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.
1) South Dakota I lived here for the first 23.5 years of my life and have been back for lengthy visits many times since. It is a beautiful, windswept, lonely place. I love it like no other on Earth, and yet I don't think I could ever
The Grinder is probably my FAVORITE show right now. By that I don't mean I think it's the best show on TV, though I think it's pretty darn good. No, I mean that every week, without fail, it's one I put on
(Every so often, I write about random shows I liked at various stages of my life that most people probably don't think about that often. This will eventually give me a chance to finally write about Dave's World. Be forewarned.) When Trust Me debuted in 2009,
A couple of weeks ago, I suggested in this space that religion is really tough to make good series about. My explanation for this, in a nutshell, is that any good story about religion requires us to believe, just a little bit, in religion ourselves, if only in the fictional
Recently, I was having a conversation with a friend, who was expressing irritation with how a professional colleague/competitor seemed to be making my friend's life much more difficult. And, to be sure, some of this was just pure competitive spirit, which is usually fine. (I doubt my
Of all of the things about me that seem to most amuse my fellow critics, my general affection for awards shows (especially the Oscars and Emmys) probably takes the cake. As we all know, awards shows almost never pick the best possible option. They always end up picking some dumb
As part of my TCA prep, I've been watching episodes of Hulu's upcoming The Path. It's a part of the streaming service's attempt to step up to the level of Netflix and Amazon when it comes to original programming, and it does
True crime is having a moment. Serial seemed to kick it off for a lot of people, and then Making a Murderer launched everything into high gear. (I'm fascinated by how it seems to have become a cultural phenomenon pretty much because it was on Netflix. But I&
My winter holidays were bookended by the very odd phenomenon of being called horribly uncritical on one end, then being called too critical on the other. Both are at least somewhat grave accusations for someone in my profession. The former suggests a cheerleader whose word can't be trusted;
It took us far longer than it should have to move out of the old apartment, choked with dust and junk as it was. It was a place we had both disappeared into, and even though we budgeted six weeks to crawl out of it, it took us an extra
When I interviewed him at the end of The Leftovers' second season, Damon Lindelof said something that's stuck with me ever since. The best stories, he suggested, are all about transformation on some level. I'm sure if you and I sat down, we could come
The Christmas TV special canon is pretty small and mostly relegated to a handful of specials made in the '60s and '70s. Certainly Charlie Brown, Rudolph, and the Grinch. Then there are a handful of other Rankin-Bass productions and Emmett Otter's Jug Band Christmas, if we