I love stories about the aftermath of the apocalypse. I especially love stories about the aftermath of nuclear war. There's just something about the terrifying randomness of it, the way that the bombs mark a clear delineation between "before" and "after." A plague takes
I don't know if you heard, but this weekend sees the debut of the 600th episode of The Simpsons, a feat that will bring it in line with just one other scripted primetime program in American TV history (which would be Gunsmoke). There are a lot of reasons
There are a lot of TV shows I love that people reflexively write off, but none gets written off as often as Green Acres, CBS's 1965 to 1971 sitcom about two rich city dwellers who decide to get a taste of the country life and descend into a
A couple of weeks ago, a friend was arguing with me, saying she didn't understand how someone could be a Republican. She wasn't saying she didn't know any Republicans or anything like that. Indeed, she had many in her family and had grown up
When I was in the fifth grade, I started having to use the locker room with guys several times my size, and I hated it. I hated it when I was scrawny and small, so much tinier than them. And I hated it when I abruptly hit puberty and shot
A couple of weeks ago, I joked to a friend that my career was going to be 90 percent explaining to people what the term "multi-camera sitcom" means, 10 percent other things. It was kind of a low point, in that I felt like I was stuck having
A couple of days ago, I was talking about Manchester by the Sea with someone, trying to convince them to see it (for whatever reason, I run into a ton of people who just find the idea of this movie very unappealing, and I wonder if I am alone in
One of the things a lot of younger writers find hard to do that I have always found easier than most is writing "kickers," those pithy little sentences that come at the very end of reviews or thinkpieces or whatever and are supposed to leave you with one
(I love stock photography!) Let's talk about something tough, something I've been trying to write about for a year and a half now and mostly failing, because I keep pulling the rug out from under myself: the growing prominence of sociopolitical commentary in cultural reviews (or,
(As we head toward Election Day, I thought I'd share a few anecdotes from my political past. They won't take over the newsletter, but I have enough of them of interest to keep your attention, hopefully.) In the summer of 2008, unemployed, desperate, and believing I
If you have followed my career lo these many years, you will know that I have a major soft spot for graphic adventure games – games where you take over a little character who tries to solve puzzles (usually by combining random items in an attempt to guess exactly what the
If you spend a lot of time reading and researching about '80s and '90s TV (and u know I do), a group keeps popping up: the Viewers for Quality Television. At first, the idea of the group seems more or less obvious: this was an organization of TV