I saw that, I knew my beloved Manhattan was done for, because the approach that series embodied (a sophisticated, more
I don't know if you heard, but Leonardo DiCaprio won his first Oscar at Sunday's awards. The Oscars this year were overshadowed by the controversy over an all-white slate of acting nominees, but the one thing seemingly everybody thought to mention, even if they were talking