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.
The Sopranos, The Wire, and Deadwood aren't just three of the best TV series of all time. They also, weirdly, tell the entire story of America, in HBO-friendly terms. (Let us pause, briefly, here to say that the continued downgrading of Deadwood in SOME CORNERS is just awful,
An idea we kicked around a few times at AV Club but never quite licked was the idea of some sort of feature on the best lineups in TV history. We had a few different notions of how to tackle this, from single-article ideas, to full-fledged features. But nothing ever
NARRATOR: Emily and Libby met at college, and they've been together ever since! This fun-loving couple enjoys hanging out with their many cats, playing board games, and watching TV. In fact, they love TV so much, they both get paid to do it! EMILY: I guess it was
Somewhere around the point that a band of insane criminals dropped a bunch of bodies from the top of a building so that they spelled out MANIAX on the ground below, I realized I was going to watch every single episode of Gotham this season, after bailing shortly into season
I'm 21, just barely, when my father asks me when my girlfriend and I will be getting married. My grandfather has died. The funeral was a few days before Christmas, and the family soldiered on through the holiday, because it felt better to practice happiness than to realize
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