In the fall of 1993, NBC gambled on Seinfeld. Yes, it had performed impressively well post-Cheers, but with the classic bar-set sitcom (arguably the best traditional sitcom ever made) off the air, it was anybody's guess as to whether audiences would return to the wild weirdness of Seinfeld,
Earlier in the week, I attended the Banff World Media Festival to moderate a panel for The Leftovers. It was a great honor, both to get to discuss a show I love and to attend a hugely prestigious industry event (even if I was only there for a few hours,
Over the weekend, New York Times TV critic James Poniewozik, a friend, tweeted something that resonated with me: of all the pieces of writing advice you can give someone, "write what you know" is about the lousiest. (James's two tweets are here and here.) It'
(Sometimes, on Fridays, we rank things, why not? Also, those are not my cats. Maybe they're your cats? Who knows!) I say "since I became an adult" because when I was a kid, we routinely had dozens of farm cats I was varying degrees of friendly
I live in downtown LA, near a strip mall lined with the usual suspects and a really great ramen restaurant (really great ramen restaurants seem to be on every other street corner here). At the end is a Starbucks, which is open really late. And since I seem to be
Every time I go to New York City, I think I picked the wrong coast. Then, when I go back to Los Angeles, I realize I didn't. To be sure, New York has almost all of the things I like about Los Angeles (the culture and the feeling
Living in Los Angeles, you see a lot of celebrities. And shortly after you move here, you learn to not see them, even as you acknowledge their presence. For instance: I attended a Captain America: Civil War screening in hopes of gathering snippets for what became this piece, and as
I didn't realize I was a feminist; I just was one. Of course, getting to the point where I would say so took some doing. I spent a lot of my life not wanting to be described by the term. Of course I thought men and women were
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The summer after my high school graduation, I did whatever I could to slip loose of the bonds that had thus far held me. If I could find an excuse to leave behind the home where I had grown up, I took it. I found a job in a town
So a couple of years ago, I made a typo. It wasn't the world's worst typo – I just switched an actor's first name for the character they played. And because I kept very weird hours back then (often going to bed at 6 am
Let me submit a proposition to you: the problem with the 22-episode season isn't the number of episodes; it's the relative timidity of the networks that still traffic in such large numbers of episodes, which are wary of trying to create artistic TV. (Or, corollary, the
At the recent TCM Classic Film Festival (which I talked about in the last newsletter), I ended up taking in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, thanks to missing another screening. I hadn't seen the film since college, when I had confirmed it to be one