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.
Fairly early in my critical career, I read a piece by someone (almost certainly Jaime Weinman) that reconfigured a lot of how I thought about TV and about TV criticism. TV criticism, he said, was strongly driven by consideration of form above all else. And by that, I don'
If you read a lot of TV criticism, the spring of 2015 must have seemed as if every critic on Earth had decided to start suggesting rape scenes shouldn't ever happen. This had been building for a while. There were minor skirmishes over Game of Thrones and Tyrant
(This was by far my favorite picture when I Google image searched "writing.") People often ask me for writing advice. Actually, that's not specifically true. Usually, when people ask me for writing advice, they're asking for career advice. They want to know how to
I am, generally speaking, not a fan of sketch comedy. I've been trying to figure out why recently. It seems like a foundational part of many people's comedy upbringing, but for me, I'm just missing the part of my brain that might be into
Until today, I'm relatively certain I had never seen an episode of Make Room for Daddy, the Danny Thomas vehicle that ran for 11 seasons and 351 episodes on two different networks. For as much of a Nick at Nite kid as I was, I might have seen
When I was 10 or 11, a relative gave me a big sack of glow in the dark stars to affix to my ceiling. I'm not sure why, but I took them out a few months later and hung them up over my bed. Accidentally, they took on
Privilege is a hard thing to talk about, both in art and in life. It's almost impossible to confront somebody on it without coming off as a huge jerk. The simple fact of the matter is that telling someone they're failing to check their privilege is
bruce springsteen
The hospital where I visit my wife as she convalesces sits at the square corner of the town I grew up near, went to school in. When entering the city limits to go to school every morning, the hospital was the first sign that you had left the wildness of
The X-Files
"For although we may not be alone in the universe, in our own separate ways on this planet, we are all... alone." — Jose Chung At the center of "Jose Chung's From Outer Space," the episode of television I have seen more than any other,
hannibal
At first blush, "The Gift," the fifth season finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and "The Wrath of the Lamb," the series finale (for now) of Hannibal would seem to have little to do with each other, beyond the obvious — both conclude with the protagonist plunging