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
(Yo, this piece originally appeared on Tumblr. I am tired and don't want to write any more.) The first time I saw “So-Called Angels,” the much-maligned Christmas episode of My So-Called Life, I was but 14, and I thought it was the best episode of television I had
Few aspects of being a critic seem to fascinate readers more than the making of the annual top 10 list. (Okay, getting TV screeners/attending movie screenings are more interesting to most.) The irony here is that many critics hate to make them — narrowing a full year down to just
Criticism is sleight of hand. It's three-card monte. It's whatever you call that game with the cups where there's a ball under one of the cups. What I mean by this is that criticism is a personal essay that either needs to put the
Jaime Weinman has a strong piece today about how many of our Christmas songs take place in a version of the 1890s that the songwriters who created those songs had no first-hand experience with, to say nothing for those of us who sing or listen to those songs now. Something
I went on a bit of a Twitter tear a week ago, spurred by the HitFix TV critics poll but, really, by any list that aggregates a bunch of critics' votes together. I used to run one, in the AV Club's annual poll, and I counted the
No TV critic watches everything. So when my top 30 shows on TV list is unveiled on December 21 at the Vox Dot Com (along with, possibly, a very special sequel), you are bound to find that I've forgotten something, which will cause you great anger and distress.
It's that time of year again! The time of year when I insert some platitudes about how the calendar is reaching its end and time is meaningless. It's also time to talk about how it was a good year for TV! Maybe not as good as