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.
(Hey, we're talking about scary TV this week, why not?) My mother would never say this, but I think when she first moved to the farm I grew up on, she thought it was haunted. The way our farm was laid out was like this. You had the
(For the next four days, I'm going to look at some scary TV episodes, ideally ones I haven't seen, though I will inevitably have to write about at least one I'm familiar with.) Horror TV has always understood one thing by virtue of simple
(Don't worry. I still plan on doing some Halloween type stuff this week. Just promised some people I'd get this one out sooner, rather than later.) As part of my ongoing quest to redefine the terms via which we discuss television in the most self-aggrandizing manner
Let's just admit it: Summer is hugely overrated. Spring is just fine. I can enjoy a nice, crisp winter. But summer? Summer is gulping down liquids because you can't stop sweating. Summer is sitting as still as you possibly can in hopes the sun won'
When I was a kid, the de facto "best TV show of all time" was The Mary Tyler Moore Show. It didn't top every list, but it topped most of them, and if you either didn't rank it as highly as other series or
Of all the questions people ask of American TV critics, there's one that's become harder and harder to grapple with over the years: Why do we treat so much foreign TV as a curiosity? When we're making lists of the best TV shows of
One of the delights of moving (if moving can be said to have delights) is the part where you find all of the stuff you had and sort of forgot about. By that I don't mean that you unearth buried treasure or anything like that, but that you
You wouldn't know it to look at me now, but I was a bit of a nerd in my middle school days, and the way that nerdery most consistently manifested itself was via the playing of graphic adventure games. Graphic adventure games, for those of you who don&
Today, I got exasperated with people on Twitter, and it all boiled down to the same thing it always does: structure vs .content. I made what I assumed was an incredibly innocuous tweet about how Breaking Bad's greatest influence was in its cold opens (something I plan to
Somehow, the last several Octobers have involved a lot of car travel for me, which has meant lots of listening to playoff baseball on the radio. Baseball has always been my favorite of the major professional sports, mostly because I have fond memories of it from my childhood and because
The night we moved into the apartment on Bonito, we were already running behind. I was to leave the next morning on a plane for Michigan, to visit family, and we didn't leave our old home in Riverside until long after we had meant to. I left my
Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak, which comes out on Friday, is a perfect Halloween movie. (You can look for my review at Vox probably Friday or Saturday.) And by that, I don't mean that it's particularly scary, because it's not. It has